Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get StuckEliezer Yudkowsky
An Enquiry Concerning Human UnderstandingHume, David
The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the EarthRobin Hanson
Floornightnostalgebraist
We Are All Completely Beside OurselvesKaren Joy Fowler
The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel BetterTyler Cowen
Burning Girls: A Tor.Com OriginalSchanoes, Veronica
The True BelieverEric Hoffer
An Introduction to General Systems ThinkingWeinberg, Gerald
Why We Get FatGary Taubes
A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified ReservationsMencius Moldbug
The Fortunate FallRaphael Carter
Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American HistoryPeter Turchin
Bad BloodJohn Carreyrou
Fault linesRajan, Raghuram G.
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-RightAngela Nagle
Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societiesJared M. Diamond
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show BusinessPostman, Neil
ExhalationTed Chiang
The Passions and the InterestsSen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Wisehouse Classics Edition)Aurelius, Marcus
TurbulenceSamit Basu
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the FuturePeter Thiel;Blake Masters
The RecognitionsWilliam Gaddis, William H. Gass
The Freeze-Frame RevolutionPeter Watts
An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday FoodiesTyler Cowen
Operating System ConceptsGagne, Greg
The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human LifeRobert Trivers
Lost in MathHossenfelder, Sabine
Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New RussiaPeter Pomerantsev
What Mad PursuitFrancis Crick
The Bluest EyeToni Morrison
ValisPhilip K. Dick
Bleeding EdgePynchon, Thomas
The IdiotElif Batuman
If on a Winters NightItalo Calvina
GoliathMatt Stoller
The Art of LovingFromm, Erich
The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politicsde Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
The Myth of the Strong LeaderArchie Brown
American ElsewhereBennett, Robert Jackson
Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian EconomyMihir S. Sharma
The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of KindnessHarman, Oren
Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia the Almost Nearly Perfect People (Hardback) - CommonMichael Booth
The Gone-Away WorldNick Harkaway
And Then I Thought I Was a FishPeter Hunt Welch
Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy)VanderMeer, Jeff
Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving InRoger Fisher;William L. Ury;Bruce Patton
How to Solve ItG. Polya
Paul Graham's EssaysPaul Graham
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1)Taylor, Dennis
Why Greatness Cannot Be PlannedKenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
How the Mind WorksSteven Pinker
Thinking, Fast and SlowKahneman, Daniel
Make It StickBrown, Peter C.
On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing NonfictionZinsser, William
The Silence of AnimalsGray, John
Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics WarsMayo, Deborah G.
The Omnivore's DilemmaMichael Pollan
The Origins of Political OrderFukuyama, Francis
Night WatchTerry Pratchett
The Last PolicemanBen H. Winters
SolarisStanislaw Lem
The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human UnderstandingDan Sperber
How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and HappinessRuss Roberts
On bullshitHarry Frankfurt
Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition)Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books)Ha-Joon Chang
DataclysmChristian Rudder
Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media ManipulatorRyan Holiday
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and WorstRobert M. Sapolsky
The Creative HabitTharp, Twyla
The Brothers KaramazovFyodor Dostoevsky
Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human StrengthBaumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
(POPULATION EXPLOSION Unique in human experience, an event which happened yesterday but which everyone swears won’t happen until tomorrow. —The Hipcrime Vocab by Chad C. Mulligan) John Brunner
, Stand on Zanzibar.
loc. 7723-7724
, clipped on Friday, June 13, 2014 7:57:59 PM
Donald caught it before it hit the ground, turned it over in his hand as he stepped aside, and shot first the policeman and then Totilung to death. It’s the thing we know best how to do to a man. We’re marvellous at it, wonderful, unparalleled. John Brunner
, Stand on Zanzibar.
loc. 8031-8033
, clipped on Friday, June 13, 2014 8:57:47 PM
“This very distinguished philosophy professor came out on the platform in front of this gang of students and took a bit of chalk and scrawled up a proposition in symbolic logic on the board. He turned to the audience and said, ‘Well now, ladies and gentlemen, I think you’ll agree that that’s obvious?’ “Then he looked at it a bit more and started to scratch his head and after a while he said, ‘Excuse me!’ And he disappeared. “About half an hour later he came back beaming all over his face and said triumphantly, ‘Yes, I was right—it is obvious!’” John Brunner
, Stand on Zanzibar.
loc. 8421-8425
, clipped on Friday, June 13, 2014 10:20:42 PM
Did nobody ever point out to you that the only liberty implied by free will is the opportunity to be wrong? John Brunner
, Stand on Zanzibar.
loc. 8725-8726
, clipped on Friday, June 13, 2014 10:42:02 PM
(LOGIC The principle governing human intellection. Its nature may be deduced from examining the two following propositions, both of which are held by human beings to be true and often by the same people: “I can’t so you mustn’t,” and “I can but you mustn’t.” John Brunner
, Stand on Zanzibar.
loc. 8844-8846
, clipped on Friday, June 13, 2014 10:51:59 PM
Every now and again there passes through his circuits a pulse which carries the cybernetic equivalent of the phrase, “Christ, what an imagination I’ve got.” John Brunner
, Stand on Zanzibar.
loc. 9696-9697
, clipped on Saturday, June 14, 2014 1:55:44 AM
we might never have needed agriculture had earlier generations of hunters not eliminated the species they depended upon. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 298-299
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 9:07:30 AM
Where most plants during photosynthesis create compounds that have three carbon atoms, corn (along with a small handful of other species) make compounds that have four: hence “C-4,” the botanical nickname for this gifted group of plants, which wasn’t identified until the 1970s. The C-4 trick represents an important economy for a plant, giving it an advantage, especially in areas where water is scarce and temperatures high. In order to gather carbon atoms from the air, a plant has to open its stomata, the microscopic orifices in the leaves through which plants both take in and exhaust gases. Every time a stoma opens to admit carbon dioxide precious molecules of water escape. It’s as though every time you opened your mouth to eat you lost a quantity of blood. Ideally, you would open your mouth as seldom as possible, ingesting as much food as you could with every bite. This is essentially what a C-4 plant does. By recruiting extra atoms of carbon during each instance of photosynthesis, the corn plant is able to limit its loss of water and “fix”—that is, take from the atmosphere and link in a useful molecule—significantly more carbon than Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 414-422
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 9:22:07 AM
So that’s us: processed corn, walking. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 446-446
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 9:25:10 AM
“When you look at the isotope ratios,” Todd Dawson, a Berkeley biologist who’s done this sort of research, told me, “we North Americans look like corn chips with legs.” Compared to us, Mexicans today consume a far more varied carbon diet: the animals they eat still eat grass (until recently, Mexicans regarded feeding corn to livestock as a sacrilege); much of their protein comes from legumes; and they still sweeten their beverages with cane sugar. So that’s us: processed corn, walking. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 443-446
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 9:25:31 AM
The dual identity also made corn indispensable to the slave trade: Corn was both the currency traders used to pay for slaves in Africa and the food upon which slaves subsisted during their passage to America. Corn is the protocapitalist plant. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 498-500
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 8:29:14 PM
It is, for a grass, a bizarre arrangement with crucial implications: The ear’s central location halfway down the stalk allows it to capture far more nutrients than it would up top, so suddenly producing hundreds of gigantic seeds becomes metabolically feasible. Yet because those seeds are now trapped in a tough husk, the plant has lost its ability to reproduce itself—hence the catastrophe in teosinte’s sex change. A mutation this freakish and maladaptive would have swiftly brought the plant to an evolutionary dead end had one of these freaks not happened to catch the eye of a human somewhere in Central America who, looking for something to eat, peeled open the husk to free the seeds. What would have been an unheralded botanical catastrophe in a world without humans became an incalculable evolutionary boon. If you look hard enough, you can still find teosinte growing in certain Central American highlands; you can find maize, its mutant offspring, anywhere you find people. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 517-523
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 8:31:53 PM
Planting the old open-pollinated (nonhybrid) varieties so densely would result in stalks grown spindly as they jostled each other for sunlight; eventually the plants would topple in the wind. Hybrids have been bred for thicker stalks and stronger root systems, the better to stand upright in a crowd and withstand mechanical harvesting. Basically, modern hybrids can tolerate the corn equivalent of city life, growing amid the multitudes without succumbing to urban stress. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 662-665
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 9:53:41 PM
The great turning point in the modern history of corn, which in turn marks a key turning point in the industrialization of our food, can be dated with some precision to the day in 1947 when the huge munitions plant at Muscle Shoals, Alabama, switched over to making chemical fertilizer. After the war the government had found itself with a tremendous surplus of ammonium nitrate, the principal ingredient in the making of explosives. Ammonium nitrate also happens to be an excellent source of nitrogen for plants. Serious thought was given to spraying America’s forests with the surplus chemical, to help out the timber industry. But agronomists in the Department of Agriculture had a better idea: Spread the ammonium nitrate on farmland as fertilizer. The chemical fertilizer industry (along with that of pesticides, which are based on poison gases developed for the war) is the product of the government’s effort to convert its war machine to peacetime purposes. As the Indian farmer activist Vandana Shiva says in her speeches, “We’re still eating the leftovers of World War II.” Hybrid Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 722-729
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 10:00:05 PM
oil per acre of corn. (Some estimates are much higher.) Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food; before the advent of chemical fertilizer the Naylor farm produced more than two calories of food energy for every calorie of energy invested. From the standpoint of industrial efficiency, it’s too bad we can’t simply drink the petroleum directly. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 796-798
, clipped on Tuesday, June 17, 2014 10:10:28 PM
Corn, a species that had been a modest beneficiary of the first two ages of food processing (having taken well to the can and the freezer), really came into its own during the third. You would never know it without reading the ingredient label (a literary genre unknown until the third age), but corn is the key constituent of all four of these processed foods. Along with the soybean, its rotational partner in the field, corn has done more than any other species to help the food industry realize the dream of freeing food from nature’s limitations and seducing the omnivore into eating more of a single plant than anyone would ever have thought possible. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 1471-1476
, clipped on Wednesday, June 18, 2014 10:12:48 AM
Dawson and his colleague Stefania Mambelli prepared an analysis showing roughly how much of the carbon in the various McDonald’s menu items came from corn, and plotted them on a graph. The sodas came out at the top, not surprising since they consist of little else than corn sweetener, but virtually everything else we ate revealed a high proportion of corn, too. In order of diminishing corniness, this is how the laboratory measured our meal: soda (100 percent corn), milk shake (78 percent), salad dressing (65 percent), chicken nuggets (56 percent), cheeseburger (52 percent), and French fries (23 percent). What in the eyes of the omnivore looks like a meal of impressive variety turns out, when viewed through the eyes of the mass spectrometer, to be the meal of a far more specialized kind of eater. But then, this is what the industrial eater has become: corn’s koala. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 1846-1852
, clipped on Thursday, June 19, 2014 9:55:29 AM
The second phase of the marriage of grasses and humans is usually called the “invention of agriculture,” a self-congratulatory phrase that overlooks the role of the grasses themselves in revising the terms of the relationship. Beginning about ten thousand years ago a handful of particularly opportunistic grass species—the ancestors of wheat, rice, and corn—evolved to produce tremendous, nutritionally dense seeds that could nourish humans directly, thereby cutting out the intermediary animals. The grasses accomplished this feat by becoming annuals, throwing all their energy into making seeds rather than storing some of it underground in roots and rhizomes to get through the winter. These monster annual grasses outcompeted not only the trees, which humans obligingly cut down to expand the annuals’ habitats, but bested the perennial grasses, which in most places succumbed to the plow. Their human sponsors ripped up the great perennial-polyculture grasslands to make the earth safe for annuals, which would henceforth be grown in strict monocultures. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 1993-2000
, clipped on Thursday, June 19, 2014 7:06:06 PM
“You know what the best kind of organic certification would be? Make an unannounced visit to a farm and take a good long look at the farmer’s bookshelf. Because what you’re feeding your emotions and thoughts is what this is really all about. The way I produce a chicken is an extension of my worldview. You can learn more about that by seeing what’s sitting on my bookshelf than having me fill out a whole bunch of forms.” Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 2045-2048
, clipped on Thursday, June 19, 2014 7:08:36 PM
“Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians—we just want to opt out. That’s all the Indians ever wanted—to keep their tepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn’t care if there was a Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can’t bear an opt-out option. We’re going to have to refight the Battle of the Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, bar-coded, adulterated fecal spam from the centralized processing conglomerate.” Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 2056-2061
, clipped on Thursday, June 19, 2014 7:09:50 PM
For some reason the image that stuck with me from that day was that slender blade of grass in a too-big, wind-whipped pasture, burning all those calories just to stand up straight and keep its chloroplasts aimed at the sun. I’d always thought of the trees and grasses as antagonists—another zero-sum deal in which the gain of the one entails the loss of the other. To a point, this is true: More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are the edges, the in-betweens or both-ands. So it is with the blade of grass and the adjacent forest as, indeed, with all the species sharing this most complicated farm. Relations are what matter most, and the health of the cultivated turns on the health of the wild. Before I came to Polyface I’d read a sentence of Joel’s that in its diction had struck me as an awkward hybrid of the economic and the spiritual. I could see now how characteristic that mixing is, and that perhaps the sentence isn’t so awkward after all: “One of the greatest assets of a farm is the sheer ecstasy of life.” Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 3464-3472
, clipped on Saturday, June 21, 2014 8:51:52 AM
I wasn’t at it long enough for slaughtering chickens to become routine, but the work did begin to feel mechanical, and that feeling, perhaps more than any other, was disconcerting: how quickly you can get used to anything, especially when the people around you think nothing of it. In a way, the most morally troubling thing about killing chickens is that after a while it is no longer morally troubling. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 3575-3578
, clipped on Saturday, June 21, 2014 9:44:49 AM
began scribbling objections in the margin. But humans differ from animals in morally significant ways. Yes they do, Singer readily acknowledges, which is why we shouldn’t treat pigs and children alike. Equal consideration of interests is not the same as equal treatment, he points out; children have an interest in being educated, pigs in rooting around in the dirt. But where their interests are the same, the principle of equality demands they receive the same consideration. And the one all-important interest humans share with pigs, as with all sentient creatures, is an interest in avoiding pain. Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 4642-4646
, clipped on Saturday, June 21, 2014 10:18:46 PM
A powerful and compelling strain of mysticism runs like branching mycelia through the mycological literature, where I encountered one incredible speculation after another: that the mycelia of fungi are literally neurons, together comprising an organ of terrestrial intelligence and communication (Paul Stamets); that the ingestion of hallucinogenic mushrooms by the higher primates spurred the rapid evolution of the human brain (Terence McKenna); that the hallucinogenic mushrooms ingested by early man inspired the shamanic visions that led to the birth of religion (Gordon Wasson); that the ritual ingestion of a hallucinogenic fungus—called ergot—by Greek thinkers (including Plato) at Eleusis is responsible for some of the greatest achievements of Greek culture, including Platonic philosophy (Wasson again); that wild mushrooms in the diet, by nourishing the human unconscious with lunar energy, “stimulate imagination and intuition” (Andrew Weil). Michael Pollan
, The Omnivore's Dilemma.
loc. 5707-5713
, clipped on Sunday, June 22, 2014 5:16:14 PM
"and what with that and the telephone, and that dreadful phonograph that bottles up all one says and disgorges at inconvenient times, we will soon be able to do everything by electricity; who knows but some genius will invent something for the especial use of lovers? something, for instance, to carry in their pockets, so when they are far away from each other, and pine for a sound of 'that beloved voice,' they will have only to take up this electrical apparatus, put it to their ears, and be happy. Ah! blissful lovers of the future!" Ella Cheever Thayer
, Wired Love.
loc. 754-758
, clipped on Sunday, June 22, 2014 10:40:35 PM
The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. Douglas Adams
, Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency.
loc. 47-50
, clipped on Saturday, June 28, 2014 9:56:31 AM
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to. Douglas Adams
, Dirk Gentlys Holistic Detective Agency.
loc. 505-506
, clipped on Thursday, July 3, 2014 12:01:17 AM
This is the essence of intuitive heuristics: when faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 283-284
, clipped on Monday, August 4, 2014 3:20:19 AM
Kernighan’s Law “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.” Gagne, Greg
, Operating System Concepts.
loc. 2386-2388
, clipped on Thursday, August 7, 2014 1:32:56 PM
Learning and skill are things to be proud of; they are the stars that light the sky of one’s lifetime. Schanoes, Veronica
, Burning Girls: A Tor.Com Original.
loc. 114-115
, clipped on Sunday, August 10, 2014 1:26:39 PM
Now every girl is expected to have: Caucasian blue eyes full Spanish lips a classic button nose hairless Asian skin with a California tan a Jamaican dance hall ass long Swedish legs small Japanese feet the abs of a lesbian gym owner the hips of a nine-year-old boy the arms of Michelle Obama and doll tits The person closest to actually achieving this look is Kim Kardashian, who, as we know, was made by Russian scientists to sabotage our athletes. Everyone else is struggling. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 243-249
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 7:13:45 AM
The first rule of improvisation is AGREE. Always agree and SAY YES. When you’re improvising, this means you are required to agree with whatever your partner has created. So if we’re improvising and I say, “Freeze, I have a gun,” and you say, “That’s not a gun. It’s your finger. You’re pointing your finger at me,” our improvised scene has ground to a halt. But if I say, “Freeze, I have a gun!” and you say, “The gun I gave you for Christmas! You bastard!” then we have started a scene because we have AGREED that my finger is in fact a Christmas gun. Now, obviously in real life you’re not always going to agree with everything everyone says. But the Rule of Agreement reminds you to “respect what your partner has created” and to at least start from an open-minded place. Start with a YES and see where that takes you. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 851-857
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 10:59:27 AM
The second rule of improvisation is not only to say yes, but YES, AND. You are supposed to agree and then add something of your own. If I start a scene with “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you just say, “Yeah…” we’re kind of at a standstill. But if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “What did you expect? We’re in hell.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “Yes, this can’t be good for the wax figures.” Or if I say, “I can’t believe it’s so hot in here,” and you say, “I told you we shouldn’t have crawled into this dog’s mouth,” now we’re getting somewhere. To me YES, AND means don’t be afraid to contribute. It’s your responsibility to contribute. Always make sure you’re adding something to the discussion. Your initiations are worthwhile. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 860-867
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:00:34 AM
The next rule is MAKE STATEMENTS. This is a positive way of saying “Don’t ask questions all the time.” If we’re in a scene and I say, “Who are you? Where are we? What are we doing here? What’s in that box?” I’m putting pressure on you to come up with all the answers. In other words: Whatever the problem, be part of the solution. Don’t just sit around raising questions and pointing out obstacles. We’ve all worked with that person. That person is a drag. It’s usually the same person around the office who says things like “There’s no calories in it if you eat it standing up!” and “I felt menaced when Terry raised her voice.” MAKE STATEMENTS also applies to us women: Speak in statements instead of apologetic questions. No one wants to go to a doctor who says, “I’m going to be your surgeon? I’m here to talk to you about your procedure? I was first in my class at Johns Hopkins, so?” Make statements, with your actions and your voice. Instead of saying “Where are we?” make a statement like “Here we are in Spain, Dracula.” Okay, Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 867-876
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:01:39 AM
The more New Yorkers like something, the more disgusted they are. “The kitchen was all Sub-Zero: I want to kill myself. The building has a playroom that makes you want to break your own jaw with a golf club. I can’t take it.” Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 1162-1164
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:33:54 AM
Only in comedy, by the way, does an obedient white girl from the suburbs count as diversity. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 1212-1213
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:39:32 AM
But there is not one management course in the world where they recommend Self-Righteousness as a tool. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 1321-1322
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 11:48:55 AM
Politics and prostitution have to be the only jobs where inexperience is considered a virtue. In what other profession would you brag about not knowing stuff? “I’m not one of those fancy Harvard heart surgeons. I’m just an unlicensed plumber with a dream and I’d like to cut your chest open.” The crowd cheers. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 2130-2132
, clipped on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 2:11:41 PM
I can tell twenty comedy writers what to do; I can argue with a cabdriver about 10th Avenue versus the West Side Highway; I will happily tell a joke about Osama bin Laden or the Ku Klux Klan on live television; but I could not talk to the babysitter about the fingernail clipping. I’ll bet you Margaret Thatcher would say the same thing if she were alive today.* Here’s the truth: I couldn’t tell the woman who so lovingly and devotedly watches my kid every day that I didn’t like how she did this one thing. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Tina Fey
, Bossypants.
loc. 2475-2479
, clipped on Thursday, August 14, 2014 12:26:29 AM
As the auto whines towards Versova, towards Uzma’s next conquest, Saheli looks at her former classmate, now staring out at the sea as the wind caresses her hair, and feels a burst of sadness. That sense of loss every first agent, every first small-time director, every childhood friend, every parent knows. The knowledge that your part in the story is done, that something larger than you is taking place but there’s no real room for you in it any more. The slow realisation that you were part of something once, but it’s gone now, it’s slipped out of your fingers. The star has moved on, and it’s time to take a bow and make your exit as gracefully as you can. Samit Basu
, Turbulence.
loc. 404-408
, clipped on Saturday, August 16, 2014 7:45:07 AM
“Aman. Aman, darling? You’re rambling again,” Tia says gently. “Tell Uzma things she needs to know, not things you could blog about. Uzma?” Samit Basu
, Turbulence.
loc. 802-803
, clipped on Saturday, August 16, 2014 10:07:24 AM
There will be unpleasant visual distortions and some protosapient wittering, but it's no more intelligent than a News of the World reporter--not really smart enough to be dangerous. Charles Stross
, The Atrocity Archives.
loc. 431-432
, clipped on Friday, August 22, 2014 7:39:18 AM
"Gene police! You! Out of the pool, now!" Charles Stross
, The Atrocity Archives.
loc. 522-523
, clipped on Saturday, August 23, 2014 10:15:20 PM
"Bogons?" "Hypothetical particles of cluelessness. Idiots emit bogons, causing machinery to malfunction in their presence. System administrators absorb bogons, letting the machinery work again. Hacker folklore--" Charles Stross
, The Atrocity Archives.
loc. 665-666
, clipped on Saturday, August 23, 2014 10:31:09 PM
"Sorry, I only smoke when you plug me into the national grid. Charles Stross
, The Atrocity Archives.
loc. 3804-3804
, clipped on Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:18:14 AM
Didn't they know that the only unhackable computer is one that's running a secure operating system, welded inside a steel safe, buried under a ton of concrete at the bottom of a coal mine guarded by the SAS and a couple of armoured divisions, and switched off? What did they think they were doing?" Charles Stross
, The Atrocity Archives.
loc. 3827-3829
, clipped on Thursday, September 4, 2014 9:20:51 AM
I am compelled to admit that there is a difference between the function and purpose of horror and spy fiction. Horror fiction allows us to confront and sublimate our fears of an uncontrollable universe, but the threat verges on the overwhelming and may indeed carry the protagonists away. Spy fiction in contrast allows us to believe for a while that the little people can, by obtaining secret knowledge, acquire some leverage over the overwhelming threats that permeate their universe. Charles Stross
, The Atrocity Archives.
loc. 4607-4610
, clipped on Thursday, September 4, 2014 12:24:56 PM
The “Florida effect” involves two stages of priming. First, the set of words primes thoughts of old age, though the word old is never mentioned; second, these thoughts prime a behavior, walking slowly, which is associated with old age. All this happens without any awareness. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 966-968
, clipped on Friday, September 5, 2014 6:58:43 AM
Anything that makes it easier for the associative machine to run smoothly will also bias beliefs. A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact. But it was psychologists who discovered that you do not have to repeat the entire statement of a fact or idea to make it appear true. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1129-1132
, clipped on Friday, September 5, 2014 11:48:48 AM
What psychologists do believe is that all of us live much of our life guided by the impressions of System 1—and we often do not know the source of these impressions. How do you know that a statement is true? If it is strongly linked by logic or association to other beliefs or preferences you hold, or comes from a source you trust and like, you will feel a sense of cognitive ease. The trouble is that there may be other causes for your feeling of ease—including the quality of the font and the appealing rhythm of the prose—and you have no simple way of tracing your feelings to their source. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1168-1172
, clipped on Friday, September 5, 2014 12:34:34 PM
The consequences of repeated exposures benefit the organism in its relations to the immediate animate and inanimate environment. They allow the organism to distinguish objects and habitats that are safe from those that are not, and they are the most primitive basis of social attachments. Therefore, they form the basis for social organization and cohesion—the basic sources of psychological and social stability. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1230-1233
, clipped on Friday, September 5, 2014 12:44:33 PM
Michotte had a different idea: he argued that we see causality, just as directly as we see color. To make his point, he created episodes in which a black square drawn on paper is seen in motion; it comes into contact with another square, which immediately begins to move. The observers know that there is no real physical contact, but they nevertheless have a powerful “illusion of causality.” If the second object starts moving instantly, they describe it as having been “launched” by the first. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1392-1396
, clipped on Monday, September 8, 2014 7:31:53 AM
The psychologist Paul Bloom, writing in The Atlantic in 2005, presented the provocative claim that our inborn readiness to separate physical and intentional causality explains the near universality of religious beliefs. He observes that “we perceive the world of objects as essentially separate from the world of minds, making it possible for us to envision soulless bodies and bodiless souls.” The two modes of causation that we are set to perceive make it natural for us to accept the two central beliefs of many religions: an immaterial divinity is the ultimate cause of the physical world, and immortal souls temporarily control our bodies while we live and leave them behind as we die. In Bloom’s view, the two concepts of causality were shaped separately by evolutionary forces, building the origins of religion into the structure of System 1. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1410-1416
, clipped on Monday, September 8, 2014 7:34:55 AM
The great comedian Danny Kaye had a line that has stayed with me since my adolescence. Speaking of a woman he dislikes, he says, “Her favorite position is beside herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.” Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1437-1438
, clipped on Monday, September 8, 2014 7:37:05 AM
Only one interpretation came to mind, and you were never aware of the ambiguity. System 1 does not keep track of alternatives that it rejects, or even of the fact that there were alternatives. Conscious doubt is not in the repertoire of System 1; it requires maintaining incompatible interpretations in mind at the same time, which demands mental effort. Uncertainty and doubt are the domain of System 2. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1460-1462
, clipped on Monday, September 8, 2014 7:39:49 AM
The moral is significant: when System 2 is otherwise engaged, we will believe almost anything. System 1 is gullible and biased to believe, System 2 is in charge of doubting and unbelieving, but System 2 is sometimes busy, and often lazy. Indeed, there is evidence that people are more likely to be influenced by empty persuasive messages, such as commercials, when they are tired and depleted. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1476-1478
, clipped on Monday, September 8, 2014 7:42:19 AM
Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, Instagram, all these companies are businesses first, but, as a close second, they’re demographers of unprecedented reach, thoroughness, and importance. Practically as an accident, digital data can now show us how we fight, how we love, how we age, who we are, and how we’re changing. All we have to do is look: from just a very slight remove, the data reveals how people behave when they think no one is watching. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 138-142
, clipped on Saturday, September 20, 2014 7:47:27 AM
We started from a fact that calls for a cause: the incidence of kidney cancer varies widely across counties and the differences are systematic. The explanation I offered is statistical: extreme outcomes (both high and low) are more likely to be found in small than in large samples. This explanation is not causal. The small population of a county neither causes nor prevents cancer; it merely allows the incidence of cancer to be much higher (or much lower) than it is in the larger population. The deeper truth is that there is nothing to explain. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 1973-1977
, clipped on Sunday, September 21, 2014 12:15:42 PM
We do not expect to see regularity produced by a random process, and when we detect what appears to be a rule, we quickly reject the idea that the process is truly random. Random processes produce many sequences that convince people that the process is not random after all. You can see why assuming causality could have had evolutionary advantages. It is part of the general vigilance that we have inherited from ancestors. We are automatically on the lookout for the possibility that the environment has changed. Lions may appear on the plain at random times, but it would be safer to notice and respond to an apparent increase in the rate of appearance of prides of lions, even if it is actually due to the fluctuations of a random process. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2064-2069
, clipped on Sunday, September 21, 2014 12:25:43 PM
The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality. Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2117-2122
, clipped on Sunday, September 21, 2014 12:30:38 PM
My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2280-2283
, clipped on Sunday, September 21, 2014 12:45:31 PM
DYLAN: I know a thousand cats who look just like you and talk just like you. GUY AT PARTY: Oh, fuck off. You’re a big noise. You know? DYLAN: I know it, man. I know I’m a big noise. GUY AT PARTY: I know you know. DYLAN: I’m a bigger noise than you, man. GUY AT PARTY: I’m a small noise. DYLAN: Right. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 316-322
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 12:03:39 AM
I know there are a lot of people making big claims about data, and I’m not here to say it will change the course of history—certainly not like internal combustion did, or steel—but it will, I believe, change what history is. With data, history can become deeper. It can become more. Unlike clay tablets, unlike papyrus, unlike paper, newsprint, celluloid, or photo stock, disk space is cheap and nearly inexhaustible. On a hard drive, there’s room for more than just the heroes. Not being a hero myself, in fact, being someone who would most of all just like to spend time with his friends and family and live life in small ways, this means something to me. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 335-340
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 12:06:20 AM
It takes a certain special motivation to, say, make a fan site, and that motivation is often intensified by feeling like you’re part of a special, embattled elect. Devotion is like vapor in a piston—pressure helps it catch. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 565-566
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 12:27:40 AM
Our sense of smell, which is the most connected to the brain’s emotional center, prefers discord to unison. Scientists have shown this in labs, by mixing foul odors with pleasant ones, but nature, in the wisdom of evolutionary time, realized it long before. The pleasant scent given off by many flowers, like orange blossoms and jasmine, contains a significant fraction (about 3 percent) of a protein called indole. It’s common in the large intestine, and on its own, it smells accordingly. But the flowers don’t smell as good without it. A little bit of shit brings the bees. Indole is also an ingredient in synthetic human perfumes. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 633-638
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 12:36:26 AM
Waters on film: “To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 658-659
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 12:39:29 AM
But what they, or rather we, are making offers a richness and a beauty of a different kind: a poetry not of lyrical phrases but of understanding. We are at the cusp of momentous change in the study of human communication and what it tries to foster: community and personal connection. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 715-718
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 7:40:31 AM
Looking through the data, instead of a wasteland of cut stumps, we find a forest of bonsai. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 893-893
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 1:39:44 PM
But realize this: we are living through writing’s Cambrian explosion, not its mass extinction. Language is more varied than ever before, even if some of it is directly copied from the clipboard—variety is the preservation of an art, not a threat to it. From the high-flown language of literary fiction to the simple, even misspelled, status update, through all this writing runs a common purpose. Whether friend to friend, stranger to stranger, lover to lover, or author to reader, we use words to connect. And as long as there is a person bored, excited, enraged, transported, in love, curious, or missing his home and afraid for his future, he’ll be writing about it. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 1012-1018
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 1:54:56 PM
Early on, the best predictor of a relationship doesn’t depend on the couple’s social graph at all; for the first year or so of dating, the optimal method is how often they view each other’s profile. Only over time, as the page views go down and their mutual network fills out, does assimilation come to dominate the calculus. In other words, the curiosity, discovery, and (visual) stimulation of falling for someone is eventually replaced by the graph-theory equivalent of nesting. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 1154-1158
, clipped on Monday, September 22, 2014 2:08:23 PM
In my opinion, Muhammad Ali is one of the bravest Americans. In 1967, as heavyweight champion, he refused to serve in Vietnam and was not only stripped of his title but banned from the sport for three and a half years. He lost the prime of his career, and received a five-year prison sentence (that took the Supreme Court to overturn), because of what he believed in. It’s a stand unimaginable from today’s political leaders, let alone our athletes and celebrities. From Kanye to Glenn Beck to Rachel Maddow to Sarah Palin, you get plenty of anger, but little sacrifice. We can each have our own take on Ali’s stance against Vietnam—and as the son of a veteran, Huê´ ’69, I know at least one person who disagrees with mine—but data like this can help anyone understand why he took it. As Ali said at the time, “No Viet-Cong ever called me nigger,” and he was probably right. But imagine, had Google existed then, what would’ve been going into American search bars. And imagine the home-state disadvantage of a black man in those days. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 1857-1865
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 7:38:50 AM
I invite you to imagine when it will be a mystery no more. That will be the real transformation—to know not just that people are cruel, and in what amounts, and when, but why. Why we search for “nigger jokes” when a black man wins; why inspiration is hollow-eyed, stripped, and, above all, #thin; why people scream at each other about the true age of the earth. And why we seem to define ourselves as much by what we hate as by what we love. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 2107-2111
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 8:11:55 AM
In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband …,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.” Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 2607-2609
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 9:20:39 AM
That is, 51 percent of women and 18 percent of men have had or would like to have a same-sex experience. Those numbers are far higher than any plausible estimate of the true gay population, so not only do we find that sexuality is more fluid than the categories a website can accommodate, we see that sex with someone of the same gender is relatively common, whether people consider it part of their identity or not. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 2712-2715
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 9:26:57 AM
Communities move to find an environment that will sustain them and where they are safe, but also to find a physical place that reflects what they feel within. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3009-3010
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:01:03 PM
Two months later Zook measured a convulsion of another kind: the Kentucky Wildcats won the NCAA championship and the students got wasted and burned shit like the future leaders they no doubt are. #LexingtonPoliceScanner began trending as a hashtag, based mostly on this tweet from @TKoppe22: “Uh We have a partially nude male with a propane tank #LexingtonPoliceScanner.” Zook tracked that tag to show how formerly local nonsense can now reverberate worldwide. The highbrow/lowbrow schizophrenia of Twitter never stops amazing me. It’s the Chris Farley of technologies. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3023-3027
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:02:25 PM
Reduction is inescapable. Algorithms are crude. Computers are machines. Data science is trying to make digital sense of an analog world. It’s a by-product of the basic physical nature of the microchip: a chip is just a sequence of tiny gates. Not in the way that the Internet is a “series of tubes” but in actuality. The gates open and close to let electrons through, and when one of these gates wants to know what state to be in, it’s all or nothing—like any door, a circuit is open or it isn’t; there are no shades of maybe. From that microscopic reality an absolutism propagates up through the whole enterprise, until at the highest level you have the definitions, data types, and classes essential to programming languages like C and JavaScript. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3218-3224
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:17:25 PM
But if simplifying is what it takes to understand large data sets, I do worry about a different kind of reductionism: people becoming not a number exactly, but a dehumanized userid fed into the grind of a marketing algorithm; grist for someone else’s brand. Data takes too much of the guesswork out of the sell. It’s a rare urban legend that turns out to be true, but Target, by analyzing a customer’s purchases, really did know she was pregnant before she’d told anyone. The hitch was that she was a teenager, and they’d started sending maternity ads to her father’s house. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3255-3260
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:21:04 PM
More recently, Mountain Dew ran a “Dub the Dew” contest, trying to ride the “crowdsourcing” wave to a cool new soda name and thinking maybe, if everything went just right and the metrics showed enough traction to get buy-in from the right influencers, they’d earn some brand ambassadors in the blogosphere. Reddit and 4chan got ahold of it, and “Hitler did nothing wrong” led the voting for a while, until at the last minute “Diabeetus” swooped in and the people’s voice was heard: Dub yourself, motherfucker. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3286-3290
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:23:29 PM
The Internet can be a deranged place, but it’s that potential for the unexpected, even the insane, that so often redeems it. I can’t imagine anything worse for You! The Brand! than upvoting Hitler. Plus, what a waste of time, because obviously Mountain Dew isn’t going to print a single unflattering word in the style of its precious and distinctive marks. I find comfort in the silliness, in the frivolity, even in the stupidity. Trolling a soda is something no formula would ever recommend. It’s no industry best practice. And it’s evidence that as much as corporatism might invade our newsfeeds, our photostreams, our walls, and even, as some would hope, our very souls, a small part of us is still beyond reach. That’s what I always want to remember: it’s not numbers that will deny us our humanity; it’s the calculated decision to stop being human. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3291-3297
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:24:40 PM
Google, mentioned many times in these pages, leads the way in turning data to the public good. There’s Flu and the work of Stephens-Davidowitz, but also a raft of even more ambitious, if less publicized, projects, such as Constitute—a data-based approach to constitution design. The citizens of most countries are usually only concerned with one constitution—their own—but Google has assembled all nine hundred such documents drafted since 1787. Combined and quantified, they give emerging nations—five new constitutions are written every year—a better chance at a durable government because they can see what’s worked and what hasn’t in the past. Here, data unlocks a better future because, as Constitute’s website points out: in a constitution, “even a single comma can make a huge difference.” Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3502-3507
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:41:42 PM
Tech gods. Titans. Colossi astride the whole Earth, because, you know, Rhodes just isn’t cool anymore. This is how the industry is often cast to the public, and sadly it’s how it often thinks of itself. But though there are surely monsters, there are no gods. We would all do well to remember this. All are flawed, human, and mortal, and we all walk under the same dark sky. We brought on the flood—will it drown us or lift us up? My hope for myself, and for the others like me, is to make something good and real and human out of the data. And while we do, whenever the technology and the devices and the algorithms seem just too epic, we must all recall Tennyson’s aging Ulysses and resolve to search for our truth in a slightly different way. To strive, to seek, to find, but then, always, to yield. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3554-3561
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:46:19 PM
From Nature’s discussion of the console: “It is fitted with a camera that can monitor the heart rate of people sitting in the same room. The sensor is primarily designed for exercise games, allowing players to monitor heart changes during physical activity, but, in principle, the same type of system could monitor and pass on details of physiological responses to TV advertisements, horror movies or even … political broadcasts.” Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3562-3565
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:46:26 PM
A web page can’t replace granite. It can’t replace friendship or love or family, either. But what it can do—as a conduit for our shared experience—is help us understand ourselves and our lives. The era of data is here; we are now recorded. That, like all change, is frightening, but between the gunmetal gray of the government and the hot pink of product offers we just can’t refuse, there is an open and ungarish way. To use data to know yet not manipulate, to explore but not to pry, to protect but not to smother, to see yet never expose, and, above all, to repay that priceless gift we bequeath to the world when we share our lives so that other lives might be better—and to fulfill for everyone that oldest of human hopes, from Gilgamesh to Ramses to today: that our names be remembered, not only in stone but as part of memory itself. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3605-3611
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:48:55 PM
this as follows: 129,864,880 books have been written, at least according to Google. That number is laughably precise; however, given that they have already logged 30 million of them, and indexing things is their business, their guess should be considered a plausible estimate. See Ben Parr, “Google: There Are 129,864,880 Books in the Entire World,” Mashable, August 5, 2010, mashable.com/2010/08/05/number-of-books-in-the-world/. According to Amazon, the median length of a novel is 64,000 words. Since it’s very likely that the median and mean are close here, I’m comfortable using it as an average. I don’t think novels are necessarily longer or shorter than other books. See Gabe Habash, “The Average Book Has 64,500 Words,” PWxyz, March 6, 2012, blogs.publishersweekly.com/blogs/PWxyz/2012/03/06/the-average-book-has-64500-words. These two numbers together yield 8,311,352,320,000 words ever in print. Twitter reported 500 million tweets a day in August 2013. See blog.twitter.com/2013/new-tweets-per-second-record-and-how. I estimate that each tweet has 20 words. So at 10 billion words a day, it will take Twitter 831 days (2.3 years) to surpass all of printed literature in volume. This is obviously meant to be an approximation, and a conservative one at that. In all likelihood, Twitter will do it much faster, since the rate of tweets per day is increasing rapidly. Christian Rudder
, Dataclysm.
loc. 3870-3883
, clipped on Wednesday, September 24, 2014 1:59:18 PM
Physical money – be it a banknote, a gold coin or the huge, virtually immovable stones that were used as money in some Pacific islands – is only a symbol. Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you, or your claim on particular amounts of the society’s resources. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 231-233
, clipped on Thursday, September 25, 2014 7:47:38 AM
For Gesell as for Goodenough, parents were a taken-for-granted part of the child’s environment, anonymous and interchangeable. Children of a given age were pretty much interchangeable as well. Gesell spoke of “your four-year-old” or “your seven-year-old” and gave instructions on how to take care of them,12 much as a book about cars might have told you how to take care of “your Ford” or “your Studebaker.” The home was like a garage where the children came home at night and where the anonymous attendants washed them, waxed them, and filled their tanks. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 560-565
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 1:00:32 AM
The relationship between a parent and a child, like any relationship between two individuals, is a two-way street—an ongoing transaction in which each party plays a role. When two people interact, what each one says or does is, in part, a reaction to what the other has just said or done, and to what was said or done in the past. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 936-939
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 8:10:54 AM
When differences in parents’ behavior to their different children are discussed, often the first issue that comes to mind is the birth order of the children. It is frequently assumed that parents systematically treat their firstborn child differently from laterborn children.... In an important sense such differences are not relevant. This is because individual differences in personality and psychopathology in the general population—the differences in outcome that we are trying to explain—are not clearly linked to the birth order of the individuals. Although this evidence goes against many widely held and cherished beliefs, the judgment of those who have looked carefully at a large number of studies is that birth order plays only a bit-part in the drama of sibling differences.... If there are no systematic differences in personality according to birth order, then any differences in parental behavior that are associated with birth order cannot be very significant for later developmental outcome. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1239-1246
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 8:42:07 AM
I will let those plainspoken Swiss researchers, Ernst and Angst, have the last word. In italics (theirs). Birth order research seems very simple, since position in a sibship and sibship size are easily defined. The computer is fed some ordinal numbers, and then it is easy to find a plausible post hoc explanation for any significant difference in the related variables. If, for example, lastborn children report more anxiety than other birth ranks, it is because for many years they were the weakest in the family. If firstborns are found to be the most timid, it is because of incoherent treatment by an inexperienced mother. If, on the other hand, middle children show the greatest anxiety, it is because they have been neglected by their parents, being neither the first- nor the lastborn. With some imagination it is even possible to find explanations for greatest anxiety in a second girl of four, and so on, ad infinitum. This kind of research is a sheer waste of time and money. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1307-1314
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 8:51:59 AM
Of course, if we look at one particular person, it’s easy to come up with a story about how the home environment (the critical, demanding mother, the ineffectual father) shaped the child’s personality and produced the messed-up grownup we see today. That kind of post hoc speculation—unprovable, undisprovable—is the stock-in-trade of biographers. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1331-1333
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 8:54:08 AM
birth order effects do not turn up in the majority of studies of adult personality. They do, however, turn up in the majority of studies of one particular kind: the kind in which subjects’ personalities are judged by their parents or siblings. When parents are asked to describe their children, they are likely to say that their firstborn is more serious, methodical, responsible, and anxious than their laterborns. When a younger brother or sister is asked to describe the firstborn, a word that often turns up is “bossy.”20 What we’re getting is a picture of the way the subject behaves at home. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1641-1646
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 9:51:26 AM
At home there are birth order effects, no question about it, and I believe that is why it’s so hard to shake people’s faith in them. If you see people with their parents or their siblings, you do see the differences you expect to see. The oldest does seem more serious, responsible, and bossy. The youngest does behave in a more carefree fashion. But that’s how they act when they’re together. These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don’t even drag them to nursery school. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1646-1650
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 9:52:26 AM
The humor writer Dave Barry has captured the feeling: After canteen we’d stand outside the school, surrounded by our peers, waiting for our parents to pick us up; when my dad pulled up, wearing his poodle hat and driving his Nash Metropolitan—a comically tiny vehicle resembling those cars outside supermarkets that go up and down when you put in a quarter, except the Metropolitan looked sillier and had a smaller motor—I was mortified. I might as well have been getting picked up by a flying saucer piloted by some bizarre, multitentacled, stalk-eyed, slobber-mouthed alien being that had somehow got hold of a Russian hat. I was horrified at what my peers might think of my dad; it never occurred to me that my peers didn’t even notice my dad, because they were too busy being mortified by THEIR parents. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1861-1867
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 10:26:01 AM
Socialization research has demonstrated one thing clearly and irrefutably: a parent’s behavior toward a child affects how the child behaves in the presence of the parent or in contexts that are associated with the parent. I have no problem with that—I agree with it. The parent’s behavior also affects the way the child feels about the parent. When a parent favors one child over another, not only does it cause hard feelings between the children—it also causes the unfavored child to harbor hard feelings against the parent. These feelings can last a lifetime. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 1953-1957
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 10:34:18 AM
Girls tend to play closer to home than boys and are more likely to have younger children to care for, because mothers in most societies—probably all societies—prefer girls as babysitters.38 But boys are pressed into service if no girls are available, and they take the job very seriously. In one of Jane Goodall’s books about chimpanzees there is a photo of an African man with a badly mutilated face, the result of an injury he suffered when he was a child. He had been taking care of his baby brother when a big male chimpanzee came out of the forest and seized the baby.* The boy was only six, but he chased after the formidable animal. The chimpanzee dropped the baby and attacked the boy. The baby survived. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 2261-2266
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 11:10:35 AM
According to Frans de Waal, a Dutch primatologist who spent several years observing the chimpanzees and their human visitors at a Netherlands zoo, “Contrary to general belief, humans imitate apes more than the reverse.” Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 2386-2388
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 11:58:21 AM
As Eibl-Eibesfeldt points out, human babies in all societies start becoming afraid of strangers when they’re about six months old. By then, in a typical hunter-gatherer or small village society, they have usually had a chance to meet all the members of their community, so a stranger is valid cause for concern. What is he here for? Does he want to steal me? Make me a slave? Maybe even eat me? The baby watches its mother for clues; if she seems to think the stranger is okay, the baby is reassured. Eibl-Eibesfeldt calls the baby’s reaction to strangers “childhood xenophobia” and considers it the first sign of a built-in predisposition to see the world in terms of us versus them. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 2642-2647
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 12:28:45 PM
During Goodall’s first few years in Tanzania, she used to put out boxes of bananas to attract chimpanzees. Usually the high-ranking males would eat most of them. To enable the females and younger males to get their share, she would hide some bananas in the trees. One day a young chimpanzee named Figan spotted a banana hanging in a tree directly above a high-ranking male. If Figan had reached for it, the big male would have taken it away from him. Instead, Figan moved to a spot where he couldn’t see the banana and waited. As soon as the big male moved away, Figan retrieved the banana. By sitting in a spot where he couldn’t see the object of his desire, he made sure he wouldn’t give away the secret with his eyes. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 2752-2757
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 12:37:06 PM
The human brain is an apparatus, first and foremost, for dealing with the social environment. Dealing with the physical environment is a secondary benefit. Evolutionary psychologist Linnda Caporael points out that we have a default mode for dealing with ambiguous or troublesome things: we try to interact with them socially. We personalize them. We don’t treat humans like machines—we treat machines like humans.52 We say “Start, damn you!” to our cars. We expect our computers to be friendly. And when faced with phenomena we don’t understand or can’t control, we attribute them to entities called God and Nature, to which we impute human social motives such as vengefulness, jealousy, and compassion. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 2773-2779
, clipped on Friday, September 26, 2014 12:38:59 PM
Children don’t perceive adults as people like themselves, not if there are any other children around to make the distinction clear. To a child, an adult might as well be a member of another species. Grownups know everything and can do whatever they want. Their bodies are enormously big and strong and hairy, and they bulge out in odd places. Though grownups can run, they are usually seen sitting or standing. Though they can cry, they hardly ever do. Different creatures entirely. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 3301-3304
, clipped on Saturday, September 27, 2014 12:12:26 PM
It is a sad and paradoxical fact that abuse may actually increase a child’s clinginess, because attachment is most evident when a child is frightened or in pain. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 3417-3418
, clipped on Saturday, September 27, 2014 12:23:34 PM
Children who spend their early years in an orphanage do not lack social skills; if anything, they are overly friendly. What they lack is the ability to form close relationships. They seem to be unable to care deeply about anyone.21 The department in their brain where working models are constructed either has never learned to construct them or has given up the job as futile. “Use it or lose it” is a saying most appropriately applied to the developing brain, not the aging one. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 3517-3521
, clipped on Saturday, September 27, 2014 12:33:02 PM
But a case study from Czechoslovakia provides a clue. A pair of twin boys lost their mother at birth and were placed in an orphanage. When they were about a year old their father remarried and brought the boys home—to a stepmother worse than Cinderella’s. For the next six years the boys were kept in a small unheated closet, undernourished and periodically beaten. When they were discovered at the age of seven they could barely walk and had less language than an average two-year-old. But they turned out all right. They were adopted into a normal family and by the age of fourteen they were attending public school and had caught up with their classmates. They had “no pathological symptoms or eccentricities,” according to the researcher who studied them.28 In their first seven years they hadn’t had a mother’s love—nor, it would appear, a father’s—but they had had each other. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 3572-3579
, clipped on Saturday, September 27, 2014 12:38:02 PM
The idea that babies are born with the potential to become either male or female, and that the behaviors associated with the two sexes are entirely cultural, was popularized by the anthropologist Margaret Mead. It is another example of her tendency to see things through the lens of her prior beliefs. She described a New Guinea tribe—the Tchambuli—in which the men supposedly behaved like women and the women like men. Submissive, anxious men; strong, bossy women. According to anthropologist Donald Brown, Mead got it wrong. In fact, among the Tchambuli, “polygyny was normal, wives were bought by men, men were stronger than women and could beat them, and men were considered by right to be in charge.” Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 4936-4940
, clipped on Sunday, September 28, 2014 12:28:04 PM
Stereotypes are not always accurate; they are less likely to be accurate when they involve groups we don’t know as well as we know men and women. But the real danger in stereotypes is not so much their inaccuracy as their inflexibility. We may be right when we see men as more apt to take on leadership roles and less adept at reading other people’s feelings, but we are wrong if we think all men are like that. We are fairly good estimators of differences between means—the difference between the average member of group X and the average member of group Y—but we are poor estimators of the variability within groups. Categorization tends to make us see the members of social categories as more alike than they really are, and this is particularly true for the category we’re not in. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 4969-4975
, clipped on Sunday, September 28, 2014 12:30:52 PM
A bit of advice to parents who want to rear androgynous children: join a nomadic hunter-gatherer group. Or move to a part of the world where there are just enough kids to form one play group and not quite enough to form two. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 5214-5216
, clipped on Sunday, September 28, 2014 1:57:19 PM
But gendered socialization is not the only reason why people vary. The pressures from within and without to conform to the norms of one’s group, the contrast effects that make these norms different, can only do so much. Psychological differences between the sexes are statistical differences: the distance between the twin peaks of the two bell curves. During childhood the curves pull a bit farther apart but they never part company: there is always an overlap. Some men are short; some women are tall. Some boys are gentle; some girls are tough. Even when they’re in the company of their peers. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 5275-5279
, clipped on Sunday, September 28, 2014 2:04:50 PM
the diverse bunch of kids in her classroom into a united group of motivated learners—an us. An us is a social category, whether or not it has a name. I think Miss A made her kids feel that they were in a special social category: “a brave corps on a secret, impossible mission.” This self-categorization stuck with them even after they graduated from her classroom; it buffered them from anti-school attitudes and made them feel superior to the other kids in their grade. And the existence of this special social category must have been recognized even by those who hadn’t been lucky enough to have Miss A as a teacher. That is why some of the people Pedersen interviewed claimed to have been in Miss A’s class: they were, or had aspired to be, part of the group she created. Behind the barred windows of that old school, among the tenement kids who attended it, there was a group of motivated learners who thought of themselves as “Miss A’s kids,” even though some of them had never set foot in her classroom. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 5412-5419
, clipped on Sunday, September 28, 2014 2:28:11 PM
Number turns out not to be trivial. Whether a classroom of kids will split up into contrasting groups depends partly on how many kids there are in the classroom: bigger classes split up more readily than smaller ones.39 And whether the kids will form groups that differ in village of origin, or in race, ethnicity, religion, socioeconomic class, or academic ability, depends on how many there are in these social categories. You need a minimum number to form a group and I’m not sure what it is because there hasn’t been much research on this question—not with children, anyway. In some cases two might be enough to form a group, but usually it takes more than two, perhaps more than three or four. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 5678-5683
, clipped on Sunday, September 28, 2014 2:56:10 PM
The result of this reasoning was that pregnant women in many traditional cultures were hedged in with rules: what they were allowed to do and see, what they were allowed to eat. Sometimes the prohibitions extended to the father as well. If the child turned out badly, the neighbors could blame it on the parents: they must have done something wrong while the mother was pregnant. They must not have followed the rules. You see, things haven’t changed so much after all! The main difference is that in the old days the parents’ period of culpability lasted only nine months. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 6321-6325
, clipped on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 11:33:12 PM
I am going to try to get you off the hook by presenting evidence that maybe it’s not your fault after all. But this is a two-way deal: I ask something from you in return. I ask you to promise not to go around telling people that I said it doesn’t matter how you treat your kids. I do not say that; nor do I imply it; nor do I believe it. It is not all right to be cruel or neglectful to your children. It is not all right for a variety of reasons, but most of all because children are thinking, feeling, sensitive human beings who are completely dependent on the older people in their lives. We may not hold their tomorrows in our hands but we surely hold their todays, and we have the power to make their todays very miserable. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 6327-6332
, clipped on Wednesday, October 1, 2014 11:34:01 PM
The baby-care problem that brings the most complaints from American parents is sleep disturbances: the baby won’t sleep. The baby keeps them up at night. Most pediatricians advise the parent to get the baby accustomed to sleeping alone. But a baby in a wandering hunter-gatherer band was never left alone under normal circumstances. If he found himself alone, and if his first whimpers did not immediately fetch his mother, he was in serious trouble. Chances are that either his mother was dead or she had decided she couldn’t take care of him. The group was moving on and they weren’t taking him! He was a goner if he couldn’t quickly persuade them to change their minds. Screaming was the only persuader he had. He screamed because he was terrified and angry, and with good reason. Babies are amazingly adaptable. Most American babies adapt quite well to sleeping alone. But some do not. Many parents—my younger daughter among them—are relieved when you tell them it’s okay to let their baby sleep with them, that it’s what nature intended. They hate letting the baby cry. It is going against nature to let a baby cry, and yet many parents do it—though they suffer almost as much as the baby—because it’s what some advice-givers recommend. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 7431-7440
, clipped on Thursday, October 2, 2014 2:46:03 AM
The idea that we can make our children turn out any way we want is an illusion. Give it up. Children are not empty canvases on which parents can paint their dreams. Don’t worry about what the advice-givers tell you. Love your kids because kids are lovable, not because you think they need it. Enjoy them. Teach them what you can. Relax. How they turn out is not a reflection on the care you have given them. You can neither perfect them nor ruin them. They are not yours to perfect or ruin: they belong to tomorrow. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 7546-7550
, clipped on Thursday, October 2, 2014 2:54:31 AM
“Why don’t you just wait, Nephew. See how it goes. She starts school in September. . . . I agree with you that she’s different, you might say she is a bit strange sometimes, but you know, we’re all different though we may pretend otherwise. We’re all strange inside. We learn how to disguise our differentness as we grow up. Bunny doesn’t do that yet.”7 We learn how to disguise our differentness; socialization makes us less strange. But the disguise tends to wear thin later in life. I see socialization as a sort of hourglass: you start out with a bunch of disparate individuals and as they are squeezed together the pressure of the group makes them more alike. Then in adulthood the pressure gradually lets up and individual differences reassert themselves. People get more peculiar as they grow older because they stop bothering to disguise their differentness. The penalties for being different are not so severe. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 7701-7708
, clipped on Thursday, October 2, 2014 5:11:38 AM
The bond between parent and child lasts a lifetime. We kiss our parents goodbye not once but many times; we do not lose track of them. Each visit home gives us opportunities to take out family memories and look at them again. Meanwhile, our childhood friends have scattered to the winds and we’ve forgotten what happened on the playground. When you think about childhood you think about your parents. Blame it on the relationship department of your mind, which has usurped more than its rightful share of your thoughts and memories. As for what’s wrong with you: don’t blame it on your parents. Pinker, Steven;Harris, Judith Rich
, The Nurture Assumption.
loc. 7790-7794
, clipped on Thursday, October 2, 2014 5:17:13 AM
one sentence were to sum up the mechanism driving the Great Stagnation, it is this: Recent and current innovation is more geared to private goods than to public goods. That simple observation ties together the three major macroeconomic events of our time: growing income inequality, stagnant median income, and, as we will see in chapter five, the financial crisis. Tyler Cowen
, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.
loc. 222-224
, clipped on Thursday, October 2, 2014 4:44:53 PM
Have you ever wondered why so many developing economies—the successful ones, I mean—rise to prosperity through exports and tradable goods? There are a few reasons for this, but one is that the external world market provides a real measure of value. If you are exporting successfully, it’s not based on privilege, connections, corruption, or fakery. Someone who has no stake in your country and no concern for your welfare is spending his or her own money to buy your product. Tyler Cowen
, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.
loc. 297-300
, clipped on Thursday, October 2, 2014 4:52:54 PM
How did we make so many bad mistakes at the same time, all pointing in more or less the same direction? Here is the eight-word answer: We thought we were richer than we were. Tyler Cowen
, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.
loc. 658-660
, clipped on Friday, October 3, 2014 1:00:04 AM
I was struck when Norman Borlaug died in 2009. Borlaug, as you may know, was a leader of the “Green Revolution” and the inventor of more robust seeds and crop varieties, which were then used in India, Africa, and many other poorer parts of the world. It is no exaggeration to say that Borlaug’s work saved the lives of millions of human beings by preventing starvation. Yet when Borlaug died, most Americans still did not know who he was. The press covered his passing, but in a low-key manner, even though one of the most important people of his era had died. Tyler Cowen
, The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better.
loc. 802-805
, clipped on Friday, October 3, 2014 1:11:27 AM
Vilfredo Pareto (1848–1923) argued that, if we respect the rights of every sovereign individual, we should consider a social change an improvement only when it makes some people better off without making anyone worse off. There should be no more individual sacrifices in the name of the ‘greater good’. This is known as the Pareto criterion and forms the basis for all judgements on social improvements in Neoclassical economics today.6 In real life, unfortunately, there are few changes that hurt no one; thus the Pareto criterion effectively becomes a recipe to stick to the status quo and let things be – laissez faire. Its adoption thus imparted a huge conservative bias to the Neoclassical school. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 1516-1523
, clipped on Thursday, October 9, 2014 12:59:38 AM
Only when we know that there are different economic theories will we be able to tell those in power that they are wrong to tell us that ‘there is no alternative’ (TINA), as Margaret Thatcher once infamously put it in defence of her controversial policies. When we learn how much intellectual common ground there is between supposed ‘enemy factions’ in economics, we can more effectively resist those who try to polarize the debate by portraying everything in black and white. Once we learn that different economic theories say different things partly because they are based on different ethical and political values, we will have the confidence to discuss economics for what it really is – a political argument – and not a ‘science’ in which there is clear right and wrong. And only when the general public displays awareness of these issues will professional economists find it impossible to browbeat them by declaring themselves to be custodians of scientific truths. Knowing different types of economics and knowing their respective strengths and weaknesses, thus seen, is not an esoteric exercise reserved only for professional economists. It is a vital part of learning about economics and also a contribution to our collective effort to make the subject better serve humanity. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 2078-2087
, clipped on Thursday, October 9, 2014 4:41:46 AM
The first candidate is asked by the interview board, ‘What is two plus two, comrade?’ He answers: ‘Five.’ The chairman of the interview board smiles indulgently and says: ‘Comrade, we very much appreciate your revolutionary enthusiasm, but this job needs someone who can count.’ The candidate is politely shown the door. The second candidate’s answer is ‘Three.’ The youngest member of the interview board springs up and shouts: ‘Arrest that man! We cannot tolerate this kind of counter-revolutionary propaganda, under-reporting our achievements!’ The second candidate is summarily dragged out of the room by the guards. When asked the same question, the third candidate answers: ‘Of course it is four.’ The professorial-looking member of the board gives him a stern lecture on the limitations of bourgeois science, fixated on formal logic. The candidate hangs his head in shame and walks out of the room. The fourth candidate is hired. What was his answer? ‘How many do you want it to be?’ Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 2532-2541
, clipped on Thursday, October 9, 2014 6:23:07 AM
Economics is a political argument. It is not – and can never be – a science; there are no objective truths in economics that can be established independently of political, and frequently moral, judgements. Therefore, when faced with an economic argument, you must ask the age-old question ‘Cui bono?’ (Who benefits?), first made famous by the Roman statesman and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 5617-5619
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:24:11 PM
Political and ethical judgements are present even in ostensibly value-free exercises, such as defining the boundaries of the market. Deciding what belongs in the domain of the market is an intensely political exercise. Once you can drag something (say, water) into the domain of the market, you can apply the ‘one-dollar-one-vote’ rule to decisions surrounding it, making it easier for the rich to influence the outcome. Conversely, if you can take something (say, child labour) out of the domain of the market, it becomes impossible to influence its use with the power of money. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 5627-5631
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:25:11 PM
Saying that economics is a political argument does not mean that ‘anything goes’. Some theories are better than others, depending on the situation at hand. But it does mean that you should never believe any economist who claims to offer ‘scientific’, value-free analysis. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 5631-5633
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:25:24 PM
Many people would assume that numbers are straightforward and objective, but each of them is constructed on the basis of a theory. I might not go as far as Benjamin Disraeli, the former British prime minister, who quipped that ‘there are lies, damned lies, and statistics’, but numbers in economics are invariably the results of attempts to measure concepts whose definitions are often extremely contentious or at least debatable. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 5653-5656
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:26:43 PM
The focus on the market has made most economists neglect vast areas of our economic life, with significant negative consequences for our well-being. The neglect of production at the expense of exchange has made policy-makers in some countries overly complacent about the decline of their manufacturing industries. The view of individuals as consumers, rather than producers, has led to the neglect of issues such as the quality of work (e.g., how interesting it is, how safe it is, how stressful it is and even how oppressive it is) and work–life balance. The disregard of these aspects of economic life partly explains why most people in the rich countries don’t feel more fulfilled despite consuming the greatest ever quantities of material goods and services. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 5677-5682
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:28:28 PM
Expert knowledge is absolutely necessary, but an expert by definition knows well only a narrow field and we cannot expect him or her to make a sound judgement on issues that involve more than one area of life (that is, most issues), balancing off different human needs, material constraints and ethical values. The possession of expert knowledge can sometimes give you a blinkered view. This dose of scepticism about expert knowledge should be applied to all areas of life, not just economics. But it is especially important in economics – a political argument often presented as a science. Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 5691-5696
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:29:23 PM
Krugman wrote in 2009: ‘Thirty-plus years ago, when I was a graduate student in economics, only the least ambitious of my classmates sought careers in the financial world. Even then, investment banks paid more than teaching or public service – but not that much more, and anyway, everyone knew that banking was, well, boring’ (‘Making banking boring’, The New York Times, 9 April 2009). Ha-Joon Chang
, Economics: The User's Guide: A Pelican Introduction (Pelican Books).
loc. 6629-6632
, clipped on Saturday, October 11, 2014 11:37:13 PM
professor at UCLA found an ingenious way to exploit the availability bias. He asked different groups of students to list ways to improve the course, and he varied the required number of improvements. As expected, the students who listed more ways to improve the class rated it higher! Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2408-2410
, clipped on Monday, October 13, 2014 7:36:00 AM
“Risk” does not exist “out there,” independent of our minds and culture, waiting to be measured. Human beings have invented the concept of “risk” to help them understand and cope with the dangers and uncertainties of life. Although these dangers are real, there is no such thing as “real risk” or “objective risk.” Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2542-2545
, clipped on Monday, October 13, 2014 1:47:43 PM
There are two ideas to keep in mind about Bayesian reasoning and how we tend to mess it up. The first is that base rates matter, even in the presence of evidence about the case at hand. This is often not intuitively obvious. The second is that intuitive impressions of the diagnosticity of evidence are often exaggerated. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2797-2799
, clipped on Wednesday, October 15, 2014 7:42:24 AM
The essential keys to disciplined Bayesian reasoning can be simply summarized: Anchor your judgment of the probability of an outcome on a plausible base rate. Question the diagnosticity of your evidence. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 2800-2802
, clipped on Wednesday, October 15, 2014 7:42:36 AM
The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 3077-3082
, clipped on Friday, October 17, 2014 2:59:14 PM
Subjects’ unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general was matched only by their willingness to infer the general from the particular. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 3171-3172
, clipped on Saturday, October 18, 2014 7:35:28 AM
The test of learning psychology is whether your understanding of situations you encounter has changed, not whether you have learned a new fact. There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience. On the other hand, surprising individual cases have a powerful impact and are a more effective tool for teaching psychology because the incongruity must be resolved and embedded in a causal story. That is why this book contains questions that are addressed personally to the reader. You are more likely to learn something by finding surprises in your own behavior than by hearing surprising facts about people in general. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 3174-3180
, clipped on Saturday, October 18, 2014 7:36:07 AM
Indeed, the statistician David Freedman used to say that if the topic of regression comes up in a criminal or civil trial, the side that must explain regression to the jury will lose the case. Why is it so hard? The main reason for the difficulty is a recurrent theme of this book: our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with “mere statistics.” When our attention is called to an event, associative memory will look for its cause—more precisely, activation will automatically spread to any cause that is already stored in memory. Causal explanations will be evoked when regression is detected, but they will be wrong because the truth is that regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause. The event that attracts our attention in the golfing tournament is the frequent deterioration of the performance of the golfers who were successful on day 1. The best explanation of it is that those golfers were unusually lucky that day, but this explanation lacks the causal force that our minds prefer. Indeed, we pay people quite well to provide interesting explanations of regression effects. A business commentator who correctly announces that “the business did better this year because it had done poorly last year” is likely to have a short tenure on the air. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 3326-3335
, clipped on Monday, October 20, 2014 3:11:38 AM
Here are the directions for how to get there in four simple steps: Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA. If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA. Step 1 gets you the baseline, the GPA you would have predicted if you were told nothing about Julie beyond the fact that she is a graduating senior. In the absence of information, you would have predicted the average. (This is similar to assigning the base-rate probability of business administration graduates when you are told nothing about Tom W.) Step 2 is your intuitive prediction, which matches your evaluation of the evidence. Step 3 moves you from the baseline toward your intuition, but the distance you are allowed to move depends on your estimate of the correlation. You end up, at step 4, with a prediction that is influenced by your intuition but is far more moderate. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 3489-3498
, clipped on Monday, October 20, 2014 3:24:22 AM
The core of the illusion is that we believe we understand the past, which implies that the future also should be knowable, but in fact we understand the past less than we believe we do. Know is not the only word that fosters this illusion. In common usage, the words intuition and premonition also are reserved for past thoughts that turned out to be true. The statement “I had a premonition that the marriage would not last, but I was wrong” sounds odd, as does any sentence about an intuition that turned out to be false. To think clearly about the future, we need to clean up the language that we use in labeling the beliefs we had in the past. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 3650-3655
, clipped on Tuesday, October 21, 2014 4:05:52 AM
Klein elaborated this description into a theory of decision making that he called the recognition-primed decision (RPD) model, which applies to firefighters but also describes expertise in other domains, including chess. The process involves both System 1 and System 2. In the first phase, a tentative plan comes to mind by an automatic function of associative memory—System 1. The next phase is a deliberate process in which the plan is mentally simulated to check if it will work—an operation of System 2. The model of intuitive decision making as pattern recognition develops ideas presented some time ago by Herbert Simon, perhaps the only scholar who is recognized and admired as a hero and founding figure by all the competing clans and tribes in the study of decision making. I quoted Herbert Simon’s definition of intuition in the introduction, but it will make more sense when I repeat it now: “The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition.” This strong statement reduces the apparent magic of intuition to the everyday experience of memory. We marvel at the story of the firefighter who has a sudden urge to escape a burning house just before it collapses, because the firefighter knows the danger intuitively, “without knowing how he knows.” However, we also do not know how we immediately know that a person we see as we enter a room is our friend Peter. The moral of Simon’s remark is that the mystery of knowing without knowing is not a distinctive feature of intuition; it is the norm of mental life. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 4299-4311
, clipped on Thursday, October 23, 2014 10:04:20 AM
If a strong predictive cue exists, human observers will find it, given a decent opportunity to do so. Statistical algorithms greatly outdo humans in noisy environments for two reasons: they are more likely than human judges to detect weakly valid cues and much more likely to maintain a modest level of accuracy by using such cues consistently. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 4383-4385
, clipped on Thursday, October 23, 2014 10:09:10 AM
Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean me. Mark Haddon
, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
loc. 217-218
, clipped on Thursday, October 23, 2014 1:12:17 PM
I think people believe in heaven because they don’t like the idea of dying, because they want to carry on living and they don’t like the idea that other people will move into their house and put their things into the rubbish. Mark Haddon
, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
loc. 429-431
, clipped on Thursday, October 23, 2014 1:28:19 PM
Asked why so many expensive big-budget movies are released on the same days (such as Memorial Day and Independence Day), he replied: Hubris. Hubris. If you only think about your own business, you think, “I’ve got a good story department, I’ve got a good marketing department, we’re going to go out and do this.” And you don’t think that everybody else is thinking the same way. In a given weekend in a year you’ll have five movies open, and there’s certainly not enough people to go around. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 4748-4752
, clipped on Sunday, October 26, 2014 7:22:54 AM
The errors of a theory are rarely found in what it asserts explicitly; they hide in what it ignores or tacitly assumes. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 4959-4959
, clipped on Sunday, October 26, 2014 4:03:14 PM
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 268-275
, clipped on Tuesday, November 4, 2014 2:52:12 PM
it is implausible to imagine that anyone like our twenty-seventh President, the multi-chinned, three-hundred-pound William Howard Taft, could be put forward as a presidential candidate in today’s world. The shape of a man’s body is largely irrelevant to the shape of his ideas when he is addressing a public in writing or on the radio or, for that matter, in smoke signals. But it is quite relevant on television. The grossness of a three-hundred-pound image, even a talking one, would easily overwhelm any logical or spiritual subtleties conveyed by speech. For on television, discourse is conducted largely through visual imagery, which is to say that television gives us a conversation in images, not words. The emergence of the image-manager in the political arena and the concomitant decline of the speech writer attest to the fact that television demands a different kind of content from other media. You cannot do political philosophy on television. Its form works against the content. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 346-353
, clipped on Wednesday, November 5, 2014 1:02:36 AM
When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, his reception equaled the adulation we offer today to television stars, quarterbacks, and Michael Jackson. “I can give you no conception of my welcome,” Dickens wrote to a friend. “There never was a King or Emperor upon earth so cheered and followed by the crowds, and entertained at splendid balls and dinners and waited upon by public bodies of all kinds.... If I go out in a carriage, the crowd surrounds it and escorts me home; if I go to the theater, the whole house ... rises as one man and the timbers ring again.” Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 853-857
, clipped on Wednesday, November 5, 2014 3:47:49 PM
For example, on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. 1 The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined. What kind of audience was this? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? It should be noted, by the way, that Lincoln and Douglas were not presidential candidates; at the time of their encounter in Peoria they were not even candidates for the United States Senate. But their audiences were not especially concerned with their official status. These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education, who took them to be an integral part of their social lives, and who were quite accustomed to extended oratorical performances. Typically at county or state fairs, programs included many speakers, most of whom were allotted three hours for their arguments. And since it was preferred that speakers not go unanswered, their opponents were allotted an equal length of time. (One might add that the speakers were not always men. At one fair lasting several days in Springfield, “Each evening a woman [lectured] in the courtroom on ‘Woman’s Influence in the Great Progressive Movements of the Day.”’ 2) Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 932-945
, clipped on Thursday, November 6, 2014 2:45:21 PM
A written sentence calls upon its author to say something, upon its reader to know the import of what is said. And when an author and reader are struggling with semantic meaning, they are engaged in the most serious challenge to the intellect. This is especially the case with the act of reading, for authors are not always trustworthy. They lie, they become confused, they over-generalize, they abuse logic and, sometimes, common sense. The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one’s responses are isolated, one’s intellect thrown back on its own resources. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1024-1031
, clipped on Thursday, November 6, 2014 2:55:23 PM
Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the strongest possible bias toward exposition: a sophisticated ability to think conceptually, deductively and sequentially; a high valuation of reason and order; an abhorrence of contradiction; a large capacity for detachment and objectivity; and a tolerance for delayed response. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1228-1231
, clipped on Friday, November 7, 2014 7:50:30 AM
And just as “nature” and “the sea” cannot be photographed, such larger abstractions as truth, honor, love, falsehood cannot be talked about in the lexicon of pictures. For “showing of” and “talking about” are two very different kinds of processes. “Pictures,” Gavriel Salomon has written, “need to be recognized, words need to be understood.” 6 By this he means that the photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea. For even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act of thinking—of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an imaginary category. There is no such thing in nature as “man” or “tree.” The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1363-1371
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:15:40 AM
For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names. Thus it provided the illusion, at least, that “the news” had a connection to something within one’s sensory experience. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1406-1408
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:19:28 AM
Twenty years ago, the question, Does television shape culture or merely reflect it? held considerable interest for many scholars and social critics. The question has largely disappeared as television has gradually become our culture. This means, among other things, that we rarely talk about television, only about what is on television—that is, about its content. Its ecology, which includes not only its physical characteristics and symbolic code but the conditions in which we normally attend to it, is taken for granted, accepted as natural. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1472-1476
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:25:25 AM
But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1560-1564
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:33:30 AM
When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, “Let me think about that” or “I don’t know” or “What do you mean when you say ... ?” or “From what sources does your information come?” This type of discourse not only slows down the tempo of the show but creates the impression of uncertainty or lack of finish. It tends to reveal people in the act of thinking, which is as disconcerting and boring on television as it is on a Las Vegas stage. Thinking does not play well on television, a fact that television directors discovered long ago. There is not much to see in it. It is, in a phrase, not a performing art. But television demands a performing art, and so what the ABC network gave us was a picture of men of sophisticated verbal skills and political understanding being brought to heel by a medium that requires them to fashion performances rather than ideas. Which accounts for why the eighty minutes were very entertaining, in the way of a Samuel Beckett play: The intimations of gravity hung heavy, the meaning passeth all understanding. The performances, of course, were highly professional. Sagan abjured the turtle-neck sweater in which he starred when he did “Cosmos.” He even had his hair cut for the event. His part was that of the logical scientist speaking in behalf of the planet. It is to be doubted that Paul Newman could have done better in the role, although Leonard Nimoy might have. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1610-1620
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:38:55 AM
In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas; they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials. For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1645-1648
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:42:21 AM
Of course, in television’s presentation of the “news of the day,” we may see the “Now ... this” mode of discourse in its boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without consequences, without value, and therefore without essential seriousness; that is to say, news as pure entertainment. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1751-1754
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 9:52:46 AM
In fact, it is quite obvious that TV news has no intention of suggesting that any story has any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct their attending to the next story that waits panting in the wings. In any case, viewers are not provided with much opportunity to be distracted from the next story since in all likelihood it will consist of some film footage. Pictures have little difficulty in overwhelming words, and short-circuiting introspection. As a television producer, you would be certain to give both prominence and precedence to any event for which there is some sort of visual documentation. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1794-1799
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 11:34:28 AM
The idea, he writes, “is to keep everything brief, not to strain the attention of anyone but instead to provide constant stimulation through variety, novelty, action, and movement. You are required ... to pay attention to no concept, no character, and no problem for more than a few seconds at a time.” 2 He goes on to say that the assumptions controlling a news show are “that bite-sized is best, that complexity must be avoided, that nuances are dispensable, that qualifications impede the simple message, that visual stimulation is a substitute for thought, and that verbal precision is an anachronism.” Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1829-1834
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 12:34:41 PM
There is no problem in someone’s remarking that he prefers oranges to apples, and also remarking that he prefers apples to oranges—not if one statement is made in the context of choosing a wallpaper design and the other in the context of selecting fruit for dessert. In such a case, we have statements that are opposites, but not contradictory. But if the statements are made in a single, continuous, and coherent context, then they are contradictions, and cannot both be true. Contradiction, in short, requires that statements and events be perceived as interrelated aspects of a continuous and coherent context. Disappear the context, or fragment it, and contradiction disappears. This point is nowhere made more clear to me than in conferences with my younger students about their writing. “Look here,” I say. “In this paragraph you have said one thing. And in that you have said the opposite. Which is it to be?” They are polite, and wish to please, but they are as baffled by the question as I am by the response. “I know,” they will say, “but that is there and this is here.” The difference between us is that I assume “there” and “here,” “now” and “then,” one paragraph and the next to be connected, to be continuous, to be part of the same coherent world of thought. That is the way of typographic discourse, and typography is the universe I’m “coming from,” as they say. But they are coming from a different universe of discourse altogether: the “Now ... this” world of television. The fundamental assumption of that world is not coherence but discontinuity. And in a world of discontinuities, contradiction is useless as a test of truth or merit, because contradiction does not exist. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1889-1901
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 2:53:19 PM
For television—bless its heart—is not congenial to messages of naked hate. For one thing, you never know who is watching, so it is best not to be wildly offensive. For another, haters with reddened faces and demonic gestures merely look foolish on television, as Marshall McLuhan observed years ago and Senator Joseph McCarthy learned to his dismay. Television favors moods of conciliation and is at its best when substance of any kind is muted. (One must make an exception here for those instances when preachers, like Swaggart, turn to the subject of the Devil and secular humanism. Then they are quite uncompromising in the ferocity of their assaults, partly, one may assume, because neither the Devil nor secular humanists are included in the Nielsen Ratings. Neither are they inclined to watch.) Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 1987-1993
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 3:35:18 PM
A book is all history. Everything about it takes one back in time—from the way it is produced to its linear mode of exposition to the fact that the past tense is its most comfortable form of address. As no other medium before or since, the book promotes a sense of a coherent and usable past. In a conversation of books, history, as Carlyle understood it, is not only a world but a living world. It is the present that is shadowy. Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 2295-2298
, clipped on Saturday, November 8, 2014 5:32:28 PM
television’s principal contribution to educational philosophy is the idea that teaching and entertainment are inseparable. This entirely original conception is to be found nowhere in educational discourses, from Confucius to Plato to Cicero to Locke to John Dewey. In searching the literature of education, you will find it said by some that children will learn best when they are interested in what they are learning. You will find it said—Plato and Dewey emphasized this —that reason is best cultivated when it is rooted in robust emotional ground. You will even find some who say that learning is best facilitated by a loving and benign teacher. But no one has ever said or implied that significant learning is effectively, durably and truthfully achieved when education is entertainment Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 2445-2450
, clipped on Sunday, November 9, 2014 12:54:52 AM
What is information? Or more precisely, what are information ? What are its various forms? What conceptions of intelligence, wisdom and learning does each form insist upon? What conceptions does each form neglect or mock? What are the main psychic effects of each form? What is the relation between information and reason? What is the kind of information that best facilitates thinking? Is there a moral bias to each information form? What does it mean to say that there is too much information? How would one know? What redefinitions of important cultural meanings do new sources, speeds, contexts and forms of information require? Does television, for example, give a new meaning to “piety,” to “patriotism,” to “privacy”? Does television give a new meaning to “judgment” or to “understanding”? How do different forms of information persuade? Is a newspaper’s “public” different from television’s “public”? How do different information forms dictate the type of content that is expressed? Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 2662-2672
, clipped on Sunday, November 9, 2014 1:12:58 AM
Although I believe the computer to be a vastly overrated technology, Postman, Neil
, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.
loc. 2677-2677
, clipped on Sunday, November 9, 2014 1:14:37 AM
“YOU CAN’T SAY THAT CIVILIZATION DON’T ADVANCE, FOR IN EVERY WAR THEY KILL YOU IN A NEW WAY.” Ray Kurzweil
, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.
loc. 5710-5711
, clipped on Thursday, November 27, 2014 6:11:25 AM
To appreciate the asymmetry between the possibility effect and the certainty effect, imagine first that you have a 1% chance to win $1 million. You will know the outcome tomorrow. Now, imagine that you are almost certain to win $1 million, but there is a 1% chance that you will not. Again, you will learn the outcome tomorrow. The anxiety of the second situation appears to be more salient than the hope in the first. The certainty effect is also more striking than the possibility effect if the outcome is a surgical disaster rather than a financial gain. Compare the intensity with which you focus on the faint sliver of hope in an operation that is almost certain to be fatal, compared to the fear of a 1% risk. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 5703-5707
, clipped on Sunday, November 30, 2014 3:46:03 PM
A lottery ticket is the ultimate example of the possibility effect. Without a ticket you cannot win, with a ticket you have a chance, and whether the chance is tiny or merely small matters little. Of course, what people acquire with a ticket is more than a chance to win; it is the right to dream pleasantly of winning. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 5749-5751
, clipped on Sunday, November 30, 2014 3:51:47 PM
than they were when prospect theory was formulated. The probability of a rare event will (often, not always) be overestimated, because of the confirmatory bias of memory. Thinking about that event, you try to make it true in your mind. A rare event will be overweighted if it specifically attracts attention. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 6040-6042
, clipped on Wednesday, December 3, 2014 9:39:03 AM
It works when the gambles are genuinely independent of each other; it does not apply to multiple investments in the same industry, which would all go bad together. It works only when the possible loss does not cause you to worry about your total wealth. If you would take the loss as significant bad news about your economic future, watch it! It should not be applied to long shots, where the probability of winning is very small for each bet. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 6140-6143
, clipped on Friday, December 5, 2014 2:01:59 AM
The key is not the difference between commission and omission but the distinction between default options and actions that deviate from the default. When you deviate from the default, you can easily imagine the norm—and if the default is associated with bad consequences, the discrepancy between the two can be the source of painful emotions. The default option when you own a stock is not to sell it, but the default option when you meet your colleague in the morning is to greet him. Selling a stock and failing to greet your coworker are both departures from the default option and natural candidates for regret or blame. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 6317-6321
, clipped on Saturday, December 6, 2014 4:10:31 PM
Reframing is effortful and System 2 is normally lazy. Unless there is an obvious reason to do otherwise, most of us passively accept decision problems as they are framed and therefore rarely have an opportunity to discover the extent to which our preferences are frame-bound rather than reality-bound. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 6682-6685
, clipped on Monday, December 8, 2014 1:43:54 AM
Your moral feelings are attached to frames, to descriptions of reality rather than to reality itself. The message about the nature of framing is stark: framing should not be viewed as an intervention that masks or distorts an underlying preference. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 6740-6742
, clipped on Monday, December 8, 2014 1:49:32 AM
Confusing experience with the memory of it is a compelling cognitive illusion—and it is the substitution that makes us believe a past experience can be ruined. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 6907-6910
, clipped on Monday, December 8, 2014 2:05:38 AM
Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 7067-7068
, clipped on Monday, December 8, 2014 2:18:22 AM
Nothing in life is as important as you think it is when you are thinking about it. Kahneman, Daniel
, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
loc. 7293-7294
, clipped on Monday, December 8, 2014 2:37:15 AM
The camera does not lie; left to its own devices, it renders outdoor scenes as milk and indoor scenes as mud. Photographers, and sometimes microchips inside the camera, coax a realistic image out of the film with tricks like adjustable shutter timing, lens apertures, film speeds, flashes, and darkroom manipulations. Steven Pinker
, How the Mind Works.
loc. 236-238
, clipped on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 7:41:00 PM
The computational theory of mind resolves the paradox. It says that beliefs and desires are information, incarnated as configurations of symbols. The symbols are the physical states of bits of matter, like chips in a computer or neurons in the brain. They symbolize things in the world because they are triggered by those things via our sense organs, and because of what they do once they are triggered. If the bits of matter that constitute a symbol are arranged to bump into the bits of matter constituting another symbol in just the right way, the symbols corresponding to one belief can give rise to new symbols corresponding to another belief logically related to it, which can give rise to symbols corresponding to other beliefs, and so on. Eventually the bits of matter constituting a symbol bump into bits of matter connected to the muscles, and behavior happens. The computational theory of mind thus allows us to keep beliefs and desires in our explanations of behavior while planting them squarely in the physical universe. It allows meaning to cause and be caused. Steven Pinker
, How the Mind Works.
loc. 540-548
, clipped on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 8:17:07 PM
Think about all the things you’ve believed, unquestioning, while dreaming. When you dream, you are InstaFanatic about whatever ludicrous set of rules you’re presented with. That’s not a great place to be when you’re awake, unless you’re looking to start a religion. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 509-511
, clipped on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 8:43:33 PM
When you’re nuts, and deprived of your ability to doubt and reason against evidence, the same thing can happen. The processes running your emotions are now running your logic centers, and you’re more receptive to signals you can no longer interpret. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 1510-1512
, clipped on Tuesday, December 9, 2014 10:11:16 PM
Emotion trumps reason. Always. You can stop yourself from screaming and curb the urge toward violence, but your thoughts are shaped by how you feel. You can throw some feedback into your hormones, but the impetus for even that effort is rooted in your mood. If you take someone and cut the link between the cerebral cortex and the emotional centers of the brain, that person can no longer make choices. Nothing has any more or less value than anything else, so judgments are pointless. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 1974-1977
, clipped on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 4:08:38 AM
I think alleviating existential dread is bad for humanity: if we really want immortality and rocket ships and all the possible pleasures of existence, we need hubris and dread. Monks be damned. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 2486-2487
, clipped on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 9:36:37 AM
I’m tempted to believe this is how human culture mutates. If you go through this whole process very slowly, you have culture and language. Go through a little faster, you have philosophy and rhetoric. Go through at a canter, you’ve got politics, and if you break into a gallop, you’re insane. The faster the process, the easier it is to get smaller, more literal symbols in the mix. Think about this sentence: “God is God but not God, God is everything, God is the water and the wave, the vision and its completion.” Sunday morning, right? Now, trying to make Friday night before prom something worth confessing on Sunday: “Love is Love but not Love, Love is everything, Love is the water and the wave, the vision and its completion.” Sweet. I’ve just demonstrated how the Bible can be used to get young atheists laid. Grab a short passage, replace God with Love, and say it to an insecure girl late at night. This can be done because Love and God are both huge, ancient symbols describing nothing in particular. Love, God, Earth, Hell, Heaven, Hope, Faith, etc., are all big words people argue about, because by the process of insane osmosis[198] these words have merged with every other concept and thought process we have, and thus mean jack all. They’re shortcuts between other, more literal concepts. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 2533-2542
, clipped on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 9:43:31 AM
The idea that drugs and radically altered states express a higher potential is a bit like saying humans are the pinnacle of evolution. Evolution has no pinnacle, and an altered state of mind is just that. It’s not better or worse: it’s different. I think contrast in general is an excellent experience for broadening the mind and making it more able to be further broadened, and if that’s what you want, extreme brain alteration is part of it. But extreme and continuing contrast is also the thing that gradually instills a sense of the arbitrariness of interpretation and meaning. A popular altered state of mind that lacks contrast is fanatical guru, and their universal cry is “everybody should shuck the rest of the world and listen to the thoughts in my head.” Exploring one’s own mind excessively is not pursuing universal consciousness. It’s narcissism. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 2637-2643
, clipped on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 11:00:57 AM
The difference for me is that I don’t find a purposeless, meaningless universe unsettling: the core mystical awakening is in the experience of being, and even a laymen’s exploration of modern science reveals that the universe is an extremely strange place that we don’t really understand. The quest for spiritual truth becomes a need when people project the banality and frustrations of their internal worlds and see the universe as boring and faulty. A spiritual awakening is primarily breaking the mind out of that interpretative trap, which is enough for me. Somehow fitting visions and feelings into a framework with beings and consciousnesses and unknown forces that care is superfluous. I find such attempts less revelations than they are representations of a longing to be loved. All of my altered experience, psychedelic and otherwise, has left me with the lesson that it is far more important to love than to be loved. Peter Hunt Welch
, And Then I Thought I Was a Fish.
loc. 2695-2701
, clipped on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 11:09:03 AM
If you look at the cause of some movement in a time frame measured in milliseconds, the immediate cause will be the firing of some nerve cells that connect the brain to the muscles. There is no consciousness in that process. Nobody is aware of nerve cells firing. But the will is to be found in connecting units across time. Will involves treating the current situation as part of a general pattern. Smoking one cigarette will not jeopardize your health. Taking heroin once will not make you addicted. One piece of cake won’t make you fat, and skipping one assignment won’t ruin your career. But in order to stay healthy and employed, you must treat (almost) every episode as a reflection of the general need to resist these temptations. That’s where conscious self-control comes in, and that’s why it makes the difference between success and failure in just about every aspect of life. Baumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
loc. 276-282
, clipped on Wednesday, December 10, 2014 1:25:25 PM
The link between self-awareness and self-control was also demonstrated in experiments involving adults and alcohol. Researchers found that one of the chief effects of drinking was to reduce people’s ability to monitor their own behavior. As drinkers’ self-awareness declines, they lose self-control, so they get into more fights, smoke more, eat more, make more sexual blunders, and wake up the next day with many more regrets. One of the hardest parts of a hangover is the return of self-awareness, because that’s when we resume that crucial task for a social animal: comparing our behavior with the standards set by ourselves and our neighbors. Baumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
loc. 1663-1668
, clipped on Thursday, December 11, 2014 5:02:58 AM
Public information has more impact than private information. People care more about what other people know about them than about what they know about themselves. A failure, a slipup, a lapse in self-control can be swept under the carpet pretty easily if you’re the only one who knows about it. You can rationalize it or just plain ignore it. But if other people know about it, it’s harder to dismiss. After all, the other person might not buy the excuses that you make, even though you find them quite satisfying. Baumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
loc. 1779-1782
, clipped on Thursday, December 11, 2014 5:20:22 AM
But the act of writing it was part of a strategy to conserve willpower that he used over and over with great success: precommitment. The essence of this strategy is to lock yourself into a virtuous path. You recognize that you’ll face terrible temptations to stray from the path, and that your willpower will weaken. So you make it impossible—or somehow unthinkably disgraceful or sinful—to leave the path. Baumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
loc. 2194-2197
, clipped on Thursday, December 11, 2014 9:49:43 AM
This broad rise in narcissism is the problem child of the self-esteem movement, and it is not likely to change anytime soon, because the movement persists despite the evidence that it’s not making children become more successful, honest, or otherwise better citizens. Too many students, parents, and educators are still seduced by the easy promises of self-esteem. Like the students in Forsyth’s class in Virginia, when the going gets tough, people with high self-esteem often decide they shouldn’t bother. If other people can’t appreciate how terrific they are, then it’s the other people’s problem. Baumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
loc. 2813-2817
, clipped on Thursday, December 11, 2014 10:50:11 AM
“The secret of my incredible energy and efficiency in getting work done is a simple one,” Benchley wrote. “The psychological principle is this: anyone can do any amount of work, provided it isn’t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment.” Baumeister, Roy F.;Tierney, John
, Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength.
loc. 3693-3695
, clipped on Thursday, December 11, 2014 1:11:37 PM
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Good writing starts strong. Not with a cliché (“Since the dawn of time”), not with a banality (“Recently, scholars have been increasingly concerned with the question of …”), but with a contentful observation that provokes curiosity. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 308-311
, clipped on Thursday, December 11, 2014 1:44:49 PM
I write with a thesaurus, mindful of the advice I once read in a bicycle repair manual on how to squeeze a dent out of a rim with Vise-Grip pliers: “Do not get carried away with the destructive potential of this tool.” Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 540-542
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 12:36:26 AM
The authors of the four passages share a number of practices: an insistence on fresh wording and concrete imagery over familiar verbiage and abstract summary; an attention to the readers’ vantage point and the target of their gaze; the judicious placement of an uncommon word or idiom against a backdrop of simple nouns and verbs; the use of parallel syntax; the occasional planned surprise; the presentation of a telling detail that obviates an explicit pronouncement; the use of meter and sound that resonate with the meaning and mood. The authors also share an attitude: they do not hide the passion and relish that drive them to tell us about their subjects. They write as if they have something important to say. But no, that doesn’t capture it. They write as if they have something important to show. And that, we shall see, is a key ingredient in the sense of style. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 613-620
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 12:46:16 AM
The key to good style, far more than obeying any list of commandments, is to have a clear conception of the make-believe world in which you’re pretending to communicate. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 652-654
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 12:49:07 AM
The guiding metaphor of classic style is seeing the world. The writer can see something that the reader has not yet noticed, and he orients the reader’s gaze so that she can see it for herself. The purpose of writing is presentation, and its motive is disinterested truth. It succeeds when it aligns language with the truth, the proof of success being clarity and simplicity. The truth can be known, and is not the same as the language that reveals it; prose is a window onto the world. The writer knows the truth before putting it into words; he is not using the occasion of writing to sort out what he thinks. Nor does the writer of classic prose have to argue for the truth; he just needs to present it. That is because the reader is competent and can recognize the truth when she sees it, as long as she is given an unobstructed view. The writer and the reader are equals, and the process of directing the reader’s gaze takes the form of a conversation. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 665-673
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 12:52:29 AM
It takes cognitive toil and literary dexterity to pare an argument to its essentials, narrate it in an orderly sequence, and illustrate it with analogies that are both familiar and accurate. As Dolly Parton said, “You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to look this cheap.” Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 839-841
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 1:09:20 AM
The summary should be self-contained, almost as if the material being summarized had never existed. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 914-915
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 1:17:57 AM
metadiscourse, signposting, hedging, apologizing, professional narcissism, clichés, mixed metaphors, metaconcepts, zombie nouns, and unnecessary passives. Writers who want to invigorate their prose could try to memorize that list of don’ts. But it’s better to keep in mind the guiding metaphor of classic style: a writer, in conversation with a reader, directs the reader’s gaze to something in the world. Each of the don’ts corresponds to a way in which a writer can stray from this scenario. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 1275-1279
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 3:24:37 AM
The reason that the task is so challenging is that the main resource that English syntax makes available to writers—left-to-right ordering on a page—has to do two things at once. It’s the code that the language uses to convey who did what to whom. But it also determines the sequence of early-to-late processing in the reader’s mind. The human mind can do only a few things at a time, and the order in which information comes in affects how that information is handled. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 1823-1827
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 5:29:48 AM
The advice to omit needless words should not be confused with the puritanical edict that all writers must pare every sentence down to the shortest, leanest, most abstemious version possible. Even writers who prize clarity don’t do this. That’s because the difficulty of a sentence depends not just on its word count but on its geometry. Good writers often use very long sentences, and they garnish them with words that are, strictly speaking, needless. But they get away with it by arranging the words so that a reader can absorb them a phrase at a time, each phrase conveying a chunk of conceptual structure. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 2329-2334
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 12:03:36 PM
Accomplished wordsmiths identify a need while writing, or spot a problem in a sentence while revising, and when all goes well the suitable word or construction pops into mind. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 3002-3003
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 1:55:32 PM
Just below the surface of these inchoate intuitions, I believe, is a tacit awareness that the writer’s goal is to encode a web of ideas into a string of words using a tree of phrases. Aspiring wordsmiths would do well to cultivate this awareness. It can help rid their writing of errors, dead ends, and confusing passages. And it can take the fear and boredom out of grammar, because it’s always more inviting to master a system when you have a clear idea of what it is designed to accomplish. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 3004-3008
, clipped on Friday, December 12, 2014 1:55:52 PM
Paragraph breaks generally coincide with the divisions between branches in the discourse tree, that is, cohesive chunks of text. But the same little notch must be used for divisions between branches of every size, whether it’s the end of a minor digression, the end of a major summation, or anything in between. Sometimes a writer should cleave an intimidating block of print with a paragraph break just to give the reader’s eyes a place to alight and rest. Academic writers often neglect to do this and trowel out massive slabs of visually monotonous text. Newspaper journalists, mindful of their readers’ attention spans, sometimes go to the other extreme and dice their text into nanoparagraphs consisting of a sentence or two apiece. Inexperienced writers tend to be closer to academics than to journalists and use too few paragraph breaks rather than too many. It’s always good to show mercy to your readers and periodically let them rest their weary eyes. Just be sure not to derail them in the middle of a train of thought. Carve the notch above a sentence that does not elaborate or follow from the one that came before. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 3142-3151
, clipped on Saturday, December 13, 2014 10:37:49 AM
The cognitive difference between believing that a proposition is true (which requires no work beyond understanding it) and believing that it is false (which requires adding and remembering a mental tag) has enormous implications for a writer. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 3805-3807
, clipped on Saturday, December 13, 2014 12:39:33 PM
When an author has to negate something that a reader doesn’t already believe, she has to set it up as a plausible belief on his mental stage before she knocks it down. Or, to put it more positively, when a writer wants to negate an unfamiliar proposition, she should unveil the negation in two stages: You might think … But no. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 3881-3885
, clipped on Saturday, December 13, 2014 12:45:21 PM
Of course, responsible writers have to deal with counterarguments and counterevidence. But if there are enough of them to merit an extended discussion, they deserve a section of their own, whose stated point is to examine the contrary position. A fair-minded examination of the counterevidence can then occupy as much space as it needs, because its bulk will reflect its importance within that section. This divide-and-conquer strategy is better than repeatedly allowing counterexamples to intrude into the main line of an argument while browbeating readers into looking away. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 3992-3997
, clipped on Saturday, December 13, 2014 12:54:27 PM
A writer, after laying out her topic, will introduce a large number of concepts which explain, enrich, or comment on that topic. These concepts will center on a number of themes which make repeated appearances in the discussion. To keep the text coherent, the writer must allow the reader to keep track of these themes by referring to each in a consistent way or by explaining their connection. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 4041-4044
, clipped on Saturday, December 13, 2014 1:08:30 PM
But the claim that there is nothing inherently wrong with ain’t (which is true) should not be confused with the claim that ain’t is one of the conventions of standard written English (which is obviously false). This distinction is lost on the purists, who worry that if we point out that people who say ain’t or He be working or ax a question are not lazy or careless, then we have no grounds for advising students and writers to avoid them in their prose. So here is an analogy. In the United Kingdom, everyone drives on the left, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that convention; it is in no way sinister, gauche, or socialist. Nonetheless, we have an excellent reason to encourage a person in the United States to drive on the right. There is a joke about a commuter who’s on his way to work when he gets a call on his mobile phone from his wife. “Be careful, honey,” she says. “They just said on the radio that there’s a maniac driving on the wrong side of the freeway.” “One maniac?” he replies; “There are thousands of them!” Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 4278-4288
, clipped on Saturday, December 13, 2014 1:29:22 PM
If I were allowed to take just one book to the proverbial desert island, it might be a dictionary. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 5501-5501
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 6:24:50 AM
There are several legitimate ways to splice two sentences, depending on the coherence relation that connects them. When two sentences are conceptually pretty much independent, the first should end with a period and the next should begin with a capital, just like they teach you in third grade. When the two are conceptually linked but the writer feels no need to pinpoint the coherence relation that holds between them, they can be joined with a semicolon; the semicolon is the all-purpose way to eliminate a comma splice. When the coherence relation is elaboration or exemplification (when one is tempted to say that is, in other words, which is to say, for example, here’s what I have in mind, or Voilà!), they may be linked with a colon: like this. When the second sentence intentionally interrupts the flow of the discussion, requiring the reader to wake up, think twice, or snap out of it, a writer can use a dash—dashes can enliven writing, as long as they are used sparingly. And when the writer pinpoints the coherence relation he has in mind with an explicit connective such as a coordinator (and, or, but, yet, so, nor) or a preposition (although, except, if, before, after, because, for), a comma is fine, because the phrase is a mere supplement (like the underlined clause, which I fastened to the preceding one with a comma). Just don’t confuse these connectives with sentence adverbs, such as however, nonetheless, consequently, or therefore, which are themselves supplements of the clause they precede. The clause with the adverb is a freestanding sentence; consequently, it cannot be joined to its predecessor with a comma. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 6744-6760
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 12:51:49 PM
If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 6979-6982
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:10:09 PM
First, look things up. Humans are cursed with the deadly combination of a highly fallible memory and an overconfidence in how much they know.73 Our social networks, traditional and electronic, multiply the errors, so that much of our conventional wisdom consists of friend-of-a-friend legends and factoids that are too good to be true. As Mark Twain said, “The trouble with the world is not that people know too little, but that they know so many things that aren’t so.” Actually, he didn’t say that—I looked it up.74 But whoever said it (probably Josh Billings) made an important point. We are blessed to live in an age in which no subject has gone unresearched by scholars, scientists, and journalists. The fruits of their research are available within seconds to anyone with a laptop or smartphone, and within minutes to anyone who can get to a library. Why not take advantage of these blessings and try to restrict the things you know (or at least the things you write) to things that are true? Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 6983-6993
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:12:51 PM
Second, be sure your arguments are sound. If you are making a factual claim, it should be verifiable in an edited source—one that has been vetted by disinterested gatekeepers such as editors, fact-checkers, or peer reviewers. If you’re making an argument, it should proceed from premises that reasonable people already agree upon to your newer or more contentious assertion using valid if-then steps. If you’re making a moral argument—a claim about what people ought to do—you should show how doing it would satisfy a principle or Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 6994-6999
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:12:59 PM
Third, don’t confuse an anecdote or a personal experience with the state of the world. Just because something happened to you, or you read about it in the paper or on the Internet this morning, it doesn’t mean it is a trend. In a world of seven billion people, just about anything will happen to someone somewhere, and it’s the highly unusual events that will be selected for the news or passed along to friends. An event is a significant phenomenon only if it happens some appreciable number of times relative to the opportunities for it to occur, and it is a trend only if that proportion has been shown to change over time. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 7000-7005
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:13:26 PM
Fourth, beware of false dichotomies. Though it’s fun to reduce a complex issue to a war between two slogans, two camps, or two schools of thought, it is rarely a path to understanding. Few good ideas can be insightfully captured in a single word ending with -ism, and most of our ideas are so crude that we can make more progress by analyzing and refining them than by pitting them against each other in a winner-take-all contest. Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 7005-7009
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:13:36 PM
Finally, arguments should be based on reasons, not people. Saying that someone you disagree with is motivated by money, fame, politics, or laziness, or slinging around insults like simplistic, naïve, or vulgar, does not prove that the things the person is saying are false. Nor is the point of disagreement or criticism to show that you are smarter or nobler than your target. Psychologists have shown that in any dispute both sides are convinced that they themselves are reasonable and upright and that their opposite numbers are mulish and dishonest.75 They can’t all be right, at least not all the time. Keep in mind a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: “It isn’t about being right. It’s about getting it right.” Steven Pinker
, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
loc. 7009-7017
, clipped on Sunday, December 14, 2014 1:14:24 PM
Optimality notions can be of theoretical interest even if they are physically unrealizable. They give us a standard by which to judge heuristic approximations, and sometimes we can reason about what an optimal agent would do in some special case. Bostrom, Nick
, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
loc. 468-470
, clipped on Monday, December 15, 2014 11:48:33 AM
Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization—a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it. Bostrom, Nick
, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
loc. 1166-1168
, clipped on Monday, December 15, 2014 2:43:58 PM
One might expect that Marx would go on to explain in some detail what communism would be like. He does not—in fact, nowhere in his writings does he give more than sketchy suggestions on this subject. He does, however, gesture at the enormous difference communism would make. Singer, Peter
, Marx.
loc. 613-614
, clipped on Thursday, December 18, 2014 4:02:20 AM
The view of society as a totality is no doubt illuminating when set against the view that ideas, politics, law, religion, and so on have a life and history of their own, independently of mundane economic matters. Nevertheless it does not amount to “the law of development of human history,” or to a scientific discovery comparable to Darwin’s theory of evolution. To qualify as a contribution to science, a proposed law must be precise enough to enable us to deduce from it certain consequences rather than others. That is how we test proposed scientific laws—by seeing if the consequences they predict actually occur. The conception of society as an interconnected totality is about as precise an instrument of historical analysis as a bowl of porridge. Anything at all can be deduced from it. No observation could ever refute it. Singer, Peter
, Marx.
loc. 856-861
, clipped on Thursday, December 18, 2014 5:08:48 AM
There is a reason for Marx’s reticence over the details of communist society. He believed that history owed its momentum to the development of the forces of production rather than the development of ideas. This did not mean that theory was unimportant. If Marx’s mission in life was to contribute to the overthrow of capitalism and the liberation of the proletariat, his theories of history and of economics were intended to do this by showing the workers their role in history and making them conscious of the manner in which capitalism exploited them. While theory could describe existing reality in this way, however, for theory to reach ahead of its time was another matter altogether. Marx derided as “Utopian” those socialists who sought to bring about communism by producing blueprints of a future communist society. His own form of socialism was, he claimed, scientific because it built on knowledge of the laws of history that would bring socialism into existence. Singer, Peter
, Marx.
loc. 1188-1195
, clipped on Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:25:42 AM
Everything Marx says about communism is premised on material abundance. Remember that it is the development of the forces of production that, according to the materialist theory of history, is the driving force behind historical change. The change from one form of society to another occurs when the existing structure of society acts as a fetter on the further development of the productive forces. But communism is the final form of society. Building on the dramatic advances so ruthlessly made by capitalism, communism allows the forces of production to develop to their fullest possible extent. Production will be cooperatively planned for the benefit of all, not wasted in socially fruitless competition between individual capitalists for their own private ends. There will be no crises of overproduction, as there are in unplanned economies. The reserve army of unemployed workers required by capitalism to keep labor cheap and available will become productive. Mechanization and automation will continue to develop as they had developed under capitalism, though without their degrading effect on the workers (unfortunately Marx does not tell us how these effects would be avoided, but presumably it would be by a drastic reduction in the hours of necessary labor). No longer will surplus-value be extracted from the workers to line the pockets of the capitalists. The working class will receive the full use-value of its labor, subject only to a deduction for future social investment. We will control our economy, instead of being controlled by it. Singer, Peter
, Marx.
loc. 1285-1296
, clipped on Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:41:08 AM
Marx saw that within its own terms this defense of capitalism is coherent; but he also saw that from a broader, historical perspective, the liberal definition of freedom is open to a fundamental objection. To explain his objection, I shall switch to a more homely example. Suppose I live in the suburbs and work in the city. I could drive my car to work, or take the bus. I prefer not to wait around for the bus, and so I take my car. Fifty thousand other people living in my suburb face the same choice and make the same decision. The road to town is choked with cars. It takes each of us an hour to travel ten miles. In this situation, according to the liberal conception of freedom, we have all chosen freely. No one deliberately interfered with our choices. Yet the outcome is something none of us wants. If we all went by bus, the roads would be empty and we could cover the distance in twenty minutes. Even with the inconvenience of waiting at the bus stop, we would all prefer that. We are, of course, free to alter our choice of transportation, but what can we do? While so many cars slow the bus down, why should any individual choose differently? The liberal conception of freedom has led to a paradox: we have each chosen in our own interests, but the result is in no one’s interest. Individual rationality, collective irrationality. Singer, Peter
, Marx.
loc. 1357-1366
, clipped on Thursday, December 18, 2014 9:49:29 AM
This strategy is exemplified by the sea squirt larva, which swims about until it finds a suitable rock, to which it then permanently affixes itself. Cemented in place, the larva has less need for complex information processing, whence it proceeds to digest part of its own brain (its cerebral ganglion). One can observe the same phenomenon in some academics when they have been granted tenure. Bostrom, Nick
, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
loc. 6814-6817
, clipped on Saturday, December 20, 2014 5:50:29 AM
For instance, one search discovered a frequency discrimination circuit that functioned without a clock—a component normally considered necessary for this function. The researchers estimated that the evolved circuit was between one and two orders of magnitude smaller than what a human engineer would have required for the task. The circuit exploited the physical properties of its components in unorthodox ways; some active, necessary components were not even connected to the input or output pins! These components instead participated via what would normally be considered nuisance side effects, such as electromagnetic coupling or power-supply loading. Bostrom, Nick
, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
loc. 3620-3625
, clipped on Saturday, December 20, 2014 3:40:12 PM
Nature might be a great experimentalist, but one who would never pass muster with an ethics review board—contravening the Helsinki Declaration and every norm of moral decency, left, right, and center. It is important that we not gratuitously replicate such horrors in silico. Bostrom, Nick
, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
loc. 4378-4380
, clipped on Monday, December 22, 2014 9:52:21 AM
(Information continence may be especially challenging for academic researchers, accustomed as they are to constantly disseminating their results on every available lamppost and tree.) Bostrom, Nick
, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
loc. 6013-6014
, clipped on Wednesday, December 24, 2014 7:41:04 AM
In the cutthroat world of academic publishing, simply being passionate about a topic is nowhere near sufficient for success; one must be well-versed in the preferences of senior colleagues in a particular subfield who are serving as paper reviewers. In short, our data sets were not as good, our techniques were not as refined, and our results and presentation style were less impressive than what the veterans in this subfield expected. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 427-430
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 2:00:27 AM
I learned about the importance of being endorsed by an influential person; simply doing good work isn't enough to get noticed in a hyper-competitive field. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 657-658
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 2:18:45 AM
I discovered that this strategy of finding and setting short-term deadlines for myself would work wonders in keeping me focused throughout the rest of my Ph.D. years. Without self-imposed deadlines, it becomes easy to fall into a rut and succumb to chronic procrastination. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 819-821
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 2:33:19 AM
I wish I could say that my solo brainstorming sessions were motivated by a true love for the pure essence of academic scholarship. But the truth was that I was driven by straight-up fear: I was afraid of not being able to graduate within a reasonable time frame, so I pressured myself to come up with new ideas that could potentially lead to publications. I was all too aware that it might take two to three years for a paper to get accepted for publication, so if I wanted to graduate by the end of my sixth year, I would need to submit several papers this year and pray that at least two get accepted. I felt rushed because my fellowship lasted only until the end of this year. After my funding expired, I would need to either find grant funding from a professor and face all of the requisite restrictions (e.g., working on Klee again), or else become a perpetual teaching assistant and delay my graduation even further. Time was running out. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 923-929
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 2:41:43 AM
Our user testing had failed to show the productivity improvement effects that we originally hoped to see, so I was afraid that our paper would be rejected for sure. But miraculously, Jeff's technical writing and argument framing skills turned that near-defeat into a surprise victory. The reviewers loved how we honestly acknowledged the failures of our evaluation and extracted valuable insights from them. Without a doubt, our paper would have never been accepted if not for Jeff's rhetorical expertise. He had a lot of practice, though. Back when he was a Ph.D. student, Jeff published 19 papers mostly in top-tier conferences, which is five to ten times more than typical computer science Ph.D. students. That's the sort of intensity required to get a faculty job at a top-tier university like Stanford. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 1119-1124
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 2:57:09 AM
Academic conferences are filled with senior Ph.D. students, postdocs, and pre-tenure professors schmoozing like crazy in attempts to impress their senior colleagues. For these junior researchers, professional networking at conferences is a serious full-time job, since their budding careers and academic reputations depend upon excelling at it. But since I was getting out of this academic game, I didn't care at all and enjoyed myself without being nervous or calculating. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 1177-1180
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:01:41 AM
I understood the importance of aligning with the subjective preferences of senior collaborators (and paper reviewers), even when doing research in supposedly objective technical fields. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 1214-1215
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:04:34 AM
The popular view of how a Ph.D. dissertation arises is that a student comes up with some inspired intellectual idea in a brilliant flash of insight and then spends a few years writing a giant treatise while sipping hundreds of lattes and cappuccinos. In many science and engineering fields, this perception is totally inaccurate: The “writing” is simply combining one's published papers together into a single document and surrounding their contents with introductory and concluding chapters. All of the years of sweaty labor has already been done by the time a student sits down to “write” their dissertation document. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 1246-1250
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:07:40 AM
reality, almost nobody fails their defense unless they act totally moronic: The committee will usually have read through and approved a student's dissertation before they let that student defend, so there should be no surprises. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 1285-1287
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:10:18 AM
Fun is often frivolous, ephemeral, and easy to obtain, but true fulfillment comes only after overcoming significant and meaningful challenges. Pursuing a Ph.D. has been one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life, and I feel extremely lucky to have been given the opportunity to be creative during this time. Philip Guo
, The Ph.D. Grind: A Ph.D. Student Memoir.
loc. 1450-1452
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:25:42 AM
Writing proceeds from thinking. To achieve good prose styles, writers must work through intellectual issues, not merely acquire mechanical techniques. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 74-75
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 7:37:37 AM
Classic style is in its own view clear and simple as the truth. It adopts the stance that its purpose is presentation; its motive, disinterested truth. Successful presentation consists of aligning language with truth, and the test of this alignment is clarity and simplicity. The idea that presentation is successful when language is aligned with truth implies that truth can be known; truth needs no argument but only accurate presentation; the reader is competent to recognize truth; the symmetry between writer and reader allows the presentation to follow the model of conversation; a natural language is sufficient to express truth; and the writer knows the truth before he puts it into language. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 94-99
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 7:41:06 AM
Classic style is focused and assured. Its virtues are clarity and simplicity; in a sense, so are its vices. It declines to acknowledge ambiguities, unessential qualifications, doubts, or other styles. It declines to acknowledge that it is a style. It makes its hard choices silently and out of the reader’s sight. Once made, those hard choices are not acknowledged to be choices at all; they are presented as if they were inevitable because classic style is, above all, a style of presentation with claims to transparency. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 197-201
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:24:49 PM
The role is severely limited because classic prose is pure, fearless, cool, and relentless. It asks no quarter and gives no quarter to anyone, including the writer. While the role can be necessary, true, and useful, as well as wonderfully thrilling, it can hardly be permanent. For better or worse, human beings are not pure, fearless, cool, or relentless, even if we may find it convenient for certain purposes to pretend that we are. The human condition does not, in general, allow the degree of autonomy and certainty that the classic writer pretends to have. It does not sustain the classic writer’s claim to disinterested expression of unconditional truth. It does not allow the writer indefinitely to maintain the posture required by classic style. But classic style simply does not acknowledge the human condition. The insouciance required to ignore what everyone knows and to carry the reader along in this style cannot be maintained very long, and the masters of the style always know its limits. The classic distance is a sprint. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 209-216
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:26:54 PM
“The truth is pure and simple” is plain style. “The truth is rarely pure, and never simple” is classic style. The plain version contains many elements of classic style without being classic; the classic version contains all of the plain version without being plain. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 280-282
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:36:35 PM
The concept of classic style assumes that plain style already exists. The classic version introduces a refinement, a qualification, a meditation on the plain version that makes it classic. Classic style takes the attitude that it is superior to plain style because classic style presents intelligence as it should be presented: as a sparkling display, not weighed down by grinding earnestness. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 283-285
, clipped on Monday, January 26, 2015 3:37:11 PM
Before any communication, think about what will be your Message Objective. Limit yourself to no more than three points. Always support your points with solid evidence, including stories (lots of stories), personal examples, expert testimony, analogies, killer quotes, and stats and facts. Asher, Joey
, Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People.
loc. 477-480
, clipped on Wednesday, January 28, 2015 3:46:53 PM
1. Recaps build retention. Be sure to restate your MO and your three key points at the end of your presentation. 2. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Either ask for the order or end with a call to action. 3. You can end with a final persuasive story. But make sure it’s tight and relevant. Asher, Joey
, Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People.
loc. 1142-1145
, clipped on Friday, January 30, 2015 4:01:14 PM
If you start off with the view of style as a list of surface mechanical elements at any level, then you can end up with the correct list and present it as constituting style, rather than a style. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 405-407
, clipped on Friday, January 30, 2015 4:10:09 PM
The domain of style is what can be chosen. A fundamental stand is a choice open to the writer. By contrast, to know a language is to know a great range of things that are not open to choice: it is not open to every writer, for example, to decide that sentences shall begin with a period and end with a capital letter, that the word “dog” shall refer to cats, that predicates shall not agree in number and person with their subjects, or that six fine brick houses shall be called “brick fine houses six.” You can, however, decide whether to call a certain dog a “dog” or a “hound,” to say “Sally devoured the roast beef” rather than “The roast beef was devoured by Sally,” to write in sentences that are short and clipped rather than baroque and periodic, or to write “24 March 1954” rather than “March 24, 1954,” but these are surface features. Books that talk about style in writing treat these moments of choice at the surface level but typically ignore the elements of style, which is to say, the fundamental choices from which surface features derive. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 410-417
, clipped on Friday, January 30, 2015 4:11:13 PM
The elements come under five topical headings: truth, presentation, scene, cast, thought and language. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 419-419
, clipped on Friday, January 30, 2015 4:11:31 PM
His thesis is that everybody has what is essential for identifying truth—natural reason—whether or not that person has any special educational formation. Failure to identify truth comes either from directing natural reason to the wrong objects—which can include the recondite lore of erudition—or from uncritically accepting opinion and custom. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 437-440
, clipped on Friday, January 30, 2015 4:14:16 PM
Classic style treats external objects, contingent facts, and even opinions as if they too are beyond doubt or discussion. To verify them we need to acquire local conventions so widespread within the relevant culture that the style treats them as if they were natural endowments. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 452-454
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 1:50:11 AM
Classic style expands the domain of truth to include anything that might require not merely the knowledge of a convention but even the ability to make a judgment. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 469-470
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 1:52:06 AM
In classic style, opinions stated clearly and distinctly are treated as if they can be verified by simple observation. The writer does not typically attempt to persuade by argument. The writer merely puts the reader in a position to see whatever is being presented and suggests that the reader will be able to verify it because the style treats whatever conventions or even prejudices it operates from as if these were, like natural reason, shared by everyone. It is a style of disguised assertion. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 471-474
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 1:52:45 AM
In the classic view, what cannot be universally verified cannot be true. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 499-500
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 1:56:33 AM
The classic writer presents himself not as a guide to morals or behavior, but as an observer of truth. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 535-535
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:00:40 AM
The classic writer rarely writes as if he is pressing claims and presenting arguments, but rather pretends that he is presenting subjects and conducting analyses. When, on rare occasions, the classic writer adopts the stance that the reader will not believe what is being presented, he never concedes that the reader’s disposition should influence what he says. A writer who wishes to persuade is constrained from ever telling the audience something it is unwilling to believe, and this is a compromise unacceptable in the classic attitude. The classic attitude compels writers, in extreme cases, to express truth and leave the audience to its folly. In that case—as always—the writer’s explicit motive is not hope of persuasion but rather respect for truth. It is the choice Socrates makes in the Apology. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 539-544
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:01:49 AM
Classic writers speak with conviction. That conviction, they imply, comes from knowledge or experience of something that exists before the writing and is completely independent of it. Their prose is conceived of as a perfectly efficient instrument: it neither invents nor distorts. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 555-557
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:04:10 AM
But classic prose never has to be puzzled out. We never have to rework the expression in order to see what it means to present. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 572-572
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:05:49 AM
When accuracy in the sense of being exhaustively correct involves complicated qualifications of no consequence to the main issue, classic writers do not hesitate to simplify. In this frame, accuracy becomes pedantry if it is indulged for its own sake. A classic writer will phrase a subordinate point precisely but without the promise that it is technically accurate. The convention between writer and reader is that the writer is not to be challenged on these points because they are merely scaffolding. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 617-620
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:11:17 AM
Paradoxically, classic style thus requires a strong revelation of personality even as it subordinates what is merely personal. The classic writer is not interested in mirroring the personal processes of her thought; certainly she is not interested in mirroring her personal sensations or emotions. Yet, since her only motive for speaking is the felt importance of what she has to say, she reveals herself through the topics she chooses and what she says about them. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 663-666
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:16:27 AM
The elitism of classic style has nothing to do with the object of presentation, which can range from fine wines to deep sewer tunnels. It has nothing to do with the connoisseurship of the writer either. The writer may speak with a technical mastery not possessed by the reader, but his attitude is always that the reader lacks this mastery only accidentally. You could know what he knows, and you would if you were standing where he stands, which is where the classic writer is trying to place you. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 752-755
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:27:15 AM
The classic writer stands fully behind what she has to say because she has thought it out independently. It may be that in thinking something out independently she has come to a common conclusion, but in expressing it she is neither joining a chorus nor embracing a platitude. Her conclusion is the product of her own thought. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 869-872
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:39:27 AM
There is a tacit contract between writer and reader: the reader’s closely focused intelligence will be repaid with something valuable and self-contained. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 952-953
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:51:27 AM
In the classic view, writing is not thinking. This runs counter to an extremely powerful and pervasive connection between a concept of writing and a concept of mind. Records are understood as a sort of external memory, and memory as internal records. Writing is thinking on paper, and thought is writing in the mind. The author’s mind is an endless paper on which he writes, making mind internal writing; and the book he writes is external mind, the external form of that writing. The author is the self thinking. The self is the author writing in the mind. (Hamlet says, “Within the book and volume of my brain.”) Sometimes, the self is an author who records the process of his thinking on paper. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 976-981
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:55:38 AM
In classic style, thinking is seeing, or more generally, recognizing; writing is presenting what the writer has seen so the reader can see it, too. The classic writer seems to be trying to place something before your eyes or trying to put you where he is so you can see what he sees. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 993-995
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 2:57:30 AM
In this image schema, the end of the sentence seems to be the goal of the sentence, what it is trying to get to. In consequence, there is a phenomenon in English known as the stress position: whatever you put at the end of the sentence will be taken, absent direction to the contrary, to be the most important part of the sentence, Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1056-1059
, clipped on Saturday, January 31, 2015 3:07:29 AM
If there is something you find uncomfortable that the audience may be interested in, you should take control and air the issue before someone else airs it for you. That way you can put your own spin on the issue and you retain your credibility with the audience. Asher, Joey
, Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People.
loc. 1531-1533
, clipped on Sunday, February 1, 2015 12:14:35 AM
When people are nervous, sometimes the adrenaline can cause their vocal cords to tighten. What you need to do is learn to relax your vocal cords. When our clients have this problem, we have them talk while holding a pencil between their teeth. When you do this, you’re forced to drop your jaw, which loosens the vocal cords and lowers your voice. Try it. It works. Now you will know how your jaw should feel when you give a presentation. Of course, remember to put down the pencil before you’re introduced. Asher, Joey
, Even a Geek Can Speak: Low-Tech Presentation Skills for High-Tech People.
loc. 2121-2125
, clipped on Sunday, February 1, 2015 3:27:02 PM
Plain style is communal, its model scene a congregation in which speakers reaffirm for each other common truths that are the property of all. In the theology behind plain style, truth is always simple, and it is a common human possession. Individual revisions of this communal possession distort and dilute it. The wisdom of children can be the wisdom of adults, because knowing truth requires no special experience and no critical analysis. Sophisticated thought and conceptual refinement pervert truth. Any language that reaches beyond the simplest level is suspicious as the probable symptom of such a perversion. Simple language may not always be completely adequate to the expression of truth, but at least it is pure as far as it goes. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1169-1174
, clipped on Monday, February 2, 2015 3:23:07 PM
Classic prose does not discuss doubts or fears about its own enterprise, not because it is naïve, but because it has chosen something incompatible with reflexive inquiry. We can question the possibility of acting or we can act, but we cannot do both at once. Classic writers make an unspoken choice: they act. Rather than discuss the possibility of action, they put that possibility to the test, and let the reader be the judge. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1222-1225
, clipped on Wednesday, February 4, 2015 2:08:23 AM
Practical style comes from deciding that what matters in style is the reader, and in particular the reader’s ease in parsing features of the text, especially the discourse features of the text. Practical style is so firm in this decision that it treats it as no decision at all, but as a necessity: of course excellence of style consists in conforming to the reader’s grammatical expectations in the act of reading. Why else would anyone presume to take up a reader’s time than to solve a problem for the reader? Why then would anyone write except to inform the reader about a solution to that problem? How else can this be done aside from ordering the text so that readers can get the point before giving up in the face of the obvious difficulty? Williams and Colomb accordingly coach their students in a style of writing assimilated to a model of reading. Classic style makes similar pretenses in adopting the rather different stand that the writer counts equally with the reader, that both are fully engaged by the subject, competent, and alert, that of course the reader will be interested in what the writer has to say, and that of course the reader will recognize truth once it has been clearly presented. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1310-1319
, clipped on Sunday, February 8, 2015 9:16:22 AM
The first fundamental distinction between classic style and contemplative style is thus that classic style presents something but contemplative style presents an interpretation of something. This entails many different decisions concerning truth, presentation, cast, and scene. The second fundamental distinction between classic style and contemplative style has to do with thought and language. Classic language is an instrument for presenting the product of thought according to the order of reason, not according to the sequence of experience. In contemplative style, writing is itself the engine of discovery: the writing is a record of the process of the writer’s thinking, quite independent of its relation to the order of reason. In contemplative style, the touchstone of the writing is the process of the writer’s contemplation. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1374-1380
, clipped on Sunday, February 8, 2015 9:24:55 AM
Whom to love, whom to believe in, On whom alone shall we depend? Who will fit their speech and on, To our measure, in the end? . . . Never pursue a phantom, Or waste your efforts on the air Love yourself, your only care. . . . Peter Pomerantsev
, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
loc. 237-243
, clipped on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 10:12:38 AM
Now, Russia does have elections, but the “opposition,” with its almost comical leaders, is designed and funded in such a way as to actually strengthen the Kremlin: when the beetroot-faced communists and the spitting nationalists row on TV political debating shows, the viewer is left with the feeling that, compared to this lot, the President is the only sane candidate. And Russia does have nongovernmental organizations, representing everyone from bikers to beekeepers, but they are often created by the Kremlin, which uses them to create a “civil society” that is ever loyal to it. And though Russia does officially have a free market, with mega-corporations floating their record-breaking IPOs on the global stock exchanges, most of the owners are friends of the President. Or else they are oligarchs who officially pledge that everything that belongs to them is also the President’s when he needs it: “All that I have belongs to the state,” says Oleg Deripaska, one of the country’s richest men. This isn’t a country in transition but some sort of postmodern dictatorship that uses the language and institutions of democratic capitalism for authoritarian ends. Peter Pomerantsev
, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
loc. 637-644
, clipped on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 10:46:53 AM
On the tour of Skolkovo we were accompanied by a young man named Sergey Kalenik, a member of the Kremlin youth group, Nashi, created by Surkov. Sergey wore a hoodie, goatee, and skinny jeans and looked like any hipster youth you find in Brooklyn or Hackney—then he opened his mouth and began to sing paeans to the President and how the West is out to get Russia. Sergey was from a humble background in Minsk, Belarus. He first made his name by drawing a really rather good manga cartoon that showed the President as superhero doing battle against zombie protesters and evil monster anticorruption bloggers: a nice example of the Surkovian tactic of co-opting hipster language to its own ends, trying to get the “cool” people on the Kremlin’s side. The cartoon was so successful Kalenik was introduced to senior government officials, and his career as a young spin doctor was launched. “Politics is the ability to use any situation to advance your own status,” Sergey told me with a smile that seemed to mimic Surkov’s (who in turn mimics the KGB men). “How do you define your political views?” I asked him. He looked at me like I was a fool to ask, then smiled: “I’m a liberal . . . it can mean anything!” Peter Pomerantsev
, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
loc. 1142-1151
, clipped on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 11:41:13 AM
“I tried to read but I keep on getting these thoughts in my head.” Peter Pomerantsev
, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
loc. 1326-1326
, clipped on Wednesday, February 11, 2015 11:50:32 AM
And as I walk around this fog-asphyxiated Moscow, I see how the city’s topography articulates these splits: the bullying avenues with their baron-bureaucrats, bribes, and werewolves in uniform, where the only way to survive is to be as corrupt as they are, and just a few meters away the gentle courtyards with an almost bucolic mood and small-town ideas of decency. Before I used to think the two worlds were in conflict, but the truth is a symbiosis. It’s almost as if you are encouraged to have one identity one moment and the opposite one the next. So you’re always split into little bits and can never quite commit to changing things. And a result is the somewhat aggressive apathy you can encounter here so often. That’s the underlying mind-set that supported the USSR and supports the new Russia now even though the USSR might officially be long gone. But there is a great comfort in these splits, too: you can leave all your guilt with your “public” self. That wasn’t you stealing that budget/making that propaganda show/bending your knee to the President, just a role you were playing; you’re a good person really. It’s not so much about denial. It’s not even about suppressing dark secrets. You can see everything you do, all your sins. You just reorganize your emotional life so as not to care. Peter Pomerantsev
, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia.
loc. 2900-2909
, clipped on Friday, February 13, 2015 9:40:48 AM
What cram schools are, in effect, is leaks in a seal. The use of credentials was an attempt to seal off the direct transmission of power between generations, and cram schools represent that power finding holes in the seal. Cram schools turn wealth in one generation into credentials in the next. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 5628-5630
, clipped on Tuesday, March 17, 2015 6:29:04 AM
One reason we want kids to be innocent is that we're programmed to like certain kinds of helplessness. I've several times heard mothers say they deliberately refrained from correcting their young children's mispronunciations because they were so cute. And if you think about it, cuteness is helplessness. Toys and cartoon characters meant to be cute always have clueless expressions and stubby, ineffectual limbs. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 6608-6611
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 4:08:53 AM
Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you're going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you're better off learning it last. Otherwise you won't bother learning much more. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 6615-6618
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 4:09:45 AM
The truth is common property. You can't distinguish your group by doing things that are rational, and believing things that are true. If you want to set yourself apart from other people, you have to do things that are arbitrary, and believe things that are false. And after having spent their whole lives doing things that are arbitrary and believing things that are false, and being regarded as odd by "outsiders" on that account, the cognitive dissonance pushing children to regard themselves as Xes must be enormous. If they aren't an X, why are they attached to all these arbitrary beliefs and customs? If they aren't an X, why do all the non-Xes call them one? Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 6649-6653
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 4:14:20 AM
I doubt you could teach kids recent history without teaching them lies, because practically everyone who has anything to say about it has some kind of spin to put on it. Much recent history consists of spin. It would probably be better just to teach them metafacts like that. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 6701-6703
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 4:21:27 AM
Most explicitly benevolent projects don't hold themselves sufficiently accountable. They act as if having good intentions were enough to guarantee good effects. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 6906-6907
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 4:32:07 AM
The theology behind classic style does not admit that there is anything that counts as truth that cannot be presented briefly and memorably. In practice, this simply means that classic style prefers to limit its domain while tacitly claiming universal application. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1604-1605
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 7:35:34 AM
Classic style always assumes that it might as well be standing outside the world of actual persons because the classic writer is above mere personal interest; he has no motive but truth, or at least, his highest and governing motive is truth. The classic perception of truth is a perfect copy of truth. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 1621-1623
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 7:37:00 AM
Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is. So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first lifting the light one. Cialdini, Robert B.
, Influence Science and Practice.
loc. 538-541
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 8:44:28 AM
I grew up in a time where college degrees seemed really important, so I'm alarmed to be saying things like this, but there's nothing magical about a degree. There's nothing that magically changes after you take that last exam. The importance of degrees is due solely to the administrative needs of large organizations. These can certainly affect your life—it's hard to get into grad school, or to get a work visa in the US, without an undergraduate degree—but tests like this will matter less and less. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 7716-7719
, clipped on Saturday, March 28, 2015 9:43:34 AM
Some introductions to philosophy now take the line that philosophy is worth studying as a process rather than for any particular truths you'll learn. The philosophers whose works they cover would be rolling in their graves at that. They hoped they were doing more than serving as examples of how to argue: they hoped they were getting results. Most were wrong, but it doesn't seem an impossible hope. This argument seems to me like someone in 1500 looking at the lack of results achieved by alchemy and saying its value was as a process. No, they were going about it wrong. It turns out it is possible to transmute lead into gold (though not economically at current energy prices), but the route to that knowledge was to backtrack and try another approach. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 8009-8014
, clipped on Sunday, March 29, 2015 6:09:22 AM
What matters is what you make of yourself. I think that's what we should tell kids. Their job isn't to get good grades so they can get into a good college, but to learn and do. And not just because that's more rewarding than worldly success. That will increasingly be the route to worldly success. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 8105-8107
, clipped on Sunday, March 29, 2015 6:25:05 AM
What I didn't understand was that the value of some new acquisition wasn't the difference between its retail price and what I paid for it. It was the value I derived from it. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. Unless you have some plan for selling that valuable thing you got so cheaply, what difference does it make what it's "worth?" The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to use it. And if you don't have any immediate use for it, you probably never will. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 8319-8322
, clipped on Sunday, March 29, 2015 6:48:07 AM
Before you buy anything, ask yourself: will this be something I use constantly? Or is it just something nice? Or worse still, a mere bargain? Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 8344-8345
, clipped on Sunday, March 29, 2015 6:50:19 AM
Our early training and our self-centeredness combine to make us believe that every judgement of us is about us. In fact most aren't. This is a rare case where being less self-centered will make people more confident. Once you realize how little most people judging you care about judging you accurately—once you realize that because of the normal distribution of most applicant pools, it matters least to judge accurately in precisely the cases where judgement has the most effect—you won't take rejection so personally. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 8772-8776
, clipped on Sunday, March 29, 2015 11:31:40 PM
One test adults use is whether you still have the kid flake reflex. When you're a little kid and you're asked to do something hard, you can cry and say "I can't do it" and the adults will probably let you off. As a kid there's a magic button you can press by saying "I'm just a kid" that will get you out of most difficult situations. Whereas adults, by definition, are not allowed to flake. They still do, of course, but when they do they're ruthlessly pruned. Paul Graham
, Paul Graham's Essays.
loc. 8909-8913
, clipped on Sunday, March 29, 2015 11:44:53 PM
but I find her personality annoying. It’s like being molested by a sleeping bag that speaks in Comic Sans with little love-hearts over the i’s. Charles Stross
, Saturn's Children.
loc. 308-309
, clipped on Saturday, May 2, 2015 5:51:56 AM
Thus, it is not the traditionally most downtrodden people—those who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural order of things—who are especially likely to revolt. Instead, revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life. When the economic and social improvements they have experienced and come to expect suddenly become less available, they desire them more than ever and often rise up violently to secure them. For instance, it is little recognized that at the time of the American Revolution, the colonists had the highest standard of living and the lowest taxes in the Western World. According to historian Thomas Fleming (1997), it wasn’t until the British sought a cut of this widespread prosperity (by levying taxes) that the Americans revolted. Cialdini, Robert B.
, Influence Science and Practice.
loc. 5104-5110
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 2:07:42 AM
Professors downplay the cutthroat culture of academia, but managers never tire of comparing business to war. MBA students carry around copies of Clausewitz and Sun Tzu. War metaphors invade our everyday business language: we use headhunters to build up a sales force that will enable us to take a captive market and make a killing. But really it’s competition, not business, that is like war: allegedly necessary, supposedly valiant, but ultimately destructive. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 407-410
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 11:13:09 AM
Originally, “disruption” was a term of art to describe how a firm can use new technology to introduce a low-end product at low prices, improve the product over time, and eventually overtake even the premium products offered by incumbent companies using older technology. This is roughly what happened when the advent of PCs disrupted the market for mainframe computers: at first PCs seemed irrelevant, then they became dominant. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 622-625
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 12:00:15 PM
Indefinite attitudes to the future explain what’s most dysfunctional in our world today. Process trumps substance: when people lack concrete plans to carry out, they use formal rules to assemble a portfolio of various options. This describes Americans today. In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewilderingly diverse résumé to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready—for nothing in particular. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 681-685
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 12:24:32 PM
An indefinite pessimist looks out onto a bleak future, but he has no idea what to do about it. This describes Europe since the early 1970s, when the continent succumbed to undirected bureaucratic drift. Today the whole Eurozone is in slow-motion crisis, and nobody is in charge. The European Central Bank doesn’t stand for anything but improvisation: the U.S. Treasury prints “In God We Trust” on the dollar; the ECB might as well print “Kick the Can Down the Road” on the euro. Europeans just react to events as they happen and hope things don’t get worse. The indefinite pessimist can’t know whether the inevitable decline will be fast or slow, catastrophic or gradual. All he can do is wait for it to happen, so he might as well eat, drink, and be merry in the meantime: hence Europe’s famous vacation mania. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 694-700
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 12:27:06 PM
Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old things or help other people structure their affairs. And private equity investors and management consultants don’t start new businesses; they squeeze extra efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations. It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of résumé-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”? Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 745-750
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 12:31:58 PM
Malcolm Gladwell says you can’t understand Bill Gates’s success without understanding his fortunate personal context: he grew up in a good family, went to a private school equipped with a computer lab, and counted Paul Allen as a childhood friend. But perhaps you can’t understand Malcolm Gladwell without understanding his historical context as a Boomer (born in 1963). When Baby Boomers grow up and write books to explain why one or another individual is successful, they point to the power of a particular individual’s context as determined by chance. But they miss the even bigger social context for their own preferred explanations: a whole generation learned from childhood to overrate the power of chance and underrate the importance of planning. Gladwell at first appears to be making a contrarian critique of the myth of the self-made businessman, but actually his own account encapsulates the conventional view of a generation. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 757-764
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 12:33:55 PM
At no point does anyone in the chain know what to do with money in the real economy. But in an indefinite world, people actually prefer unlimited optionality; money is more valuable than anything you could possibly do with it. Only in a definite future is money a means to an end, not the end itself. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 778-780
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 12:35:54 PM
Our schools teach the opposite: institutionalized education traffics in a kind of homogenized, generic knowledge. Everybody who passes through the American school system learns not to think in power law terms. Every high school course period lasts 45 minutes whatever the subject. Every student proceeds at a similar pace. At college, model students obsessively hedge their futures by assembling a suite of exotic and minor skills. Every university believes in “excellence,” and hundred-page course catalogs arranged alphabetically according to arbitrary departments of knowledge seem designed to reassure you that “it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you do it well.” That is completely false. It does matter what you do. You should focus relentlessly on something you’re good at doing, but before that you must think hard about whether it will be valuable in the future. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 978-984
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 1:01:37 PM
People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn’t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn’t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right—dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in—is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 1051-1054
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 1:12:55 PM
Social elites have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done? Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: “You got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You’re set for life.” But that’s probably the kind of thing that’s true only if you don’t believe it. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 1054-1058
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 1:13:04 PM
There’s an optimistic way to describe the result of these trends: today, you can’t start a cult. Forty years ago, people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge was widely known. From the Communist Party to the Hare Krishnas, large numbers of people thought they could join some enlightened vanguard that would show them the Way. Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered. Peter Thiel;Blake Masters
, Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.
loc. 1062-1067
, clipped on Thursday, May 21, 2015 1:14:03 PM
Other animals at the top of the pyramid, such as lions and sharks, evolved into that position very gradually, over millions of years. This enabled the ecosystem to develop checks and balances that prevent lions and sharks from wreaking too much havoc. As lions became deadlier, so gazelles evolved to run faster, hyenas to cooperate better, and rhinoceroses to be more bad-tempered. In contrast, humankind ascended to the top so quickly that the ecosystem was not given time to adjust. Moreover, humans themselves failed to adjust. Most top predators of the planet are majestic creatures. Millions of years of dominion have filled them with self-confidence. Sapiens by contrast is more like a banana republic dictator. Having so recently been one of the underdogs of the savannah, we are full of fears and anxieties over our position, which makes us doubly cruel and dangerous. Many historical calamities, from deadly wars to ecological catastrophes, have resulted from this over-hasty jump. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 257-264
, clipped on Friday, May 22, 2015 4:06:48 AM
There is no evidence that people became more intelligent with time. Foragers knew the secrets of nature long before the Agricultural Revolution, since their survival depended on an intimate knowledge of the animals they hunted and the plants they gathered. Rather than heralding a new era of easy living, the Agricultural Revolution left farmers with lives generally more difficult and less satisfying than those of foragers Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 1335-1337
, clipped on Friday, May 22, 2015 1:29:19 PM
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 1682-1683
, clipped on Friday, May 22, 2015 4:31:35 PM
We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 1826-1828
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 1:02:22 AM
To say that a social order is maintained by military force immediately raises the question: what maintains the military order? It is impossible to organise an army solely by coercion. At least some of the commanders and soldiers must truly believe in something, be it God, honour, motherland, manhood or money. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 1849-1852
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 1:13:53 AM
How can we distinguish what is biologically determined from what people merely try to justify through biological myths? A good rule of thumb is ‘Biology enables, Culture forbids.’ Biology is willing to tolerate a very wide spectrum of possibilities. It’s culture that obliges people to realise some possibilities while forbidding others. Biology enables women to have children – some cultures oblige women to realise this possibility. Biology enables men to enjoy sex with one another – some cultures forbid them to realise this possibility. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2402-2406
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:04:38 AM
If, say, a Christian really wants to understand the Muslims who attend that mosque down the street, he shouldn’t look for a pristine set of values that every Muslim holds dear. Rather, he should enquire into the catch-22s of Muslim culture, those places where rules are at war and standards scuffle. It’s at the very spot where the Muslims teeter between two imperatives that you’ll understand them best. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2640-2643
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:25:26 AM
The first millennium BC witnessed the appearance of three potentially universal orders, whose devotees could for the first time imagine the entire world and the entire human race as a single unit governed by a single set of laws. Everyone was ‘us’, at least potentially. There was no longer ‘them’. The first universal order to appear was economic: the monetary order. The second universal order was political: the imperial order. The third universal order was religious: the order of universal religions such as Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2734-2738
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:35:09 AM
Money was created many times in many places. Its development required no technological breakthroughs – it was a purely mental revolution. It involved the creation of a new inter-subjective reality that exists solely in people’s shared imagination. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2821-2823
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:42:41 AM
People are willing to do such things when they trust the figments of their collective imagination. Trust is the raw material from which all types of money are minted. When a wealthy farmer sold his possessions for a sack of cowry shells and travelled with them to another province, he trusted that upon reaching his destination other people would be willing to sell him rice, houses and fields in exchange for the shells. Money is accordingly a system of mutual trust, and not just any system of mutual trust: money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2871-2875
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:48:06 AM
Similarly, the fact that another person believes in cowry shells, or dollars, or electronic data, is enough to strengthen our own belief in them, even if that person is otherwise hated, despised or ridiculed by us. Christians and Muslims who could not agree on religious beliefs could nevertheless agree on a monetary belief, because whereas religion asks us to believe in something, money asks us to believe that other people believe in something. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2960-2963
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:55:21 AM
For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2964-2968
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 2:56:04 AM
Money has an even darker side. For although money builds universal trust between strangers, this trust is invested not in humans, communities or sacred values, but in money itself and in the impersonal systems that back it. We do not trust the stranger, or the next-door neighbour – we trust the coin they hold. If they run out of coins, we run out of trust. As money brings down the dams of community, religion and state, the world is in danger of becoming one big and rather heartless marketplace. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 2982-2985
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 3:00:27 AM
The victory of Rome over Numantia was so complete that the victors co-opted the very memory of the vanquished. It’s not our kind of story. We like to see underdogs win. But there is no justice in history. Most past cultures have sooner or later fallen prey to the armies of some ruthless empire, which have consigned them to oblivion. Empires, too, ultimately fall, but they tend to leave behind rich and enduring legacies. Almost all people in the twenty-first century are the offspring of one empire or another. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 3025-3029
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 3:04:35 AM
Religion can thus be defined as a system of human norms and values that is founded on a belief in a superhuman order. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 3321-3323
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 4:11:32 AM
So, monotheism explains order, but is mystified by evil. Dualism explains evil, but is puzzled by order. There is one logical way of solving the riddle: to argue that there is a single omnipotent God who created the entire universe – and He’s evil. But nobody in history has had the stomach for such a belief. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 3503-3505
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 4:29:47 AM
In fact, monotheism, as it has played out in history, is a kaleidoscope of monotheist, dualist, polytheist and animist legacies, jumbling together under a single divine umbrella. The average Christian believes in the monotheist God, but also in the dualist Devil, in polytheist saints, and in animist ghosts. Scholars of religion have a name for this simultaneous avowal of different and even contradictory ideas and the combination of rituals and practices taken from different sources. It’s called syncretism. Syncretism might, in fact, be the single great world religion. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 3532-3536
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 4:32:44 AM
So why study history? Unlike physics or economics, history is not a means for making accurate predictions. We study history not to know the future but to widen our horizons, to understand that our present situation is neither natural nor inevitable, and that we consequently have many more possibilities before us than we imagine. For example, studying how Europeans came to dominate Africans enables us to realise that there is nothing natural or inevitable about the racial hierarchy, and that the world might well be arranged differently. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 3821-3824
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 4:58:33 AM
The Scientific Revolution has not been a revolution of knowledge. It has been above all a revolution of ignorance. The great discovery that launched the Scientific Revolution was the discovery that humans do not know the answers to their most important questions. Premodern traditions of knowledge such as Islam, Christianity, Buddhism and Confucianism asserted that everything that is important to know about the world was already known. The great gods, or the one almighty God, or the wise people of the past possessed all-encompassing wisdom, which they revealed to us in scriptures and oral traditions. Ordinary mortals gained knowledge by delving into these ancient texts and traditions and understanding them properly. It was inconceivable that the Bible, the Qur’an or the Vedas were missing out on a crucial secret of the universe – a secret that might yet be discovered by flesh-and-blood creatures. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 3960-3966
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 10:19:44 AM
In fact, the relationship between science and technology is a very recent phenomenon. Prior to 1500, science and technology were totally separate fields. When Bacon connected the two in the early seventeenth century, it was a revolutionary idea. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries this relationship tightened, but the knot was tied only in the nineteenth century. Even in 1800, most rulers who wanted a strong army, and most business magnates who wanted a successful business, did not bother to finance research in physics, biology or economics. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4105-4109
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 10:38:40 AM
The Chinese and Persians did not lack technological inventions such as steam engines (which could be freely copied or bought). They lacked the values, myths, judicial apparatus and sociopolitical structures that took centuries to form and mature in the West and which could not be copied and internalised rapidly. France and the United States quickly followed in Britain’s footsteps because the French and Americans already shared the most important British myths and social structures. The Chinese and Persians could not catch up as quickly because they thought and organised their societies differently. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4470-4474
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:14:20 AM
Mohenjo-daro was one of the chief cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished in the third millennium BC and was destroyed around 1900 BC. None of India’s pre-British rulers – neither the Mauryas, nor the Guptas, nor the Delhi sultans, nor the great Mughals – had given the ruins a second glance. But a British archaeological survey took notice of the site in 1922. A British team then excavated it, and discovered the first great civilisation of India, which no Indian had been aware of. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4714-4718
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:50:24 AM
truth, neither the narrative of oppression and exploitation nor that of ‘The White Man’s Burden’ completely matches the facts. The European empires did so many different things on such a large scale, that you can find plenty of examples to support whatever you want to say about them. You think that these empires were evil monstrosities that spread death, oppression and injustice around the world? You could easily fill an encyclopedia with their crimes. You want to argue that they in fact improved the conditions of their subjects with new medicines, better economic conditions and greater security? You could fill another encyclopedia with their achievements. Due to their close cooperation with science, these empires wielded so much power and changed the world to such an extent that perhaps they cannot be simply labelled as good or evil. They created the world as we know it, including the ideologies we use in order to judge them. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4780-4787
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 11:54:35 AM
Current US banking law permits the bank to repeat this exercise seven more times. The contractor would eventually have $10 million in his account, even though the bank still has but $1 million in its vaults. Banks are allowed to loan $10 for every dollar they actually possess, which means that 90 per cent of all the money in our bank accounts is not covered by actual coins and notes.2 If all of the account holders at Barclays Bank suddenly demand their money, Barclays will promptly collapse (unless the government steps in to save it). The same is true of Lloyds, Deutsche Bank, Citibank, and all other banks in the world. It sounds like a giant Ponzi scheme, doesn’t it? But if it’s a fraud, then the entire modern economy is a fraud. The fact is, it’s not a deception, but rather a tribute to the amazing abilities of the human imagination. What enables banks – and the entire economy – to survive and flourish is our trust in the future. This trust is the sole backing for most of the money in the world. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4859-4867
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 12:01:18 PM
Capitalism distinguishes ‘capital’ from mere ‘wealth’. Capital consists of money, goods and resources that are invested in production. Wealth, on the other hand, is buried in the ground or wasted on unproductive activities. A pharaoh who pours resources into a non-productive pyramid is not a capitalist. A pirate who loots a Spanish treasure fleet and buries a chest full of glittering coins on the beach of some Caribbean island is not a capitalist. But a hard-working factory hand who reinvests part of his income in the stock market is. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4948-4951
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 12:09:22 PM
Over the last few years, banks and governments have been frenziedly printing money. Everybody is terrified that the current economic crisis may stop the growth of the economy. So they are creating trillions of dollars, euros and yen out of thin air, pumping cheap credit into the system, and hoping that the scientists, technicians and engineers will manage to come up with something really big, before the bubble bursts. Everything depends on the people in the labs. New discoveries in fields such as biotechnology and nanotechnology could create entire new industries, whose profits could back the trillions of make-believe money that the banks and governments have created since 2008. If the labs do not fulfil these expectations before the bubble bursts, we are heading towards very rough times. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 4987-4993
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 12:13:09 PM
In Europe, on the other hand, kings and generals gradually adopted the mercantile way of thinking, until merchants and bankers became the ruling elite. The European conquest of the world was increasingly financed through credit rather than taxes, and was increasingly directed by capitalists whose main ambition was to receive maximum returns on their investments. The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5003-5008
, clipped on Saturday, May 23, 2015 12:14:44 PM
The capitalist-consumerist ethic is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interests. This was too tough for most. The history of ethics is a sad tale of wonderful ideals that nobody can live up to. Most Christians did not imitate Christ, most Buddhists failed to follow Buddha, and most Confucians would have caused Confucius a temper tantrum. In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises paradise on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and that the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5525-5532
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 1:38:16 AM
Many kingdoms and empires were in truth little more than large protection rackets. The king was the capo di tutti capi who collected protection money, and in return made sure that neighbouring crime syndicates and local small fry did not harm those under his protection. He did little else. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5668-5670
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 1:51:13 AM
Romantic literature often presents the individual as somebody caught in a struggle against the state and the market. Nothing could be further from the truth. The state and the market are the mother and father of the individual, and the individual can survive only thanks to them. The market provides us with work, insurance and a pension. If we want to study a profession, the government’s schools are there to teach us. If we want to open a business, the bank loans us money. If we want to build a house, a construction company builds it and the bank gives us a mortgage, in some cases subsidised or insured by the state. If violence flares up, the police protect us. If we are sick for a few days, our health insurance takes care of us. If we are debilitated for months, social security steps in. If we need around-the-clock assistance, we can go to the market and hire a nurse – usually some stranger from the other side of the world who takes care of us with the kind of devotion that we no longer expect from our own children. If we have the means, we can spend our golden years at a senior citizens’ home. The tax authorities treat us as individuals, and do not expect us to pay the neighbours’ taxes. The courts, too, see us as individuals, and never punish us for the crimes of our cousins. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5688-5697
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 1:54:30 AM
Consumerism and nationalism work extra hours to make us imagine that millions of strangers belong to the same community as ourselves, that we all have a common past, common interests and a common future. This isn’t a lie. It’s imagination. Like money, limited liability companies and human rights, nations and consumer tribes are inter-subjective realities. They exist only in our collective imagination, yet their power is immense. As long as millions of Germans believe in the existence of a German nation, get excited at the sight of German national symbols, retell German national myths, and are willing to sacrifice money, time and limbs for the German nation, Germany will remain one of the strongest powers in the world. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5743-5747
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 2:00:12 AM
Today humankind has broken the law of the jungle. There is at last real peace, and not just absence of war. For most polities, there is no plausible scenario leading to full-scale conflict within one year. What could lead to war between Germany and France next year? Or between China and Japan? Or between Brazil and Argentina? Some minor border clash might occur, but only a truly apocalyptic scenario could result in an old-fashioned full-scale war between Brazil and Argentina in 2014, with Argentinian armoured divisions sweeping to the gates of Rio, and Brazilian carpet-bombers pulverising the neighbourhoods of Buenos Aires. Such wars might still erupt between several pairs of states, e.g. between Israel and Syria, Ethiopia and Eritrea, or the USA and Iran, but these are only the exceptions that prove the rule. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5886-5891
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 2:13:42 AM
This situation might of course change in the future and, with hindsight, the world of today might seem incredibly naïve. Yet from a historical perspective, our very naïvety is fascinating. Never before has peace been so prevalent that people could not even imagine war. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5891-5894
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 2:14:10 AM
First and foremost, the price of war has gone up dramatically. The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5896-5898
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 2:15:00 AM
There is a positive feedback loop between all these four factors. The threat of nuclear holocaust fosters pacifism; when pacifism spreads, war recedes and trade flourishes; and trade increases both the profits of peace and the costs of war. Over time, this feedback loop creates another obstacle to war, which may ultimately prove the most important of all. The tightening web of international connections erodes the independence of most countries, lessening the chance that any one of them might single-handedly let slip the dogs of war. Most countries no longer engage in full-scale war for the simple reason that they are no longer independent. Though citizens in Israel, Italy, Mexico or Thailand may harbour illusions of independence, the fact is that their governments cannot conduct independent economic or foreign policies, and they are certainly incapable of initiating and conducting full-scale war on their own. Yuval Noah Harari
, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.
loc. 5923-5929
, clipped on Sunday, May 24, 2015 2:18:03 AM
A speaker of some personal charm can give a pastiche of clichés the illusion of meaning, but in writing, a pastiche of clichés will always look like a pastiche of clichés. Thomas, Francis-Noël;Turner, Mark
, Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Second Edition).
loc. 3256-3258
, clipped on Monday, May 25, 2015 2:18:11 AM
If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? Doesn't it seem to say that the outcome was inevitable, and that it would therefore be futile to try to change the outcome today? This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a his- torical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself. Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it. That's why psychologists try to understand the minds of murderers and rapists, why social historians try to understand genocide, and why physicians try to understand the causes of human disease. Those investigators do not seek to justify murder, rape, genocide, and illness. instead, they seek to use their understanding of a chain of causes to inter- rupt the chain. Jared M. Diamond
, Guns, germs, and steel: the fates of human societies.
loc. 148-155
, clipped on Saturday, May 30, 2015 5:58:00 PM
Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to Julian Jaynes
, The Origin of Consciousness in The Break down of The Bicameral Mind.
loc. 553-553
, clipped on Monday, June 8, 2015 5:12:01 AM
Reasoning and logic are to each other as health is to medicine, or—better—as conduct is to morality. Julian Jaynes
, The Origin of Consciousness in The Break down of The Bicameral Mind.
loc. 553-554
, clipped on Monday, June 8, 2015 5:12:12 AM
in other areas of science, we say we understand an aspect of nature when we can say it is similar to some familiar theoretical model. The terms theory and model, incidentally, are sometimes used interchangeably. But really they should not be. A theory is a relationship of the model to the things the model is supposed to represent. The Bohr model of the atom is that of a proton surrounded by orbiting electrons. It is something like the pattern of the solar system, and that is indeed one of its metaphoric sources. Bohr's theory was that all atoms were similar to his model. The theory, with the more recent discovery of new particles and complicated interatomic relationships, has turned out not to be true. But the model remains. A model is neither true nor false; only the theory of its similarity to what it represents. A theory is thus a metaphor between a model and data. And understanding in science is the feeling of similarity between complicated data and a familiar model. Julian Jaynes
, The Origin of Consciousness in The Break down of The Bicameral Mind.
loc. 700-707
, clipped on Monday, June 8, 2015 5:32:35 AM
my statements, recommendations, and conclusions. Although they are dramatized and corroborated through such devices as interviews, quotes, and systematic personal observations, Cialdini, Robert B.
, Influence Science and Practice.
loc. 179-181
, clipped on Tuesday, June 9, 2015 11:08:45 AM
last published. In the interim, some things have happened that deserve a place in this new edition. First, we now know more about the influence process than before. The study of persuasion, compliance, and change has advanced, and the pages that follow have been adapted to reflect that progress. In addition to an overall update of the material, I have devoted special attention to updated coverage of popular culture and new technology, as well as to research on cross-cultural social influence—how the influence process works similarly or differently in various human cultures. I have also expanded a feature that Cialdini, Robert B.
, Influence Science and Practice.
loc. 188-192
, clipped on Tuesday, June 9, 2015 11:09:02 AM
Even when using liberal rates for average energy intensities of all biomaterials other than paper, construction materials other than cement, and metals other than steel and aluminum we end up with a grand total of no more than 120 EJ, or less than 25% of the world's TPES: we create the modern world's material wealth with no more than a quarter of all energy we use. Vaclav Smil
, Making the Modern World.
loc. 3428-3431
, clipped on Saturday, June 20, 2015 1:03:16 PM
Resources denote the total mass of material (element, compound, mineral, ore) in the Earth's crust, and a distinction can be made between resources on land and under sea. Obviously, these aggregates are not known with a high degree of certainty, and their estimates tend to increase with more drilling and more extensive targeted exploration. Even if we were to know the exact amount of a particular resource, that information would not allow us to calculate the time of its ultimate exhaustion because no mineral could ever be completely exploited: long before reaching such a point the costs of removing it from excessive depths or isolating it from deposits where it is present in minuscule concentrations would make its recovery quite uneconomical. Vaclav Smil
, Making the Modern World.
loc. 5109-5114
, clipped on Sunday, June 21, 2015 8:36:22 AM
People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn’t that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people. Terry Pratchett
, Night Watch.
loc. 3651-3654
, clipped on Monday, June 22, 2015 1:07:27 AM
"The kings of the ocean are gone, and what is our argument for their return? We need them? We? Their murderers? The ones that made the water bitter in their mouths, and killed the food they ate? The ones that made the ocean boil red with their blood for miles around? Men need them? Those vermin? Those stinging insects? Struggling pustulent humanity—needs them? Do you think a whale cares? You might as well need the sun to rise at midnight because you're feeling a bit chilly. Yes, of course, certainly we need them. But the question is, do we deserve them?" Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 2436-2441
, clipped on Thursday, June 25, 2015 11:49:29 AM
Killing is killing; it's sordid, bloody, stupid, and wasteful. There's nothing noble about it. People will do what they'll do, but we can at least call it what it is." Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 2550-2551
, clipped on Thursday, June 25, 2015 12:01:44 PM
Killing is killing; it's sordid, bloody, stupid, and wasteful. There's nothing noble about it. People will do what they'll do, but we can at least call it what it is." Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 2550-2551
, clipped on Thursday, June 25, 2015 12:02:59 PM
"There are so many reasons I hardly know where to start, but here's one. You're always talking about getting past people's surfaces to what's inside, and that's what you call real. But you can't just break through a person's defenses like that; the defenses are part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like—" my eyes searched the room for a metaphor "—like skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse." Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 2568-2572
, clipped on Thursday, June 25, 2015 12:05:22 PM
"We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we're a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems, there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God's creation left, right, and center. Well, Maya Tatyanichna? You know what we have wrought. What is your judgment? Which is better? A tiger, or a poem about a tiger?" Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 4087-4090
, clipped on Friday, June 26, 2015 2:24:11 AM
"Do you suppose that Judas walks about in Heaven? Do you suppose Satan is any the less damned because he loved God? No, no, it is his love that damns him; loving God while being estranged from him is what Hell is. Even Kamatha gets his, although, since this is India, where eternity is so vast that not even human hate can fill it up, he will eventually escape from Hell into another incarnation." His eyes grew distant. "I find that messy, truthfully. For a stain so great, the punishment should surely be eternal. No, the crime is not the less just because it is for a good end. On the contrary, Judas' crime is all the worse, because he has no hope of pleading that he knew not what he did. He knew just what he was doing, and he knew its price—as I do." Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 4098-4104
, clipped on Friday, June 26, 2015 2:26:04 AM
"Pandora opens up a box of demons, unleashing them all on the world. But at the bottom of the box, there's one thing that's either the worst demon of all, or the saving grace, depending who you listen to: hope." Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 4710-4711
, clipped on Friday, June 26, 2015 3:22:01 AM
You've forgotten what human emotions are like— you either forget them completely, or you blow them up into something they can never be. Damn it, Mirabara, it's only love. It doesn't mean you want to fuse souls with someone. And it doesn't save the world, or even the people in it. It's not something you put on display for some political purpose. It's not a statement or a demonstration; it just is." Raphael Carter
, The Fortunate Fall.
loc. 4728-4731
, clipped on Friday, June 26, 2015 3:26:18 AM
One of the best habits a learner can instill in herself is regular self-quizzing to recalibrate her understanding of what she does and does not know. Brown, Peter C.
, Make It Stick.
loc. 411-412
, clipped on Wednesday, July 1, 2015 2:06:02 PM
“In the first place, they can’t have been very good tools, so why would the abos have relied on them? You might say they needed those obsidian arrowheads and bone fishhooks for getting food, but that’s not true. They could poison the water with the juices of certain plants, and for primitive people the most effective way to fish is probably with weirs, or with nets of rawhide or vegetable fiber. Just the same way, trapping or driving animals with fire would be more effective than hunting; and anyway stone tools wouldn’t be needed at all for gathering berries and the shoots of edible plants and things like that, which were probably their most important foods—those stone things got in the glass case here because the snares and nets rotted away and they’re all that’s left, so the people that make their living that way pretend they were important.” Gene Wolfe
, The Fifth Head of Cerberus.
loc. 231-237
, clipped on Tuesday, July 14, 2015 5:08:04 PM
These stories of the horrible things politicians or business executives do are appealing in their own perverse way because they free us to believe we would behave differently if given the opportunity. They liberate us to cast blame on the flawed person who somehow, inexplicably, had the authority to make monumental—and monumentally bad—decisions. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 219-222
, clipped on Monday, July 20, 2015 2:40:42 AM
First, politics is about getting and keeping political power. It is not about the general welfare of “We, the people.” Second, political survival is best assured by depending on few people to attain and retain office. That means dictators, dependent on a few cronies, are in a far better position to stay in office for decades, often dying in their sleep, than are democrats. Third, when the small group of cronies knows that there is a large pool of people waiting on the sidelines, hoping to replace them in the queue for gorging at the public trough, then the top leadership has great discretion over how revenue is spent and how much to tax. All that tax revenue and discretion opens the door to kleptocracy from many leaders, and public-spirited programs from a very few. And it means enhanced tenure in power. Fourth, dependence on a small coalition liberates leaders to tax at high rates, de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 371-377
, clipped on Monday, July 20, 2015 4:34:58 AM
To understand politics properly, we must modify one assumption in particular: we must stop thinking that leaders can lead unilaterally. No leader is monolithic. If we are to make any sense of how power works, we must stop thinking that North Korea’s Kim Jong Il can do whatever he wants. We must stop believing that Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Genghis Khan or anyone else is in sole control of their respective nation. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 531-535
, clipped on Monday, July 20, 2015 4:56:26 AM
Che may have been second in power only to Fidel himself. Indeed, that was likely his greatest fault. Castro forced Che out of Cuba in 1965 partly because of Che’s popularity, which made him a potential rival for authority. Castro sent Che on a mission to Bolivia, but towards the end of March 1967 Castro simply cut off Guevara’s support, leaving him stranded. Captain Gary Prado Salmon, the Bolivian officer who captured Che, confirmed that Guevara told him that the decision to come to Bolivia was not his own, it was Castro’s. One of Fidel’s biographers remarked, In a very real sense Che followed in the shadows of Frank Pais, Camilo Cienfuegos, Huber Matos, and Humberto Sori Marin [all close backers of Castro during the revolution]. Like them, he was viewed by Castro as a ‘competitor’ for power and like them, he had to be moved aside ‘in one manner or another.’ Che Guevara was killed in Bolivia but at least he escaped the ignominy of execution by his revolutionary ally, Fidel Castro. Humberto Sori Marin was not so ‘fortunate.’ Marin, the commander of Castro’s rebel army, was accused of conspiring against the revolution. In April 1961, like so many other erstwhile backers of Fidel Castro, he too was executed. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 823-833
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:00:57 AM
Rule 1: Keep your winning coalition as small as possible. A small coalition allows a leader to rely on very few people to stay in power. Fewer essentials equals more control and contributes to more discretion over expenditures. Bravo for Kim Jong Il of North Korea. He is a contemporary master at ensuring dependence on a small coalition. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 859-862
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:03:13 AM
Rule 2: Keep your nominal selectorate as large as possible. Maintain a large selectorate of interchangeables and you can easily replace any troublemakers in your coalition, influentials and essentials alike. After all, a large selectorate permits a big supply of substitute supporters to put the essentials on notice that they should be loyal and well behaved or else face being replaced. Bravo to Vladimir Ilyich Lenin for introducing universal adult suffrage in Russia’s old rigged election system. Lenin mastered the art of creating a vast supply of interchangeables. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 863-868
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:03:52 AM
Rule 3: Control the flow of revenue. It’s always better for a ruler to determine who eats than it is to have a larger pie from which the people can feed themselves. The most effective cash flow for leaders is one that makes lots of people poor and redistributes money to keep select people—their supporters—wealthy. Bravo to Pakistan’s president Asif Ali Zardari, estimated to be worth up to $4 billion even as he governs a country near the world’s bottom in per capita income. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 869-873
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:04:10 AM
Rule 4: Pay your key supporters just enough to keep them loyal. Remember, your backers would rather be you than be dependent on you. Your big advantage over them is that you know where the money is and they don’t. Give your coalition just enough so that they don’t shop around for someone to replace you and not a penny more. Bravo to Zimbabwe’s Robert Mugabe who, whenever facing a threat of a military coup, manages finally to pay his army, keeping their loyalty against all odds. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 874-879
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:04:33 AM
Rule 5: Don’t take money out of your supporter’s pockets to make the people’s lives better. The flip side of rule 4 is not to be too cheap toward your coalition of supporters. If you’re good to the people at the expense of your coalition, it won’t be long until your “friends” will be gunning for you. Effective policy for the masses doesn’t necessarily produce loyalty among essentials, and it’s darn expensive to boot. Hungry people are not likely to have the energy to overthrow you, so don’t worry about them. Disappointed coalition members, in contrast, can defect, leaving you in deep trouble. Bravo to Senior General Than Shwe of Myanmar, who made sure following the 2008 Nargis cyclone that food relief was controlled and sold on the black market by his military supporters rather than letting aid go to the people—at least 138,000 and maybe as many as 500,000 of whom died in the disaster. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 880-887
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:05:22 AM
While rebellion requires skill and coordination, its success ultimately depends heavily upon coalition loyalty, or more precisely, the absence of loyalty to the old regime. Hosni Mubarak’s defeat by a mass uprising in Egypt is a case in point. The most critical factor behind Mubarak’s defeat in February 2011 was the decision by Egypt’s top generals to allow demonstrators to take to the streets without fear of military suppression. And why was that the case? As explained in a talk given on May 5, 2010, based on the logic set out here, cuts in US foreign aid to Egypt combined with serious economic constraints that produced high unemployment, meant that Mubarak’s coalition was likely to be underpaid and the people were likely to believe the risks and costs of rebellion were smaller than normal.2 That is, the general rule of thumb for rebellion is that revolutions occur when those who preserve the current system are sufficiently dissatisfied with their rewards that they are willing to look for someone new to take care of them. On the other hand, revolts are defeated through suppression of the people—always an unpleasant task—so coalition members need to receive enough benefits from their leader that they are willing to do horribly distasteful things to ensure that the existing system is maintained. If they do not get enough goodies under the current system, then they will not stop the people from rising up against the regime. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 970-981
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:14:45 AM
Ottoman succession could be bloody. Unsuccessful brothers were typically killed. Mehmet II (1429–1481) institutionalized this practice with the fratricide law, under which all unsuccessful male heirs were strangled with a silk cord. A century later, Mehmet III allegedly killed nineteen brothers, two sons, and fifteen slaves who were pregnant by his own father, thereby eliminating all present and future potential rivals. By the middle of the seventeenth century this practice was replaced by the kinder, gentler practice of locking all male relatives in the Fourth Court of the Topkapi Palace—quite literally the original Golden Cage. With relatives like this, it is perhaps no wonder why Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Robert Graves’s Claudius chose to feign madness. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1118-1124
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:27:08 AM
For Christianity’s first several hundred years, the Bishop of Rome—the pope—was a relatively minor figure even within the Christian community. Bishops were the arbiters of Christian practice and belief, but not until Damasus I, pope from 366 to 384, was the Bishop of Rome truly elevated above all other Roman Catholic bishops, becoming the head of the western Roman Catholic Church.6 Eventually sainted for his extraordinary accomplishments, Damasus’s actions were a case study in the manipulation of essentials, influentials, and interchangeables. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1181-1185
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:33:52 AM
As it turns out, one thing that is always expedient is remaining solvent. If a ruler has run out of money with which to pay his supporters, it becomes far easier for someone else to make coalition members an attractive offer. Financial crises are an opportune time to strike. The Russian Revolution is often portrayed through the prism of Marxist ideology and class warfare. The reality might be much simpler. Kerensky’s revolutionaries were able to storm the Winter Palace in February 1917 because the army did not stop them. And the army did not bother to stop them because the czar did not pay them enough. The czar could not pay them enough because he foolishly cut the income from one of his major sources of revenue, the vodka tax, at the same time that he fought World War I. Czar Nicholas confused what might seem like good public policy with bad political decision making. He had the silly idea that a sober army would prove more effective than an army that was falling-over drunk. Nicholas, it seems, thought that a ban on vodka would improve the performance of Russia’s troops in World War I. He missed the obvious downsides, however. Vodka was vastly popular with the general populace and, most assuredly, with the troops. So popular and widely consumed was vodka that its sale provided about a third of the government’s revenue. With vodka banned, his revenue diminished sharply. His expenses, in contrast, kept on rising due to the costs of the war. Soon Nicholas was no longer able to buy loyalty. As a result, his army refused to stop strikers and protesters. Alexander Kerensky formed Russia’s short-lived democratic government after toppling the czar’s regime. But he couldn’t hang on to power for long. His mistake was operating a democratic government, which necessitated a large coalition, and implementing an unpopular policy—continuing the czar’s war—thereby alienating his coalition right from the start. Lenin and the Bolsheviks made no such mistakes. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1248-1263
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:42:15 AM
Successful leaders must learn the lesson of these examples and put raising revenue and paying supporters above all else. Consider Robert Mugabe’s success in staying on as Zimbabwe’s president. The economy has collapsed in Zimbabwe thanks to Mugabe’s terrible policies. Starvation is common and epidemics of cholera regularly sweep the country. Mugabe “succeeds” because he understands that it does not matter what happens to the people provided that he makes sure to pay the army. And despite regular media speculation, so far he has always managed to do so and to keep himself in office well into his eighties. He has reduced a once thriving agricultural exporting nation into one that depends on foreign aid. Mugabe is certainly horrible for what he’s done to the people he rules, but he is a master of the rules to rule by. Where policy matters most, when it comes to paying off cronies, he has delivered. That is why no one has deposed him. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1265-1271
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:42:29 AM
In democracies, politics is an arms race of ideas. Just as the democrat has to be responsive to the people when governing, when seeking office it helps to propose policies that the voters like and it pays to want to do more (as opposed to less)—even if the economic consequences are damaging down the road (when you’re no longer in office). Satisfy the coalition in the short run. When democratic politicians lament “mortgaging our children’s future,” they’re really regretting that it was not them who came up with the popular policy that voters actually want. Sure, voters might feel guilty about the latest $1 trillion program, but see if they actually vote to reject it. With parents like that, what children need enemies? de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1440-1444
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 2:55:50 AM
Both leaders knew that it is better to have loyal incompetents than competent rivals. Sometimes, of course, having competent advisers is unavoidable. Byzantine, Mughal, Chinese, Caliphate, and other emperors devised a creative solution that guaranteed that these advisers didn’t become rivals: They all relied on eunuchs at various times. In the Byzantine Empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, the three most senior posts below emperor were held almost exclusively by eunuchs. The most senior position of Grand Administrator had evolved from the position of Prefect of the Sacred Bedchamber and included the duties of posting eunuch guards and watching over the sleeping emperor. Michael III made an exception and gave this position to his favorite, Basil, rather than a eunuch. This decision cost him his life. When Basil perceived that Michael was starting to favor another courtier, he murdered the emperor and seized the throne. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1701-1708
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:16:59 AM
What we can begin to appreciate is that no matter how well a tyrant builds his coalitions, it is important to keep the coalition itself off-balance. Familiarity breeds contempt. As noted, the best way to stay in power is to keep the coalition small and, crucially, to make sure that everyone in it knows that there are plenty of replacements for them. This is why you will often read about regular elections in tyrannical states. Everyone knows that these elections don’t count, and yet people go along with them. Rigged elections are not about picking leaders. They are not about gaining legitimacy. How can an election be legitimate when its outcome is known before the vote even occurs? Rigged elections are a warning to powerful politicians that they are expendable if they deviate from the leader’s desired path. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1717-1723
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:18:36 AM
Designated seats for underrepresented minorities is another means by which leaders reduce the number of people upon whom they are dependent. Such policies are advertised as empowering minorities, whether they are women, or members of a particular caste or religion. In reality they empower leaders. That a candidate is elected by a small subset of the population reduces the number of essentials required to retain power. At a very basic level, electoral victory in a two-party parliamentary system requires the support of half the people in half the districts; that is, in principle, 25 percent of the voters. Suppose 10 percent of the seats were reserved for election by one specific group that happens to be geographically concentrated (such as gay voters in the Castro in our earlier account of Harvey Milk’s election in San Francisco). To retain half the seats in parliament, the incumbent party need only retain 40 percent of the regular single member district seats, which is readily done with just over 22 percent of the vote. So by focusing on districts in which the privileged minority is prevalent, a party can reduce the number of votes it requires by 12 percent. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1835-1843
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:52:39 AM
During Bueno de Mesquita’s time doing field work in India in 1969–1970 he observed firsthand how the quest for power coupled with the influence of power blocs undermined any notion of the pursuit of political principles other than the principles, win, and get paid off. Senior people in villages and towns, and indeed, up and down the levels of governance in India’s states, would pledge to a particular party the support of those they led. In return, they would receive benefits and privileges. By and large, all the “clients” of these “patrons” followed their patron’s lead and voted for the designated party. What is most fascinating is that the affiliations between voters and parties need not have had any ideological rhyme or reason. In Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populace state, for instance, the free-market, anticommunist Swatantra Party, the socially conservative and anticommunist Jana Sangh Party, and the Communist Party of India formed a coalition government with each other following India’s 1967 election. This was true despite the Swatantra Party’s leadership’s description of the Communist Party of India as “public enemy number 1.” What did these parties have in common? Only their desire to band together and beat the Congress Party so as to enjoy the benefits of power. This sort of odd bedfellows coalition-building strategy was long rampant throughout India. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1866-1876
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:56:09 AM
Perhaps the most egregious case of bald opportunism occurred in the state of Bihar. There ideologically disparate parties formed a government, relying heavily on currying favor with the Raja of Ramgarh. The raja, owner of much of the mining interests in Bihar, switched parties every few months, bringing coalition governments down—and up—with him. Each time he switched, he garnered greater private goods for himself and his backers, including the dismissal of criminal charges against him. As the newspaper, The Patriot, reported on June 26, 1968, following one of the raja’s frequent defections to an alternative coalition, leading to the formation of a new government, “The Raja who had been able to get his terms from Mr. Mahamaya Prasad [the former head of the Bihar government] assumed that he could demand from Mr. Paswan [the new head of the Bihar government] a higher price. This amounted to Deputy Chief Ministership and the Mines portfolio for himself and withdrawal of the innumerable cases filed against him and members of his family by the Bihar government.” 16 The raja understood that he could manipulate his bloc of backers to make and break governments and, in doing so, he could enrich himself a lot and help his followers a little bit in turn. That, indeed, is the lesson of bloc voting whether based on personal ties in Bihar, trade union membership among American teachers, tribal clans in Iraq, linguistic divisions in Belgium, or religion in Northern Ireland. Bloc leaders gain a lot, their members gain less, and the rest of society pays the price. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1878-1890
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:57:28 AM
The traditional approach has been to treat emerging democracies as patronage systems in which politicians deliver small bribes to individual voters. The New York Times, for instance, reported on September 17, 2010, in an article with the headline “Afghan Votes Come Cheap, and Often in Bulk,” that the typical price paid for an Afghan voter’s support was about $5 or $6. But the article also noted that widespread vote fraud probably made vote buying unnecessary in any event. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1895-1899
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 3:58:26 AM
Bribing voters works far better at the bloc level. Suppose there are just three villages, and suppose a party, call it party A, negotiates with senior community figures in the villages and makes the following offer: if party A wins it will build a new hospital (or road, or pick up the trash, send police patrols, plow the snow, and so on) in the most supportive of the three villages. Once a village elder declares for party A, voters in that village can do little better than support party A, even if they don’t like it. The reality is that there are so many voters that the chance that any individual’s vote matters is inconsequential. Yet, voters are much more influential about where the hospital gets built or whose streets get swept than they are about who wins the election. To see why, consider the case where two or three of the village elders declare in favor of party A and most voters in these villages go along with them. Consider the incentives of an individual voter. Since at least two of three villages have declared for party A, an alternative party is unlikely to win so an individual’s vote has little influence on the electoral outcome. Voting for party B is a waste of time. Yet the voter could influence where the hospital is built by turning out to vote for A. If everyone else supports A, but she does not, then her village gives one less vote for A than another village and so loses out on the hospital. If she votes for A, then her village has a shot at getting the hospital. In the extreme case, where absolutely everyone votes for party A, our voter would give up a one third chance of getting the hospital in her village if she did not vote for party A. Voters have little incentive but to go along with their village elders. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 1904-1917
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:00:10 AM
We all hate taxes and are impressively inventive in looking for ways to avoid them. Leaders, however, are rather fond of taxes—as long as they don’t have to pay them. Being a dictator can be a terrific job, but it also can be terribly stressful, especially if money is in short supply. Taxes are one of the great antidotes to stress for heads of governments. Taxes, after all, generate much-needed revenue, which can then reward supporters. As a general principle leaders always want to increase taxes. That gives them more resources with which to reward their backers and, not to be forgotten, themselves. Nevertheless, they will find it difficult to raise taxes with impunity. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2032-2036
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:10:06 AM
Leaders face three constraints on how much money they can skim from their subjects. First, taxes diminish how hard people work. Second, some of the tax burden inevitably will fall upon the essential backers of the leader. (In general, the first constraint limits taxes in autocracies and the second constraint sets the boundary on taxes in democracies.) The third consideration is that tax collection requires both expertise and resources. The costs associated with collecting taxes limit what leaders can extract and shapes the choice of taxation methods. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2037-2041
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:10:42 AM
The lesson from the Tea Party movement’s electoral success in 2010 is that people don’t like paying taxes. Politician who raise or even maintain current taxes are politically vulnerable, but then so too are politicians who fail to deliver the policies their coalition wants. Herein lies the rub. It may well be that cutting taxes, while increasing the size of the economic pie, fails to make it big enough to generate both more wealth and more effective government policies. The question is and always must be the degree to which the private sector’s efficient but unequal distribution of wealth trumps government’s more equitable, less efficient, but popular economic programs. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2064-2069
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:13:22 AM
Taxing the poor to pay the rich has plenty of bad economic consequences, but these tend to be “in the long run”—that is, on another leader’s watch. For instance, in Ghana, heavily taxing famers had the longer term consequence of reducing crops. Ghanaian farmers simply stopped planting and caring for cocoa trees. By the 1980s cocoa production had collapsed and farmers tried to smuggle what little they did grow to neighboring Côte d’Ivoire. Case after case proves the point: when taxes are too high, then people either stop working or they find ways to avoid the formal economy. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2211-2215
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:27:14 AM
Initially some of the tax collected by the tax farmers was only applicable to non-Muslims. This proved to be a very successful, if not wholly intended, means of encouraging religious conversion. It seems that many non-Muslims, realizing that they could reduce the tax collectors’ reach by becoming Muslim, put their religious beliefs aside and converted. As long as these conversions did not assume massive proportions, the tax farmers made themselves incredibly rich at the expense of the average citizen. When conversion became commonplace, tax farmers adjusted, no longer excluding Muslims from some of the taxes they levied. And from the perspective of the Caliph, they ensured reliable revenue. That they terrorized the people was of no political importance: impoverished and persecuted farmers were not part of the winning coalition. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2235-2241
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:29:13 AM
As many leaders have learned, the problem with raising revenue through taxation is that it requires people to work. Tax too aggressively or fail to provide an environment conducive to economic activity and people simply don’t produce. Actually extracting revenue from the land itself provides a convenient alternative, cutting the people out of the equation altogether. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2255-2258
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:30:42 AM
Nevertheless, natural resources are wonderful for leaders. Unlike getting their subjects to work, leaders don’t have to encourage natural resources to work. Admittedly the minerals need to be extracted, but by and large autocrats can achieve this without the participation of the local population. In Nigeria, for instance, the oil is concentrated in the Niger Delta region. Foreign firms with foreign workers do most of the extraction. Few Nigerians participate. The oil companies run security firms, effectively small private armies, to keep the locals from obstructing the business or complaining about the environmental degradation that results. BP and other foreign firms are free to act with impunity, provided they deliver royalty checks to the government. This is not so much a failing of these companies as the way business must be conducted in countries whose leaders rely on a few cronies to back them up. A company that acts responsibly will necessarily have less money to deliver to the government and that will be enough for them to be replaced by another company that is willing to be more “cooperative.” de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 2277-2284
, clipped on Tuesday, July 21, 2015 4:33:01 AM
Julius Caesar’s death at the hands of some of his closest supporters is often portrayed as the slaying of a despot. But the facts don’t support this interpretation. Julius Caesar was a reformer. He undertook important public works, from redoing the calendar and relieving traffic congestion, to stabilizing food availability. He also took steps specifically designed to help the poor. For instance, he provided land grants to former soldiers and got rid of the system of tax farming, replacing it with a more orderly and predictable tax system. Not only that, he relieved the people’s debt burden by about 25 percent. Not surprisingly, though these policies were popular with the people, many came at the expense of Rome’s prominent citizens. Tax farming was, of course, lucrative for those lucky few who got to extract money from the people. High indebtedness was also lucrative for those who were owed money. These groups found Caesar’s reforms hitting them straight in their anachronistic pocketbooks and, therefore, not at all to their liking. Popular though many of his reforms might have been with the man on the street, they harmed the welfare of the powerful influentials and essentials, and it was of course these people who cut him down. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 3430-3440
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 4:22:22 AM
Legal approaches to eliminating corruption won’t ever work, and can often make the situation worse. The best way to deal with corruption is to change the underlying incentives. As coalition size increases, corruption becomes a thing of the past. As we proposed for the IOC and FIFA, increasing the number of members responsible for choosing the site of the games could end graft. The same logic prevails in all organizations. If politicians want to end massive bonuses for bankers then they need to pass legislation that fosters the restructuring of corporate government, so that chief executive officers and board chairs really depend on the will of their millions of shareholders (and not on a handful of government regulators). As long as corporate bosses are beholden to relatively few people they will provide those few key supporters with fat bonuses. Big bonuses might not be popular with the public or even with their many shareholders, but the public and unorganized shareholders can’t simply depose them. Insiders at the bank can. Legislating limits on compensation will simply force CEOs to resort to convoluted and quasi legal means. Such measures cannot improve corporate transparency or make balance sheets easier to understand. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 3574-3583
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 4:37:55 AM
It is thus not because India is poor, or has a large number of people, that it suffers a crippling shortage of infrastructure. The people of Bombay are not so poor that they would not pay for slightly better local trains, with a smaller chance of spending one’s commute in unwilling communion with their neighbour’s armpit. The reasons for India’s infrastructure deficit are deeper than that—born of an enduring belief that anything beyond the basic, any hint of comfort, is sinful and unacceptably expensive. This is a belief with many antecedents: Mahatma Gandhi’s tendency to insist on taking third-class train carriages, for one; our deep-rooted socialist ethos, for another. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 269-274
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:03:25 AM
Indeed, the Financial Times reported in November 2014 that one French company finds that the cheapest and easiest way to send parts from Bangalore to Hyderabad, a few hundred kilometres apart, is to send them first from Bangalore to Europe, and then back from Europe to Hyderabad. It isn’t as if there isn’t a decent highway between the two cities; but the moment that a truck hit a state border, it has to stop and wait. According to the World Bank, Indian truck drivers spend a fourth of their time on the road waiting at the tax checkpoints that mark state borders. Factor in the time they spend in queues to pay highway tolls, and they spend less than 40 per cent of their time on the road actually driving. And that’s when the roads are good. Moving stuff around India costs this country’s manufacturers more than they spend paying their workers, the FT reports. Even India’s lower-than-low wages can’t make up for the dent logistics costs make in our competitiveness. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 298-305
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:08:28 AM
The belief that we are so poor a country that we should never, ever, have slack capacity is very deeply ingrained indeed. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 353-354
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:14:21 AM
Go, today, to a small Indian town. There are only three places where you see vibrant activity—queues, discussion, energy. One is the alcohol shop. The second is the newsagent, who will also sell application forms for public-sector jobs. And the third is the guy who sells lottery tickets. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 406-408
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:20:47 AM
India’s greatest success in agriculture came from an advance of the second kind. In the Green Revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, high-yielding varieties of grain developed mainly in the United States were introduced across India. The effects were somewhat miraculous. India had long been considered unable to feed itself. It had too many mouths, and didn’t grow enough to put in them. It relied on food aid from the West; it was, according to the more sardonic of commentators, ‘a ship-to-mouth existence’. But, in barely a decade or so, India was self-sufficient in food. Indeed, in the decades since, India has built up so vast a stockpile of rice and wheat that it is now running out of place to keep it—the paranoid hoarding one associates with a childhood of deprivation. But the right lessons from this success have never been learned. India’s town-dwellers have instead focused on the first kind of intervention—making sure that whatever farmers choose to grow, they can also sell at a high price. (This is the exact opposite of what both Marxist and classical liberal economists have always assumed and recommended. Both those sets of people expected that farmers would have to provide cheap food to a burgeoning urban working class. India’s democratic politicians had different ideas.) Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 448-457
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:24:48 AM
There are too many types of Indian farmers to count, not one, and they have as many different interests and demands; and most of them are contradictory. How can you ‘protect’ them all? The big farmer in Punjab wants nothing more than his free power and water to continue forever. His daughter is in Jalandhar and his son is in Canada; and what he wants is an end to the rural employment guarantee scheme. There’s no controlling these damned Biharis who work on his land now, they are not as desperate as they were earlier. The smallholder in Telangana wants to know where the canals he was promised are. He knows his counterpart in coastal Andhra has canals; but he, here in the arid upcountry, has to rely on wells he’s dug. He paid for them himself, too, where the canals are paid for by the government. And the worst thing is that his wells run dry just when he needs them the most. Where are those canals? The marginal farmer in Madhya Pradesh is confident. He’s confident because he believes he can get his hands on a new variety of vegetable seeds, and the man willing to sell it to him says it will triple his profits. Ah, if only he had a little more cash to invest in it! What a pity he can’t mortgage his farm properly. For that kind of returns, he’d be willing to go deeper into debt. One good throw pays for all . . . The man with 2 hectares near a highway in Gujarat wants to know if you can introduce him to PepsiCo. He thought about it, and he knows it’s risky, but he’s willing to chance it—he’ll turn the entire 2 hectares over to potatoes if PepsiCo agrees to handle the purchasing of fertilizer and comes up with a preferred planting schedule. Apparently someone two villages over got a contract like this, and he wants one too. He’s sick and tired of finding a different buyer every year. They fleece you, these traders. The young man who has inherited land in western Uttar Pradesh has heard a rumour. Is it true that there will be a new road nearby, a six-lane expressway from Delhi to Dehradun? If so, and this is crucial, how close is it to his land? Is it so close that they will acquire it forcibly? That’s bad. True, it would be worse if it was so far away that he couldn’t sell it for a good price. It’s an asset, and surely it is worth more to someone else than it is to him? In any case, he knows a mobile-phone shop in Meerut he could get a share in if he came up with a few lakhs in the next couple of months . . . The tired-looking man at the Mumbai train station is a farmer. He owns no land and spends most of his time away from his village in Jharkhand, but he insists he is still a farmer. He is going back, isn’t he? Twice a year he goes, like clockwork, when his hands are needed on the family’s fields. He likes Mumbai, sure. But he only gets really excited when he starts talking about the price of fertilizer, and whether you should grow only rice, or rice and pulses. Of course he’s a farmer! He just doesn’t live near a farm. The stocky Bengali from a border district is furious. His paddy crop is struggling; the long-grain varietal he has planted all his life is simply not doing as well as it used to. The sea is rising, he says, and water that once was sweet is now brackish. The rice his grandfather planted in this rich delta could have handled salt, he believes; but 5000 varieties have vanished now. Perhaps one of them would have been perfect. But that’s not why he’s furious. He’s furious because his brother-in-law in the next district, who always had even more saline land, has just built another floor for his house. Because he’s stopped planting rice, and turned his field into a big pond, filled it up with saline water, and become a prawn farmer. From the moment the wife heard about the prawns, his own life has become unbearable. The fellow even bought himself a flat-screen TV! The old couple in Bihar is slightly confused, but pleased. The man at the fertilizer shop always told them that more is better. And that made sense to them, too. But now they’re being told by the government to farm their tiny plot more intensively. Look after a small number of seeds and saplings as if they were children; transplant them, one at a time, into your field. Leave space between them, don’t crowd them: like a first-class compartment, not general class, the man from the government had said, laughing. Carefully moderate the water. It’s a lot of work, sure: but their yield has gone up a lot. And profit has doubled. This is really confusing, but they’re not complaining. For the first time in decades, they are enjoying their work. Does anyone think all these people can be ‘protected’ by the same policy? The law that prevents the MP farmer from gambling with his land also prevents the young man near Meerut from selling out; mandating intensive farming, as with the Bihar couple, may not help the man in Telangana who really needs a bit more water. And, in the middle of this, it is wise to remember these two things: that most people in rural areas don’t own land; and even those who do survive thanks to money they earn away from it. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 473-511
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:32:32 AM
First, genetically modified food. Get over it, people. The Europeans are the richest and most pampered human society in history. India is, to be blunt, not. We cannot exactly adopt their snooty attitude to tomatoes. Is GM food killing us from inside? Probably not. Soyabean has been genetically modified since 1996, corn since about then, and every time we have something from the US that’s processed, it’s definitely got one or the other. Billions of people have had GM high-fructose corn syrup in their Cokes and their 7Ups and their Dr Peppers, and it’s done nothing to them. (Other than ruined their teeth, made them obese, and given them diabetes, but that has nothing to do with GM.) The anti-GM lobby is so powerful and so noisy, however, that they can even pressure the Chinese government into ending its support of GM rice. What chance do India’s farmers have? None. Second, farmer suicides. Yes, people often kill themselves when they are indebted and they see no way out. But, people, stop lying to us with numbers to try and make us feel bad. It is disrespectful to farmers, it is disrespectful to us and it is, worst of all, disrespectful to mathematics and common sense. All you need to know about suicides on the farm is this: that whether or not farmers are killing themselves at a greater rate than other Indians do depends, crucially, on how every state’s police and the Census and various household surveys define and categorize ‘farmers’. If your emotional pitch for rural distress comes down to this kind of definitional quibbling, find a new pitch. And, ideally, let your new pitch not essentialize and flatten Indian farmers’ personalities and motivations, please. After all, it should not run into problems of comparison—in having to explain why 14 of every 1,00,000 middle-class people in Bangalore kill themselves, for example, a number comparable or higher than farmer suicides in most Indian states. Are they in distress? Why do 17 of every 1,00,000 people in famously happy Bhutan kill themselves, a rate higher than Indian farmers in most states? Is there an explanation for the widely different suicide rates among farmers in different states—an explanation more powerful than my Reason for All Seasons, carelessness with the data? Above all, if 20 of every 1,00,000 Japanese kill themselves for an entire complicated set of reasons, many of them to do with cultural views of suicide, why would you imagine they have that three-dimensional inner life—and not the farmers you wish to ‘protect’? Basically, what I’m saying is: don’t play number games—incompetently!—with suicide. No decision a human being could make is more complex. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 516-534
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:35:48 AM
Gandhi did not really approve of poverty—although he chose to appear to approve, usually in order to discomfit some well-dressed Briton. But he did, thoroughly and comprehensively, disapprove of increasing a poor person’s productivity. He firmly believed that machinery, like tractors, that made it easier to work on a farm would hurt and not help the poor. ‘Machinery has its place; it has come to stay. But it must not be allowed to displace necessary human labour.’ Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 563-566
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:43:34 AM
It turns out that, once upon a time, we thought we would be a manufacturing economy; and, sometime over the past few decades, we gave up. Oh, we made a ton of excuses—about infrastructure, and globalization, and skills, and so on and so forth. We even tried to sell the absence of a manufacturing sector as a brilliant innovation. Look at us! Everybody else used an industrial sector to get rich, but we are so brilliant and ancient and everything that we have jumped an entire stage, and gone straight to a services-dominated economy, like the US is today! Double Promotion! Service–Led Growth! It’s because we are a nation of thinkers, you see. Not like all those others, none of whom has a 5000-year-old intellectual tradition. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 579-584
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:47:42 AM
Do pause to consider the magnificence of India’s socialist aspirations, and the genius of its policymakers. Attempting to protect workers, they have instead ensured that none exist. Trade unions, in the process of making their own jobs among the most secure in the world, have also made themselves irrelevant. If there was a Darwin Award for public policy, handed out to the ideology most likely to select itself out of the future, then Indira Gandhi-era Indian socialism would sweep the awards. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 602-605
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:49:55 AM
Consider textile factories—the cloth and clothing sector is the quickest and best way to expand factory employment, and it always has been. Once, India had textile mills that seemed poised for global success. If you grew up in India long enough ago, you remember when advertisements for cloth brands used to dominate television and magazines—Bombay Dyeing, DCM, Lalimli Dhariwal and Vimal, Only Vimal. Each one of those was a storied mill, and in the vanguard of Indian industry. Vimal itself was, after all, the seed from which grew noble Reliance, the puissant and the mighty. But all that changed. At a lecture in New Delhi in 2014, my boss, the economic journalist T.N. Ninan pointed out the following disturbing numbers: before the expansion of trade thanks to new international rules in the twenty-first century, India made $10 billion from textile exports, and Bangladesh $8 billion. Today India makes $12 billion—and Bangladesh $21 billion. That’s because the performance of a textile industry is particularly sensitive to how big factories are—a factory needs to be able to fulfil big orders quickly and efficiently. Plus, really long assembly lines still matter in textiles: in some cases, 100 people can sequentially work to make a pair of trousers in the least time. In Bangladesh, the average number of people in a factory is between 300 and 400; in the south Indian textiles hub of Tirupur, it’s around 50. The differences in scale are even more stark when you look at the number of machines per factory—in Bangladesh, it’s around 450; in Tirupur, 25 to 30. Bangladesh, in so many ways, does far better than India. Most painful, though, is its performance in textiles and industrial growth. After all, it can hardly be explained by culture—nobody has ever claimed that Bengalis are the most energetic of people. Nor is governance very different the moment the Jessore Road crosses the border. No, the only difference is that they never had our moment of Socialist Glory. And so they don’t have the laws that bind us. Or, to be precise, the laws that bind our poorest to poverty. In a country crying out for jobs, I want you to pause and consider this: Bangladesh, which has not got our oh-so-clever worker protections, employs (proportionally) five times as many people in the textile industry as we do. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 613-630
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 9:53:08 AM
What Prakash really hoped for was one big deal that he could be a little part of. If he helped Imtiaz with some shady real-estate manoeuvre, for example, and got a tiny sliver of the profit, that might be enough for him to set up as part of the rent-seeking economy himself. A little space with a chair and a TV, people to call on the phone, a second deal on the horizon perhaps, and the prospect one day of air-conditioning and a retinue of his own. That’s the Indian Dream. We have created a country where there is no clear path to advancement other than becoming a rentier. Should it surprise us that this is the highest hope of our hopeful? Failing this dream, at the very least he would want a ‘sitting-down job’. His counterparts in the countries that trod this path before India might well have been looking for a shop-floor job that provided them with a bit of security and a bit of camaraderie. But, for a complex set of reasons, Indians are going to be harder to please. Here, in my opinion, is the biggest reason: there may be a social stigma in India attached to working with your hands that’s higher than most anywhere else in the world. And there’s social prestige attached to sitting behind a desk that’s correspondingly high, too. Not one IIT engineer in the past ten years has taken a shop-floor job. And when I say ‘social’, I am of course tiptoeing, like we all do these days, around the unpalatable truth. These young urban Indians may not mention caste in the context of their career choices. But they are shaped by it, anyway, whether they will it consciously or not. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 881-893
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:29:59 AM
There is an entertaining story that is told about western Uttar Pradesh. Once the upper castes owned the land, and the landless Dalits tilled it, rented by the day. Some upper castes have now sold their land, and some of it has been bought by Dalits. Meanwhile, the elite can also afford to buy farm machinery—tractors, harvesters, and so on. And, to make a bit of money, they might rent out its services, along with their own as operator, to local farms. So, now, one might see an odd role reversal in UP’s countryside: of an upper-caste man sweating in the sun, hired to plough a Dalit’s fields. But the attitudinal change that such reversals could engender is not here yet. What remains is an ancient heritage of looking down on manual labour. For what it’s worth, the word that north Indians speaking Hindustani use for ‘sweat’ is from an Urdu root; the word for ‘knowledge’, from Sanskrit. Make of that what you will. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 893-900
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:31:00 AM
By the logic of the market, an untrained receptionist or salesperson and an untrained factory worker should be paid approximately the same amount; if most untrained people would far rather be receptionists, then they should be paid correspondingly less than if they became factory workers. Yet the average monthly gross salary of a machine operator in a major automobile manufacturer in Delhi is Rs 7700—while a receptionist is paid Rs 11,700, half as much again. This means that the invisible hand isn’t working properly. What we’ve missed, in thinking this through so far, is that the stigma against manual labour can go deep enough to affect salary offers; and, in addition, that there are unspoken barriers of caste and class and upbringing that can prevent job-seekers from leaping straight into the sort of service jobs that they’d find ideal. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 903-909
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:32:12 AM
Since independence, the government has focused on the kind of higher education that the ruling elite loves—highly subsidized engineering colleges, for example—while ignoring what the vast majority of Indians need. Education in India today, particularly high school, vocational and college education, performs a totally different function from what we need it to perform: it’s a form of social and intellectual screening, not a way to pass on useful skills. We need to know someone has gone to college to know they’re from the right sort of background, and have the right level of potential. It’s never what you learn in a school or college that matters; it’s that you got in. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 916-921
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:34:15 AM
But what we haven’t really had is the road to wealth. In Indian movies, you inherit wealth, or you marry wealth, or you spurn wealth. You don’t earn it. If you believe that our movies reflect our national psychoses, then this has to be one of the fundamental facts about how we view our futures: you can’t get rich through trying. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 953-955
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:38:04 AM
ourselves, our government, our cities, and our economy. In the 1950s, with the hot breath of freedom on our necks, we barrelled forward optimistically on the road to good fortune, singing along with Raj Kapoor. By the 1970s, we had lost enthusiasm. We had turned angry and distrustful, and the hero wasn’t a lovable wanderer, but a lone young warrior against the injustice of the powerful. And, in what should have been an early warning of dissatisfaction about the overpowering statism of the Indira Gandhi years, the villains were cronyist businessmen, smugglers, and corrupt government officials. But then, things turned. Liberalization made us optimistic again; our heroes got younger, wore clothes with prominent, if misspelled, labels; and pretended to be as comfortable in Piccadilly as in Patiala. My old boss, Shekhar Gupta, always said that a watershed for Indian society was the success of 2001’s Dil Chahta Hai—a story about three rich young slackers trying very hard not to grow up, and eventually failing. That was the first movie, he insisted, in which the heroes were rich—and untroubled by their wealth. But there’s one thing that’s been missing throughout. There’s been distrust of wealth, as in Raj Kapoor’s Shree 420, where a migrant to 1950s Mumbai is seduced into dishonesty. There’s been rejection of wealth, as when Shashi Kapoor faces down Amitabh Bachchan in Deewar, and reminds him with infuriating sanctimony that a house, a car, and a bank balance are nothing when weighed against a mother’s love. And there’s been embrace of wealth, as in 2010’s Aisha, starring a series of brand names worn by Sonam Kapoor. But what we haven’t really had is the road to wealth. In Indian movies, you inherit wealth, or you marry wealth, or you spurn wealth. You don’t earn it. If you believe that our movies reflect our national psychoses, then this has to be one of the fundamental facts about how we view our futures: you can’t get rich through trying. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 941-955
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:38:53 AM
Nandan Nilekani, the billionaire-turned-technocrat-turned-politician, has often quoted something that Raghuram Rajan—now the governor of India’s central bank—told him over a decade ago. Rajan worried that ‘the Horatio Alger story is not yet part of India’s popular imagination’. In the Victorian era, Alger’s novels were everywhere—cheap, accessible, and as addictive as candy, they told and retold the same story. Of a young man who dealt bravely with poverty and difficult circumstances, ‘improved himself’, worked hard and honestly, and who ended the story successful, respected, and middle class. They didn’t wind up extravagantly wealthy; just secure and comfortably-off. For the red-hot socialists of the Depression, a half-century on, the Alger stories were the founding myths of predatory capitalism and of an oppressive American Dream. But they’re not just moral examples. Societies where such stories are popular are societies where such stories become possible. The Indian Dream, of one big deal and then joining the rentier class, is a danger to those who believe it, and to everyone else. A Dream—American, or capitalist, or what you will—that can be shared by even the poorest, in which there exists an ethical and accessible stairway to security, is not a danger but a blessing. The presence of Horatio Alger stories—like Rocket Singh—would be, as Raghuram Rajan said, ‘a sign that the sentiment around India has truly transformed’. Somehow, India needs to make Indians think Rocket Singh is more likely than Guru. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 967-978
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 10:43:40 AM
The truth is, foreign aid deals have a logic of their own. Aid is decidedly not given primarily to alleviate poverty or misery; it is given to make the constituents in donor states better off. Aid’s failure to eliminate poverty has not been a result of donors giving too little money to help the world’s poor. Rather, the right amount of aid is given to achieve its purpose—improving the welfare of the donor’s constituents so that they want to reelect their incumbent leadership. Likewise, aid is not given to the wrong people, that is, to governments that steal it rather than to local entrepreneurs or charities that will use it wisely. Yes, it is true that a lot of aid is given to corrupt governments but that is by design, not by accident or out of ignorance. Rather, aid is given to thieving governments exactly because they will sell out their people for their own political security. Donors will give them that security in exchange for policies that make donors more secure too by improving the welfare of their own constituents. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 3712-3719
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 11:27:41 AM
Buying policy from a democracy is expensive because many people need to be compensated for their dislike of the policy. Buying policies from autocracies is quite a bit easier. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 3783-3784
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 11:38:49 AM
Well, painting classrooms, while fun, deprived a local worker of a much-needed job. If educated westerners displace locals from manual labor jobs, then where can those workers possibly compete given the current distribution of skills and capital? How can they earn enough money to make a living, and perhaps send their children to school to acquire greater skills that will make them more competitive when they grow up? Rather than helping out, the wealthy tourists who took up paintbrushes made some worker worse off. Repeat that exercise thousands of times and in thousands of different ways and you can see how feel-good charitable acts can benefit the donor vastly more than it actually benefits the needy. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 4070-4075
, clipped on Wednesday, July 22, 2015 2:24:18 PM
Indians, when life gives them lemons, will not make lemonade. No. They will instead put up a large sign over the lemons, saying ‘DEHYDRATED SUGARLESS LEMONADE. GOOD FOR DIABETICS.’ They will then write several books praising dehydrated sugarless lemonade as a unique Indian development, well suited to our climate and traditions. US–based management professors will declare this an example of frugal innovation. Indian entrepreneurs, they will say, have found a way around the constraints of their environment. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 1426-1430
, clipped on Thursday, July 23, 2015 12:22:00 AM
Naturally the common people don’t want war. . . . But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship.... All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country. de Mesquita Bueno;de Mesquita Bueno
, The Dictator's Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics.
loc. 5171-5174
, clipped on Thursday, July 23, 2015 3:02:20 AM
Consider just two things that keep houses scarce. One is rent control. Drive down Marine Drive, and look up at the glorious Art Deco facades of one of the world’s great sea-faces, built in that first reckless rush of reclamation before Independence. Then look closer, at the rain stains and the crumbling arches. Marine Drive is collapsing before our eyes; largely because the law requires rents to remain at the levels they were in 1940. When Suraiya, a singer and actress who personified Bollywood’s most refined era, died in 2004, there was a ruckus at her Marine Drive apartment. She’d lived there for seventy-one years, paying Rs 400 a month for a 2000-square-foot apartment worth tens of crores. Suraiya died alone; but the moment she did, a dozen heirs to her rent-controlled apartment popped wailing out of the woodwork. Thanks to rent control, there are 19,000 buildings in Mumbai that should be condemned, but people are living in. Every year, people are killed when their roof falls on them. Landlords don’t bother to fix the ceilings or the short-circuiting wiring—why should they, for the pittance they’re receiving? Nor can they redevelop the buildings so that more apartments go on the market. And the second way in which real estate has been choked off is through floor-space regulations. Mumbai may look like the only Indian city with skyscrapers—but the truth is it isn’t supposed to. It isn’t supposed to because the government for years imposed a ‘floor-space index’, or FSI, of 1 on most of the island.28 That meant that, if you were building on a plot of 100 square metres, your new building couldn’t have a built-up area of more than 100 square metres. Building more—going higher, in other words—was illegal. Yes, I know. For a city chronically short of housing, this is nothing short of insane. Every major island city—Manhattan, Singapore, Hong Kong—has skyscrapers. Just to compare: the permissible FSI in Shanghai, or in New York, or in Hong Kong, is between 10 and 15. It is only plains cities that are flat. Thanks to this insanity—born of an attempt to appear green, and keep building to a minimum—Mumbai actually has only 1.1 square metres of open space per person. Just to be clear, that is less than New York. That is less than Hong Kong. It is even less than Tokyo, the gold standard for urban density. Here’s the best part: when the FSI regulation was introduced, in the mid-1960s, the permitted FSI was 4. Yes, it’s actually gone down since then, although the space crunch has increased manifold. That’s because, in the interim, everyone figured out exactly how much money there was to be made by only allowing skyscrapers one by one, with each having to ask for permission and an exemption from the rule. There’s a solid lobby of builders in Mumbai who want FSI to stay low. And politicians. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 1719-1740
, clipped on Thursday, July 23, 2015 9:08:16 AM
Delhi’s politicians talk about Reliance like Pakistani politicians talk about the Pakistani army. They don’t like it; they are a little scared of it; but, dammit, they say, it is the only efficient organization in the country, and if you want something done you have to go through it. That comes into play in this natural gas problem. You see, there’s natural gas under the Bay of Bengal. This natural gas belongs to us, not to Mukesh Ambani. This point was argued and won by Mukesh Ambani, oddly enough. He was arguing this point to ensure that the government got to set the price at which Mukesh’s Reliance sold natural gas from these fields. In one of those coincidences that make life in India so worth living, one of the primary customers for the gas being sold by Mukesh’s Reliance was the Reliance owned by his estranged brother, Anil. And, some years earlier, Mukesh and Anil had promised their mother—again, I am not making this up, I wish I had this much imagination—that they would play nicely, acceding to a ‘non-compete’ agreement that included a particular price for gas. But now, Mukesh’s lawyers basically argued that the agreement didn’t apply—because the gas wasn’t his, and so it was the government that got to price the gas and not Mukesh himself. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 2276-2285
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 1:21:20 AM
Perhaps there is indeed a cultural oneness to India, something that instinctively unites all Indians, no matter their creed or ethnicity. I suspect it is this: we are all petty clerks at heart. Where other countries have a shared ethnicity or national language or a common fondness for apple schnapps, we have instead adopted and internalized the instincts and priorities and processes of our colonial-era bureaucracy. It’s seeped into our souls, every one of us. Cut us, and we bleed in triplicate. This doesn’t mean that we respect processes, mind you: it means we seek them out in order to manipulate them. It doesn’t mean we have a respect for queues, as another example; it means we seek the tiny extra status that comes from cutting queues. It doesn’t mean that we seek to solve problems from a national perspective or whatever the Indian Administrative Service imagines its mission is; it means that we seek to create barriers between other people and their goals, and to sit atop these barriers while lesser people beg us to remove them. This is fine if you are actually a bureaucrat. Well, it isn’t fine, really, but at least it’s expected. No country in the world prides itself on the efficiency and friendliness of its bureaucrats. It’s like complaining your pit bull isn’t excessively friendly to strangers—that wasn’t what it was bred for, man, get a cocker spaniel. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 2485-2495
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 2:26:18 AM
There’s a company that rejoices in the noble name of ‘JSW Steel’; it’s part of the JSW group, owned by a man named Sajjan Jindal. The JSW stands for Jindal South West; the geographical qualification is necessary, presumably because Sajjan Jindal is one of a large number of brothers, all of whom inherited various resource-linked businesses from their father.39 (Remember that point I was making about how everyone asks: If Tata Steel can get nice mines, why can’t I? Sajjan Jindal, shortly after being formally charged by the police in the payment of a bribe to Karnataka’s chief minister for a mine, told his investors in an aggrieved tone: ‘Even after a presence of more than two decades in Karnataka, investing more than Rs 35,000 crore and creating thousands of jobs, JSW Steel remains the only major Indian steel company with no captive mines.’ This is how a resource economy works: competitive begging.) The name ‘JSW’, you will note, is not particularly imaginative. Nor is it the kind of thing you would imagine is incredible intellectual property. Yet, in 2014, JSW Steel told shareholders that it would pay Rs 125 crore a year to a firm entirely owned by Sajjan Jindal’s wife, Sangita. In return, Sangita Jindal would graciously permit her husband to use the ‘JSW’ acronym, which JSW Steel insists her company, JSW Investments, owns. Here’s the facepalm moment: JSW’s sheep-like shareholders meekly agreed. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 2526-2537
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 2:30:42 AM
In 2005, the UPA passed the Special Economic Zone Act, which is the gold standard for piecemeal thinking, for picking winners—and similarly deserves a Golden Globe for failing, and an Oscar for doing so repeatedly and yet somehow surviving. (Really long death scene.) Here’s how things started. Before 1991, someone decided to set up little ‘export promotion zones’ or EPZs in relatively underdeveloped areas, where Indian companies would set up shop and produce cheap clothing, say, for the Western market. These zones would be exempt from some of the more onerous regulations the rest of India was subject to, all the ones that people generally complained about. Naturally, not just anyone could set up shop there. You had to prove your worth, your honour, your good intentions—several times over, in triplicate, and ideally in a small envelope as well. For some reason, these failed to take off. Death #1. Then, in 2000, a man named Murasoli Maran—India’s commerce minister, and named for the newspaper he used to edit, which is confusing, but also the kind of thing that happens with hardcore intellectual-politicians, of which he definitely was one—took a trip to China. There he saw the wonders of Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone at the mouth of the Pearl river, just upriver from Hong Kong and downriver from a vast hinterland. Shenzhen was not quite what it is today, with 15 million people, a super-busy container port, and an appropriately tasteless amusement park which has one-third scale replicas of the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal and the Pyramids all next to each other. But it certainly wasn’t the sleepy fishing village it was in 1979, when Deng, seemingly offhandedly, suggested that the local government—if it was so determined to reform and export and all that jazz—‘set aside an area and call it a special zone’. (After all, Deng pointed out—precedent being all-important in those days, and an idea was only truly sanctified if Mao had done it—there had been a special zone back in 1940, on the border with the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese. The Party had earned money for its weapons by growing and selling opium in that Special Economic Zone, one of those fun bits of Chinese history the People’s Republic generally forgets to mention.) Deng’s suggestion had taken root and blossomed; Shenzhen had links to the outside world via Hong Kong, and to the people and resources of interior China via the Pearl river, and its vast scale—400 square kilometres—had allowed an entire ecosystem to develop free of the restraints of the rest of China. Anyway, Maran was duly impressed, though presumably not as impressed as he would have been today by the one-third scale Eiffel Tower, and when he returned to India, he decided that EPZs would henceforth be our own Special Economic Zones, or SEZs. Changes would be made to the regulations, those exact changes that had been holding the EPZs back from success. SEZs would be three times as large as EPZs! And private developers would be allowed! No other major changes were, of course, necessary. Lots of tinkering with the regulations was enough. For some reason, these also failed to take off. Death #2. Then, in 2004, the UPA came into office, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and energetic and determined to make a difference. (How sweet it is to be young, how bitter the draught of age.) It examined the SEZ problem and at once saw the flaw. There was no Law. The UPA firmly believed the Law was the Thing, and the Thing was the Law, and they were one and the same. Legislate employment, and people would have it; legislate food, and they would have it; legislate small tins of sardines falling from the sky, and people would not leave home without an umbrella and a can-opener. How, then, could you have SEZs without an SEZ Act? And all the problems would be fixed this time. The new SEZs would be twice as large as the old SEZs! And private developers would take the lead! No other major changes were, of course, necessary. Lots of tinkering, etc., etc. For some reason, these too failed to take off. Death #3. Wait, you say, that isn’t what the numbers say. The numbers say that, within eighteen months, 237 new SEZs were set up, when the UPA had inherited only seven. By 2012, there were almost 600, with a total area of over 700 square kilometres—bigger than Mumbai. Well, yes. A lot of people did sign up. But it wasn’t exactly the kind of crowd that we were hoping for. You see, the government was offering to help you acquire the SEZ land, right? So, thought India’s clever and public-spirited businessmen, why not sign up for an SEZ, and get our hands on large amounts of increasingly valuable land? Of those 600-odd SEZs, less than a third actually operate. The rest are simply land banks for private developers. Oh, and the main tenant of most of those that operate? The information technology sector—not textiles or manufacturing, as planned. The IT companies simply wanted to ensure that the tax breaks that they had been promised under a previous legislation wouldn’t be taken away, and so they relocated to low-tax SEZs. A large part of SEZs’ not-very-impressive export earnings are thus from IT companies which would have been bringing home that money anyway. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 3479-3517
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 7:04:23 AM
In so many ways, the Indian state could nudge its people towards becoming, well, better. We may not be terrible individuals, as individuals. But we so rarely are individuals! Most of the time, we are one group or another, most of which are at each other’s throats. Constructing solidarity, creating citizenship, from this is not straightforward. But neither can it be completely ducked, the way the Indian state has chosen to do it. This is, in fact, the biggest way in which we have rejected Gandhi. The Indian Republic is the heir of the British Raj and not Gandhi’s nationalist movement because the Raj never sought to change India. It sought only to rule. After all, 1857’s horrific violence had been caused, the British thought, by their unthinking imposition of their own cultural mores on Indians. Best to stop that. Instead of the intermingling that had become common among the East India’s Company’s nabobs, the sahibs of the Raj never thought that an Indian could be improved. At best, he could become a babu, an amusing caricature of modern man. (For them, as for today’s crazy anti-globalization anarchists, modern=Western.) The amazing thing is that when the babus took over the country, they chose to inherit this attitude. ‘There is no point working to improve our subjects’ problematic cultural practices; we have enough to do to keep them from each other’s throats, and ours.’ This is the thinking of the Raj in a nutshell, and it has also been the guiding philosophy of the Republic since 1950. Gandhi would have wanted us to make ourselves better, too; for him, that sort of self-government was as important as political swaraj, if not more. Not that Gandhi’s ideas of better were necessarily the right ones. In fact, they weren’t the right ones. But still. At some point, this attitude has to change; for we are fast approaching the limits of our growth as a premodern society attempting postmodern economics. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 4221-4235
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 3:38:00 PM
But in the Delhi Metro, where the air is conditioned and the rides are smooth, we do not do that. In the Delhi Metro, everyone mostly is given a bit of personal space. In the Delhi Metro, we stand next to a daily-wage labourer, a Nepalese domestic worker, a Kannadiga engineer, and we don’t care. In the Delhi Metro, we even try to queue. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 4264-4266
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 3:42:36 PM
Get women working. Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 4270-4271
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 3:44:17 PM
India is a big whisky-drinking country. As a sting operation in the early 2000s confirmed, when you want to pay a bribe to get a major defence deal, you take along a bottle of Blue Label just to make the point. It used to be said, in the fine old days of import controls and bell-bottoms and villains who drank Vat 69, that more Scotch was drunk in India than produced in Scotland. Of course, the most important thing to know about Indian whisky is that it is not, in fact, whisky. It is rum. This tells you more about India than any single fact should. You see, whisky is made from malt—from fermented, mashed-up grain. Most Indian whisky is made from molasses. So it isn’t whisky; it is rum, bleached, coloured and flavoured to taste like whisky. At some point in the 1980s, the Scots decided enough was enough and Indian whiskies couldn’t go around claiming to be whiskies. Indian whisky makers, such as Mallya, were shocked—shocked!—that anyone would imagine that their product could in any way be mistaken for Scotch whisky. The fact that Indian whisky-flavoured rums were named things like McDowell’s and Bagpiper was, of course, strictly a coincidence. The Scotch whisky guys were, however, particularly incensed by the only brand of Indian whisky that is, in fact, whisky: Peter Scot, made by Bangalore’s venerable Khoday distillers. Peter Scot is indeed a malt whisky. And Scot is right there in the name. Back in 1986, the Scotch-wallahs demanded Peter Scot change its name, and took to the legal system to ensure it did. In 2008—yes, twenty-two years later, amazingly quick work by Indian standards—the Supreme Court said Peter Scot didn’t need to have its name changed. They came to the conclusion that it should be plainly obvious to absolutely anyone who tasted Peter Scot that it wasn’t, in fact, Scottish. Seriously. Here’s the lawyer Soli Sorabjee, writing on the verdict in the Indian Express: ‘The Court concluded that it was concerned with the class of buyers who are supposed to know the value of money, the quality and content of Scotch whisky and the difference in the process of manufacture, the place of manufacture and their origin . . . One wonders whether ordinary consumers of Scotch whisky, including judges who are not teetotallers, are really aware of these factors.’ Mihir S. Sharma
, Restart: The Last Chance for the Indian Economy.
loc. 4514-4532
, clipped on Friday, July 24, 2015 3:57:14 PM
‘If you had to be reborn anywhere in the world as a person with average talents and income, you would want to be a Viking,’ proclaimed The Economist, ever so slightly backhandedly, in a special Nordic-themed edition. But where were the discussions about Nordic totalitarianism and how uptight the Swedes are; about how the Norwegians have been corrupted by their oil wealth to the point where they can’t even be bothered to peel their own bananas; how the Finns are self-medicating themselves into oblivion; how the Danes are in denial about their debt, their vanishing work ethic, and their place in the world; and how the Icelanders are, essentially, feral? Michael Booth
, Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia the Almost Nearly Perfect People (Hardback) - Common.
loc. 287-292
, clipped on Wednesday, August 12, 2015 5:43:29 AM
Generally, not a lot happens in Denmark, but this doesn’t stop the news editors putting whatever has happened in Denmark at the top of the agenda, regardless of events elsewhere in the world. I was once so infuriated that the national radio news, in the aftermath of the Japanese tsunami and at the commencement of the Libyan Civil War, was running as their lead item a story about how some tenants of rented properties might not be aware that their home contents insurance could assist them in claims against high rents, that I rang the news editor to ask what they were thinking. ‘Well, we didn’t think there was much new to say about Libya,’ he told me, a little embarrassed. Michael Booth
, Behind the Myth of the Scandinavian Utopia the Almost Nearly Perfect People (Hardback) - Common.
loc. 539-546
, clipped on Thursday, August 13, 2015 12:33:18 PM
why locavores have such a misguided philosophy. It overlooks that some parts of the world are running out of water and that trade of food—often long-distance trade—is the best or indeed the only real answer to that problem. Very often, trading across a distance solves more environmental problems than it creates. Tyler Cowen
, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.
loc. 2504-2506
, clipped on Wednesday, August 19, 2015 7:24:20 PM
If protestors are boycotting a very profitable corporation, there’s a good chance they’re making themselves feel better, by ceasing to affiliate with the said corporation. There’s a lower chance they’re being effective or making the world a better place. Tyler Cowen
, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.
loc. 2768-2770
, clipped on Thursday, August 20, 2015 4:14:23 AM
When the Democrats held the House of Representatives, prior to the election of 2010 and over the course of 2007– 2008, they made a big change: they introduced into the dining halls new cutlery made from corn, in part because the forks and knives could be easily turned into compost. Yet the idea was not well thought through. The new utensils cost more, estimated at $475,000 a year, and they didn’t stand up well when exposed to hot foods such as soup. It wasn’t clear that anyone was reaping a big environmental gain and in fact a House internal report suggested that, due to the need to truck away the disposable waste, there was probably a net environmental cost. Still, maybe it felt better to have the compostable cutlery. When the Republicans took over, they too made a change. The most cost-effective option for the new utensils turned out to be polystyrene, which is a plastic made from petroleum and natural gas. Styrofoam is back, but in the cafeterias for the Democratic Senate the forks are still compostable. Why not use metal knives and forks you might be wondering? The sorry truth is that this option was studied, but rejected on the grounds that too many Congressional staff—the people working so hard to improve America—would take these utensils away and, quite simply, never bring them back. Tyler Cowen
, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.
loc. 2772-2781
, clipped on Thursday, August 20, 2015 4:15:32 AM
The cookbooks by Fuchsia Dunlop on Hunan and Sichuan, by Diana Kennedy, Patricia Quintana, Mark Miller, and Rick Bayless on Mexican, and by Julie Sahni on Indian food have long informed my thinking. For simpler, standard dishes I look to Mark Bittman, and for general knowledge on the chemistry of cooking I have learned a lot from Harold McGee Tyler Cowen
, An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies.
loc. 3957-3960
, clipped on Thursday, August 20, 2015 5:55:21 PM
Each point deals with a basic element of negotiation, and suggests what you should do about it. People: Separate the people from the problem. Interests: Focus on interests, not positions. Options: Invent multiple options looking for mutual gains before deciding what to do. Criteria: Insist that the result be based on some objective standard. Roger Fisher;William L. Ury;Bruce Patton
, Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In.
loc. 539-548
, clipped on Friday, August 21, 2015 5:51:04 AM
The film Amadeus (and the play by Peter Shaffer on which it’s based) dramatizes and romanticizes the divine origins of creative genius. Antonio Salieri, representing the talented hack, is cursed to live in the time of Mozart, the gifted and undisciplined genius who writes as though touched by the hand of God. Salieri recognizes the depth of Mozart’s genius, and is tortured that God has chosen someone so unworthy to be His divine creative vessel. Of course, this is hogwash. There are no “natural” geniuses. Mozart was his father’s son. Leopold Mozart had gone through an arduous education, not just in music, but also in philosophy and religion; he was a sophisticated, broad-thinking man, famous throughout Europe as a composer and pedagogue. This is not news to music lovers. Leopold had a massive influence on his young son. I question how much of a “natural” this young boy was. Genetically, of course, he was probably more inclined to write music than, say, play basketball, since he was only three feet tall when he captured the public’s attention. But his first good fortune was to have a father who was a composer and a virtuoso on the violin, who could approach keyboard instruments with skill, and who upon recognizing some ability in his son, said to himself, “This is interesting. He likes music. Let’s see how far we can take this.” Leopold taught the young Wolfgang everything about music, including counterpoint and harmony. He saw to it that the boy was exposed to everyone in Europe who was writing good music or could be of use in Wolfgang’s musical development. Destiny, quite often, is a determined parent. Mozart was hardly some naive prodigy who sat down at the keyboard and, with God whispering in his ears, let the music flow from his fingertips. Tharp, Twyla
, The Creative Habit.
loc. 122-135
, clipped on Wednesday, August 26, 2015 2:38:04 AM
But the secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components. Every word that serves no function, every long word that could be a short word, every adverb that carries the same meaning that’s already in the verb, every passive construction that leaves the reader unsure of who is doing what—these are the thousand and one adulterants that weaken the strength of a sentence. Zinsser, William
, On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
loc. 166-169
, clipped on Saturday, September 5, 2015 2:40:35 AM
How can the rest of us achieve such enviable freedom from clutter? The answer is to clear our heads of clutter. Clear thinking becomes clear writing; one can’t exist without the other. It’s impossible for a muddy thinker to write good English. He may get away with it for a paragraph or two, but soon the reader will be lost, and there’s no sin so grave, for the reader will not easily be lured back. Zinsser, William
, On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
loc. 181-184
, clipped on Saturday, September 5, 2015 2:42:36 AM
Notice the decisions that other writers make in their choice of words and be finicky about the ones you select from the vast supply. The race in writing is not to the swift but to the original. Zinsser, William
, On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction.
loc. 502-504
, clipped on Saturday, September 5, 2015 12:27:13 PM
MUSICALLY, THE SONG MACHINE makes two types of hits. One branch is descended from Europop, and the other from R&B. The former has longer, more progressive melodies and a sharper verse-chorus differentiation, and they seem more meticulously crafted. The latter have a rhythmic groove with a melodic hook on top that repeats throughout the song. But these templates are endlessly recombined. And the line between pop and urban is as blurry as it was in the ’50s when the record business was in its infancy, and the distinctions between R&B and pop were still fluid. John Seabrook
, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
loc. 106-110
, clipped on Thursday, December 24, 2015 2:03:24 PM
Some instrumental sounds are based on samples of actual instruments, but they are no longer recognizable as such. And the electronic atmosphere and the dynamic changes in the density of the sound are more captivating than the virtuosity of the musicians. The computer is felt in the instrumentation, the cut-and-paste architecture, and in the rigorous perfection of timing and pitch—call it robopop. Melodies are fragmentary, and appear in strong short bursts, like espresso shots served throughout the song by a producer-barista. Then, slicing through the thunderous algorithms, like Tennyson’s eagle—And like a thunderbolt he falls—comes the “hook”: a short, sung line that grips the rhythm with melodic talons and soars skyward. The songs bristle with hooks, painstakingly crafted to tweak the brain’s delight in melody, rhythm, and repetition. John Seabrook
, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
loc. 116-122
, clipped on Thursday, December 24, 2015 3:15:16 PM
“I think it was to our advantage that English was not our mother language,” Ekberg says, “because we are able to treat English very respectless, and just look for the word that sounded good with the melody.” Freed from making sense, the lyricists’ horizons are boundless. John Seabrook
, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
loc. 551-553
, clipped on Thursday, December 24, 2015 4:32:10 PM
It’s striking how little the basic form of the popular song has changed. The delivery mechanism is in constant flux—from sheets to player piano rolls, to radio, vinyl, cassettes, CDs, MP3s, and now streams. But the emotional mechanics of songs have largely remained the same, whether they’re embodied by Al Jolson’s ivories or Slash’s lead guitar. The verses build up the tension, and the choruses release it, letting the joy in. After two choruses, there’s usually a bridge, also known as “the middle eight,” which is a variation on the verse melody, followed by the final chorus and coda. The fact that my ancestral hit parade concludes so abruptly tells of the massive changes that rock and R&B brought to popular song—changes my mother was not willing or able to absorb. But I did, gleefully; on the piano and, later, on the guitar, I picked up where my mother left off. Strange that these three-to-four-minute ditties should be the glue that connects us, even after she’s gone. The music changes, but the song (as the song goes) remains the same. John Seabrook
, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
loc. 1592-1599
, clipped on Thursday, December 24, 2015 6:25:12 PM
Should they offer the track for sale or let it spread virally for free? Should they upload “American Girl” to Vevo, the industry’s music-video channel, even though that would cannibalize views from YouTube? It probably didn’t matter, but this kind of stuff obsessed Dr. Luke. If they did a soft launch on iTunes and the song didn’t sell, might that hurt them with program directors, when they took it to radio? So many uncertainties for Dr. Luke to obsess over, and not one really mattered, because it was already clear, twenty-four hours in, that “American Girl” was not going to make Bonnie McKee a pop star. It would get to number sixty-seven on the charts, then quickly fall back. The lyricist wouldn’t be quitting her day job anytime soon. It was a reminder that for all their talent and experience, even Dr. Luke and Max Martin couldn’t guarantee a hit. Neither are they sure they have one until the public hears the song. Hit making remains a tricky, unpredictable endeavor. Dr. Luke often falls back on the hoary truism that it’s all a matter of “the right artist with the right song at the right time.” Take “Wrecking Ball,” a ballad Dr. Luke and Cirkut created sans Max Martin for Miley Cyrus. It seemed like a certain hit; Doug Morris predicted it would be one of the biggest songs of the year. But Luke wasn’t sure, and he bet against the song, telling Cyrus he would buy her a Numi toilet like his, the state of the art in potty technology (it has a Bluetooth receiver that can stream music from a smart phone), if it went to number one. When “Wrecking Ball” did hit number one, I asked Cyrus for a comment. “Contrary to what he thinks,” she says, “Dr. Luke isn’t always right. Now he has to buy me a ten-thousand-dollar toilet. I’ll be thinking of him every time I go.” John Seabrook
, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
loc. 3745-3757
, clipped on Thursday, December 24, 2015 11:38:13 PM
The original idea for the song came from Aaron Bay-Schuck, an up-and-coming A&R man at Atlantic Records. He wanted his artist Flo Rida to do a rap that sampled “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)” by Dead Or Alive, the mid-’80s hit created by the SAW hit factory. “It’s gotta happen. It could be huge,” Bay-Schuck kept saying. But his attempts to realize the song had so far fallen short. Bruno Mars and his writing partner, Phil Smeeze, had taken a crack at it, but the song still wasn’t working. So Bay-Schuck gave it to Dr. Luke, and Luke brought in another key early collaborator, Kool Kojak. “Dr. Luke and I both had success with the shuffle beat,” Kojak recalls, “starting back in 1999 when I composed the song ‘Sao Paulo’ for my band Supla Zoo.” The song’s swung eighth-note triplet later featured in “I Kissed a Girl.” Kojak: “We rode that bitch hard and we were about to put her to pasture with her greatest incarnation ever,” which was “Right Round.” John Seabrook
, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory.
loc. 3807-3814
, clipped on Friday, December 25, 2015 12:06:02 AM
But justice demands that we concentrate on the differences between these two works. Our task is made easier in that Hannahan—unlike Joyce!—provided his book with a commentary, which is twice the size of the novel itself (to be exact, Gigamesh runs 395 pages, the Commentary 847). We learn at once how Hannahan’s method works: the first, seventy-page chapter of the Commentary explains to us all the divergent allusions that emanate from a single, solitary word—namely, the title. Gigamesh derives first, obviously, from Gilgamesh: with this is revealed the mythic prototype, just as in Joyce, for his Ulysses also supplies the classical referent before the reader comes to the first word of the text. The omission of the letter L in the name Gigamesh is no accident; L is Lucifer, Lucipherus, the Prince of Darkness, present in the work although he puts in no personal appearance. Thus the letter (L) is to the name (Gigamesh) as Lucifer is to the events of the novel: he is there, but invisibly. Through “Logos” L indicates the Beginning (the Causative Word of Genesis); through Laocoon, the End (for Laocoon’s end is brought about by serpents: he was strangled, as will be strangled—by the rope—the hero of Gigamesh). L has ninety-seven further connections, but we cannot expound them here. To continue, Gigamesh is a GIGAntic MESS; the hero is in a mess indeed, one hell of a mess, with a death sentence hanging over his head. The word also contains: GIG, a kind of rowboat (Maesch would drown his victims in a gig, after pouring cement on them); GIGgle (Maesch’s diabolical giggle is a reference—reference No. 1—to the musical leitmotif of the descent to hell in Klage Dr. Fausti [more on this later]); GIGA, which is (a) in Italian, “fiddle,” again tying in with the musical substrates of the novel, and (b) a prefix signifying the magnitude of a billion (as in the word GIGAwatts), but here the magnitude of evil in a technological civilization. Geegh is Old Celtic for “avaunt” or “scram.” From the Italian giga through the French gigue we arrive at geigen, a slang expression in German for copulation. For lack of space we must forgo any further etymological exposition. A different partitioning of the name, in the form of Gi-GAME-sh, foreshadows other aspects of the work: GAME is a game played, but also the quarry of a hunt (in Maesch’s case, we have a manhunt). This is not all. In his youth Maesch was a GIGolo; AME suggests the Old German Amme, a wet nurse; and MESH, in turn, is a net—for instance, the one in which Mars caught his goddess wife with her lover—and therefore a gin, a snare, a trap (under the scaffold), and, moreover, the engagement of gear teeth (e.g., “synchroMESH”). Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 444-466
, clipped on Sunday, December 27, 2015 2:54:18 AM
The first chapter of Gigamesh consists of eight pages, wherein the condemned man relieves himself in the latrine of the military prison, reading—over the urinal—the countless graffiti with which other soldiers, before him, have ornamented the walls of that sanctuary. His attention rests on the inscriptions only in passing. Their extreme obscenity turns out to be, precisely through his intermittent awareness of them, a false bottom, since we pass through them straight into the sordid, hot, enormous bowels of the human race, into the inferno of its coprolalia and physiological symbolism, which goes back, through the Kamasutra and the Chinese “war of flowers,” to the dark caves, with the steatopygous Aphrodites of primitive peoples, for it is their naked parts that look out from underneath the filthy acts scrawled awkwardly across the wall. At the same time, the phallic explicitness of some of the drawings points to the East, with its ritual sanctification of Phallos-Lingam, while the East denotes the place of the primeval Paradise, revealed to be a thin lie incapable of hiding the truth—that in the beginning there was poor information. Yes, exactly: for sex and “sin” arose when the protoamoebas lost their virgin unisexuality; because the equipollence and bipolarity of sex must be derived directly from the Information Theory of Shannon; and now the purpose of the last two letters (SH) in the name of the epic becomes apparent! And thus the path leads from the walls of the latrine to the depths of natural evolution ... for which countless cultures have served as a fig leaf. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 502-513
, clipped on Sunday, December 27, 2015 3:01:32 AM
The Pythagorean quantity pi, symbolizing the feminine principle (3.14159265359787...), is expressed by the number of letters to be found in the thousand words of the chapter. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 514-515
, clipped on Sunday, December 27, 2015 3:03:45 AM
Joachim F ersengeld, a German, wrote his Pericalypse in Dutch (he hardly knows the language, which he himself admits in the Introduction) and published it in France, a country notorious for its dreadful proofreading. The writer of these words also does not, strictly speaking, know Dutch, but going by the title of the book, the English Introduction, and a few understandable expressions here and there in the text, he has concluded that he can pass muster as a reviewer after all. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 1185-1188
, clipped on Sunday, December 27, 2015 9:32:22 PM
It is known, surely, that the circle of those who dote upon a small child emerging from the infant state makes as much as it can of the child’s responses and words. To its mindless echolalia are attributed meanings; in its incoherent babbling is discovered intelligence, even wit; the inaccessibility of the child’s psyche allows the observer enormous freedom, especially the doting observer. It must have been in this way that the rationalization of the idiot’s actions first began. No doubt the father and mother vied with each other in finding signs to indicate that their child was speaking better and better, more and more clearly, that he was doing better all the time, positively radiating good nature and affection. I have been saying “child,” but when the scene opens he is already a fourteen-year-old boy. What sort of system of misinterpretation must it be, what subterfuges, what explanations—frantic to the point of being outright comical—must be called into play to save the fiction, when the reality so unremittingly contradicts it? Well, all this can be done, and of such acts consists the parental sacrifice in behalf of the idiot. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 1318-1326
, clipped on Monday, December 28, 2015 12:33:05 PM
Antitrust legislation in the U.S.A. forbids monopolies; consequently Being Inc. is not the only life arranger. There are its great competitors, Hedonica and the Truelife Corporation. And it is precisely this circumstance that leads to events unprecedented in history. For when persons who are clients of different companies come into contact with one another, the implementation of the orders of each may encounter unforeseen difficulties. Those difficulties take the form of what is called “covert parasitizing,” which leads to cloak-and-dagger escalation. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 1804-1808
, clipped on Tuesday, December 29, 2015 1:04:07 AM
This book—only a German could have written it! A fondness for classification, for that scrupulous t-crossing and i-dotting that has begotten innumerable Handbücher, makes the German mind resemble a pigeonhole desk. When one beholds the consummate order displayed by the table of contents of this book, one cannot help thinking that if the Lord God had been of German blood our world would perhaps not necessarily have turned out better existentially, but would have for sure embodied a higher notion of discipline and method. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 1870-1874
, clipped on Tuesday, December 29, 2015 8:27:25 AM
Culture is an instrument of adaptation of a new type, for it does not so much itself arise from accident as it serves this purpose, to wit, that everything which in our condition is de facto accidental stand bathed in the light of a higher, ultimate necessity. And therefore: culture acts through established religion, through custom, law, interdiction and injunction, in order to convert insufficiencies into idealities, minuses into pluses, shortcomings into acmes of perfection, defects into virtues. Suffering is distressful? Yes, but it ennobles and even redeems. Life is short? Yes, but the life beyond is everlasting. Childhood is toilsome and inane? Yes, but for all that—halcyon, idyllic, positively sacred. Old age is horrid? Yes, but this is the preparation for eternity, and besides, old people are to be respected, by virtue of the fact that they are old. Man is a monster? Yes, but he is not to blame; it was his primogenitors who brought on the evil—or else a demon interfered in the Divine Act. Man does not know what to want, he seeks the meaning of life, he is unhappy? Yes, but this is the consequence of freedom, which is the highest value; that one must pay through the nose for its possession is therefore of no great significance: a man deprived of freedom would be more unhappy than if he were not! Animals, Klopper observes, make no distinction between feces and carrion: they steer clear of both the one and the other as the evacuations of life. For a consistent materialist the equating of a corpse with excrement ought to be just as valid; but the latter we dispose of furtively, and the former with pomp, loftily, equipping the remains with a number of costly and complicated wrappings. This is required by culture, as a system of appearances that help us reconcile ourselves to the despicable facts. The solemn ceremony of burial serves as a sedative for the natural outrage and revolt roused in us by the infamy of mortality. Stanislaw Lem;Michael Kandel
, Perfect Vacuum.
loc. 1956-1970
, clipped on Tuesday, December 29, 2015 12:30:03 PM
Genomes are the gateway to an enchanted land. The reams of code, 3 billion letters in our own case, read like an experimental novel, an occasionally coherent story in short chapters broken up by blocks of repetitive text, verses, blank pages, streams of consciousness: and peculiar punctuation. A tiny proportion of our own genome, less than 2%, codes for proteins; a larger portion is regulatory; and the function of the rest is liable to cause intemperate rows among otherwise polite scientists. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 380-384
, clipped on Thursday, June 9, 2016 8:08:13 AM
Genomes do not predict the future but recall the past: they reflect the exigencies of history. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 399-400
, clipped on Thursday, June 9, 2016 8:11:24 AM
If complex cells arose via ‘standard’ natural selection, in which genetic mutations give rise to variations acted upon by natural selection, then we would expect to see a mixed bag of internal structures, as varied as the external appearance of cells. Eukaryotic cells are wonderfully varied in their size and shape, from giant leaf-like algal cells to spindly neurons, to outstretched amoebae. If eukaryotes had evolved most of their complexity in the course of adapting to distinct ways of life in divergent populations, then this long history should be reflected in their distinctive internal structures too. But look inside (as we’ll soon do) and you’ll see that all eukaryotes are made of basically the same components. Most of us couldn’t distinguish between a plant cell, a kidney cell and a protist from the local pond down the electron microscope: they all look remarkably similar. Just try it (Figure 3). If rising oxygen levels removed Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 570-577
, clipped on Thursday, June 9, 2016 2:03:56 PM
The early earth was not drastically different from our own world: it was a water world, with a moderate climate, dominated by volcanic gases such as carbon dioxide and nitrogen. While our early planet lacked oxygen, it was not rich in gases conducive to organic chemistry – hydrogen, methane and ammonia. That rules out tired old ideas of primordial soup; yet life started as early as could be, perhaps 4 billion years ago. At face value, something else was driving the emergence of life; we will come to that. Bacteria soon took over, colonising every inch, every metabolic niche, remodelling the globe over 2 billion years, depositing rocks and minerals on a colossal scale, transforming oceans, atmosphere and continents. They crashed the climate in global snowball earths; they oxidised the world, filling the oceans and air with reactive oxygen. Yet in all this immense duration, neither the bacteria nor the archaea became anything else: they remained stubbornly simple in their structure and way of life. For an eternal 4 billion years, through extremes of environmental and ecological change, bacteria changed their genes and biochemistry, but never changed their form. They never gave rise to more complex life forms, of the kind we might hope to detect on another planet, intelligent aliens – except just once. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 804-813
, clipped on Friday, June 10, 2016 9:18:45 AM
We use about 2 milliwatts of energy per gram – or some 130 watts for an average person weighing 65 kg, a bit more than a standard 100 watt light bulb. That may not sound like a lot, but per gram it is a factor of 10,000 more than the sun (only a tiny fraction of which, at any one moment, is undergoing nuclear fusion). Life is not much like a candle; more of a rocket launcher. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1063-1066
, clipped on Saturday, June 11, 2016 9:01:15 AM
Why were Mitchell’s ideas so hard to accept? In part because they were so genuinely unexpected. The structure of DNA makes perfect sense – the two strands each act as a template for the other, and the sequence of letters encodes the sequence of amino acids in a protein. The chemiosmotic hypothesis, in comparison, seemed quirky in the extreme, and Mitchell himself might as well have been talking Martian. Life is about chemistry, we all know that. ATP is formed from the reaction of ADP and phosphate, so all that was needed was the transfer of one phosphate from some reactive intermediate on to ADP. Cells are filled with reactive intermediates, so it was just a case of finding the right one. Or so it seemed for several decades. Then along came Mitchell with a mad glint in his eye, plainly an obsessive, writing out equations that nobody could understand, and declaring that respiration was not about chemistry at all, that the reactive intermediate which everyone had been searching for did not even exist, and that the mechanism coupling electron flow to ATP synthesis was actually a gradient of protons across an impermeable membrane, the proton-motive force. No wonder he made people cross! Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1236-1244
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 1:46:12 AM
I cannot consider the organism without its environment… From a formal point of view the two may be regarded as equivalent phases between which dynamic contact is maintained by the membranes that separate and link them. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1254-1255
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 9:24:18 AM
acceptor releases energy that is stored in the bonds of ATP. An inventory of all known electron donors and electron acceptors used by bacteria and archaea – so-called ‘redox couples’ – would extend over several pages. Not only do bacteria ‘eat’ rocks, but they can ‘breathe’ them too. Eukaryotic cells are pathetic in comparison. There is about the same metabolic Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1302-1305
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 9:30:59 AM
An inventory of all known electron donors and electron acceptors used by bacteria and archaea – so-called ‘redox couples’ – would extend over several pages. Not only do bacteria ‘eat’ rocks, but they can ‘breathe’ them too. Eukaryotic cells are pathetic in comparison. There is about the same metabolic versatility in the entire eukaryotic domain – all plants, animals, algae, fungi and protists – as there is in a single bacterial cell. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1302-1306
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 9:31:27 AM
The problem is that chemiosmotic coupling looks to be useless until a number of sophisticated proteins have been embedded in a proton-tight membrane; and then, but only then, does it serve a purpose. So how on earth did all the parts evolve in advance? Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1395-1397
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 9:42:01 AM
Why did life arise so early? Why did it stagnate in morphological complexity for several billion years? Why did complex, eukaryotic, cells arise just once in 4 billion years? Why do all eukaryotes share a number of perplexing traits that are never found in bacteria or archaea, from sex and two sexes to ageing? Here I am adding two more questions of an equally unsettling magnitude: why does all life conserve energy in the form of proton gradients across membranes? And how (and when) did this peculiar but fundamental process evolve? Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1400-1404
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 9:43:04 AM
Because respiration is universal across all life, but photosynthesis is restricted to just a few groups of bacteria. If the last universal common ancestor were photosynthetic, then most groups of bacteria and all archaea must have lost this valuable trait. That’s not parsimonious, to say the least. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1449-1452
, clipped on Sunday, June 12, 2016 9:44:51 AM
So what does all this stuff about reduction potentials really mean? It at once constrains and opens wide the conditions under which life should evolve in the universe. This is one of the reasons that scientists often look as if they are in their own little world, lost in abstract thought about the most arcane details. Can there possibly be any mighty import about the fact that the reduction potential of hydrogen falls with pH? Yes! Yes! Yes! Under alkaline hydrothermal conditions, H2 should react with CO2 to form organic molecules. Under almost any other conditions, it will not. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1967-1972
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 1:33:48 PM
We have established on thermodynamic grounds that to make a cell from scratch requires a continuous flow of reactive carbon and chemical energy across rudimentary catalysts in a constrained through-flow system. Only hydrothermal vents provide the requisite conditions, and only a subset of vents – alkaline hydrothermal vents – match all the conditions needed. But alkaline vents come with both a serious problem and a beautiful answer to the problem. The serious problem is that these vents are rich in hydrogen gas, but hydrogen will not react with CO2 to form organics. The beautiful answer is that the physical structure of alkaline vents – natural proton gradients across thin semiconducting walls – will (theoretically) drive the formation of organics. And then concentrate them. To my mind, at least, all this makes a great deal of sense. Add to this the fact that all life on earth uses (still uses!) proton gradients across membranes to drive both carbon and energy metabolism, and I’m tempted to cry, with the physicist John Archibald Wheeler, ‘Oh, how could it have been otherwise! How could we all have been so blind for so long!’ Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 1972-1980
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 1:37:39 PM
What’s different? An astonishing parade. Most of the enzymes used for DNA replication are distinct in bacteria and archaea. What could be more fundamental than that! Possibly only the membrane – yet it, too, is distinct in bacteria and archaea. So is the cell wall. That means both of the barriers that separate living cells from their environment are utterly different in bacteria and archaea. It is almost impossible to guess exactly what their common ancestor might have possessed instead. The list goes on, but that will do. Of the six fundamental processes of living cells discussed in the previous chapter – carbon flux, energy flux, catalysis, DNA replication, compartmentalisation and excretion – only the first three share any deep similarity, and even then only in certain respects, as we shall see. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2163-2168
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 1:59:20 PM
LUCA could have possessed two copies of everything, and lost one copy in bacteria, and the other copy in archaea. That sounds inherently daft, but it can’t be ruled out easily. For example, we know that mixtures of bacterial and archaeal lipids do make stable membranes; perhaps LUCA had both types of lipid, and her descendants later specialised by losing one or the other. That might conceivably be true for some traits, but is not generalisable to all, as it runs into a problem known as ‘the genome of Eden’. If LUCA had everything, and her descendants streamlined later on, then she must have started out with an enormous genome, much larger than any modern prokaryote. That seems to me to put the cart before the horses – we have complexity before simplicity, and two solutions to every problem. And why did all the descendants lose one of everything? I don’t buy it; roll on the second option. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2169-2175
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:00:30 PM
The next possibility is that LUCA was a perfectly normal bacterium, with a bacterial membrane, cell wall and DNA replication. At some later point, one group of descendants, the first archaea, replaced all these traits as they adapted to extreme conditions such as high temperatures in hot vents. This is probably the most widely accepted explanation, but it too is hardly persuasive. If it is true, why are the processes of DNA transcription and translation into proteins so similar in bacteria and archaea, yet DNA replication so different? Why, if archaeal cell membranes and cell walls help archaea adapt to hydrothermal environments, did extremophile bacteria living in the same vents not replace their own membranes and walls with the archaeal versions, or something similar? Why do archaea living in the soil or open oceans not replace their membranes and walls with bacterial versions? Bacteria and archaea share the same environments across the world, yet remain fundamentally different in their genetics and biochemistry in all these environments, despite lateral gene transfer between the two domains. It’s just not credible that all these profound differences could reflect adaptation to one extreme environment, and yet then remain fixed in archaea, without exception, regardless of how inappropriate they were for all other environments. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2175-2184
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:01:44 PM
The apparent paradox is not a paradox at all: LUCA really was chemiosmotic, with an ATP synthase, but really did not have a modern membrane, or any of the large respiratory complexes that modern cells use to pump protons. She really did have DNA, and the universal genetic code, transcription, translation and ribosomes, but really had not evolved a modern method of DNA replication. This strange phantom cell makes no sense in an open ocean, but begins to add up when considered in the environment of alkaline hydrothermal vents discussed in the previous chapter. The clue lies in how bacteria and archaea live in these vents – some of them, at least, by an apparently primordial process called the acetyl CoA pathway, which bears an uncanny resemblance to the geochemistry of vents. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2185-2190
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:01:56 PM
Block the pumps and everything grinds to a halt. That’s what happens if we take a cyanide pill: it jams up the final proton pump of the respiratory chain in our mitochondria. If the respiratory pumps are impeded in this way, protons can continue to flow in through the ATP synthase for a few seconds before the proton concentration equilibrates across the membrane, and net flow ceases. It is almost as hard to define death as life, but the irrevocable collapse of membrane potential comes pretty close. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2312-2315
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:14:58 PM
By tracking the steady-state difference in proton concentration, we could calculate the free energy (G) available from a pH gradient alone. The results are just beautiful. The driving force available depends on the leakiness of the membrane to protons. If the membrane is extremely leaky, protons come rushing in like fools, but they also disappear again quickly, eliminated by a rapid influx of OH– ions. Even with very leaky membranes, we found that protons will still enter faster through membrane proteins (like the ATP synthase) than through the lipids themselves. This means that proton flux can drive ATP synthesis or carbon reduction via the membrane protein Ech. Taking concentration differences and charge into consideration, as well as the operation of proteins like the ATP synthase, we showed that only cells with very leaky membranes can use natural proton gradients to power carbon and energy metabolism. Remarkably, these leaky cells theoretically glean as much energy from a natural proton gradient of 3 pH units as modern cells gain from respiration. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2339-2348
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:18:11 PM
A leaky cell in a proton gradient has plenty of energy, enough to drive carbon and energy metabolism. If by some evolutionary sleight of hand, a fully functional pump is placed in the membrane, it offers no benefit whatsoever in terms of energy availability: the power available remains exactly the same as in its absence. That’s because pumping protons over a leaky membrane is pointless – they come straight back through. Decrease membrane permeability by a factor of 10, and try again; still zero benefit. Decrease permeability by a factor of 100; still no benefit. Decrease permeability by a factor of 1,000; still no benefit. Why not? There is a balance of forces. Decreasing membrane permeability helps pumping, but also collapses the natural proton gradient, undermining the cell’s power supply. Only if large amounts of pump are plastered across a nearly impermeable membrane (equivalent to that in our own cells) is there any benefit to pumping. That is a serious problem. There is no selective driving force for the evolution of either modern lipid membranes or modern proton pumps. Without a driving force they should not evolve; but they do exist, nonetheless. So what are we missing? Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2397-2406
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:21:51 PM
Bill Martin and I were pondering over exactly that question, and we mused that methanogens use a protein called an antiporter. The methanogens in question actually pump out sodium ions (Na+), not protons (H+), but they still have a few problems with protons accumulating inside. The antiporter swaps an Na+ for an H+, as if it were a strict two-way turnstile, or revolving door. For each Na+ passing into the cell down a concentration gradient, one H+ is forced out. It is a proton pump powered by a sodium gradient. But antiporters are pretty undiscriminating. They don’t care which way round they work. If a cell pumped H+ rather than Na+, then the antiporter would simply go into reverse. For every H+ that entered, one Na+ would then be forced out. Ha! Suddenly we had it! If our leaky cell sitting in the alkaline hydrothermal vent evolved an Na+/H+ antiporter, it would act as a proton-powered Na+ pump! For each H+ that entered the cell through the antiporter, one Na+ would be forced to leave! In theory, the antiporter could convert a natural proton gradient into a biochemical sodium gradient. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2406-2416
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:25:42 PM
There are several surprising ramifications of this simple invention. One is almost incidental: pumping sodium out of the cell lowers the concentration of sodium within the cell. We know that many core enzymes found in both bacteria and archaea (those responsible for transcription and translation, for example) have been optimised by selection to work at low Na+ concentration, despite most probably evolving in the oceans, where the Na+ concentration seems to have been high even 4 billion years ago. The early operation of an antiporter could potentially explain why all cells are optimised to low sodium, despite evolving in a high-sodium environment. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2439-2444
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:26:59 PM
In the broadest of terms, prokaryotes explored the possibilities of metabolism, finding ingenious solutions to the most arcane chemical challenges, while eukaryotes turned their back on this chemical cleverness, and explored instead the untapped potential of larger size and greater structural complexity. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2681-2683
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:49:13 PM
On the face of it, there could have been scores of endosymbioses, as indeed predicted by the serial endosymbiosis theory. Yet it is barely credible that there could have been 25 different bacteria and 7 or 8 archaea all contributing to an early orgy of endosymbioses, a cellular love-fest; and then nothing for the rest of eukaryotic history. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 2779-2782
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 2:58:56 PM
There is an instructive bacterial precedent for burning ATP, known as ATP or energy ‘spilling’. The term is accurate: some bacteria can splash away up to two-thirds of their overall ATP budget on futile cycling of ions across the cell membrane and other equally pointless feats. Why? One possible answer is that it keeps a healthy balance of ATP to ADP, which keeps the membrane potential and free-radical leak under control. Again, it goes to show that bacteria have plenty of ATP to spare – they are not in any way energetically challenged; only scaling up to eukaryotic sizes reveals the energy-per-gene problem. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 3256-3260
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 4:49:04 PM
Even though it is clear from the genes that the host cell was a bona fide archaeon, which must have had characteristic archaeal lipids in its membranes, eukaryotes have bacterial lipids in their membranes. That’s a fact to conjure with. For some reason, the archaeal membranes must have been replaced with bacterial membranes early on in eukaryotic evolution. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 3544-3547
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 5:44:23 PM
Mittwoch points out a parallel problem relating to true hermaphrodites – people who are born with both types of sex organ, for example a testis on the right-hand side and an ovary on the left. It’s far more likely to be that way round. Barely a third of people with true hermaphroditism have the testis on the left-hand side and the ovary on the right. The difference can hardly be genetic. Mittwoch shows that at critical periods, the right-hand side grows slightly faster than the left, and so is more likely to develop maleness. Curiously, in mice it is exactly the other way around – the left-hand side grows slightly faster and is more likely to develop testes. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 4687-4692
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 7:37:06 PM
If life is nothing but an electron looking for a place to rest, death is nothing but that electron come to rest. Nick Lane
, The Vital Question: Why Is Life the Way It Is?.
loc. 4894-4895
, clipped on Thursday, June 16, 2016 7:48:00 PM
“It goes so much deeper than that. It’s perceptual. We’re so—impoverished, you know? We don’t look out at reality at all, we look in at this model, this caricature our brains cobble together out of wavelengths and pressure points. We squint down over handwritten notes that say two blocks east, turn left at the bridge and we think that reading those stupid scribbles is the same as seeing the universe passing by on the other side of the windshield.” Peter Watts
, Echopraxia.
loc. 817-820
, clipped on Saturday, June 25, 2016 8:40:57 PM
“Life is like a black hole. You don’t know what lies ahead. You can’t ever turn back. All you can do is move forward.” Yamamoto, Hiroshi
, The Stories of Ibis.
loc. 2262-2263
, clipped on Friday, September 23, 2016 12:39:33 AM
“That’s right. I’m able to empathize more easily with a female protagonist than a male one. It’s why I prefer such stories. As I’ve said before, the act of reading a story is a kind of role-play. For as long as I read the story, I become Nanami Shiihara, and Nanami becomes Ginny. I become Mizumi Onouchi, and Mizumi becomes Pansa…” Yamamoto, Hiroshi
, The Stories of Ibis.
loc. 2423-2425
, clipped on Friday, September 23, 2016 12:52:33 AM
a story is nothing more than a lifeless jumble of words. But once it is in the hands of the reader, the soul of the reader and the soul of the protagonist achieve a kind of synergy that transcends the world, breathing life into the story. Yamamoto, Hiroshi
, The Stories of Ibis.
loc. 2429-2430
, clipped on Friday, September 23, 2016 12:53:13 AM
Even if most ems work hard most of the time, and will end or retire soon, most remember much recent leisure and long histories of succeeding against the odds. To most ems, it seems good to be an em. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 459-460
, clipped on Monday, October 17, 2016 10:43:48 PM
Farmer advantages in war, coming in part from their higher density, helped to ensure that farming replaced foraging. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 542-543
, clipped on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 8:01:16 AM
Farmers also seem to have introduced romantic kisses. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 558-559
, clipped on Wednesday, October 19, 2016 8:03:11 AM
The industrial era feature that appeared earliest in Europe was fast changing clothes fashions, starting soon after the Black Death. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 583-584
, clipped on Saturday, October 22, 2016 12:21:44 AM
While farming era stories, jokes, and songs worked when performed by many people in many contexts, during the industrial era artistic performances became more closely matched to the features of particular artists. Intellectuals became more direct and literal (Melzer 2007), and political coalitions became stronger and more often defined by ideologies, instead of by locations, families, or ethnicities. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 603-606
, clipped on Sunday, October 23, 2016 4:14:43 AM
Many of these industrial-era trends can be usefully seen as a reversion to forager values as wealth weakened farming-era social pressures. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 626-627
, clipped on Sunday, October 23, 2016 4:17:58 AM
Inheriting these habits, today we show off in most of the same ways that foragers did, and we do even more because we are rich. Yet as we deny that we show off, we are mostly blind and indifferent to how forager-style ways to show off are often far less functional today. We continue to show off via art, chat, politics, stories, etc., without responding to many changes in their functions and effects. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 724-727
, clipped on Sunday, October 30, 2016 1:07:13 AM
Fictional characters have more extreme features, have attitudes more predictable from their history, better understand the reasons for their actions, are more willing to risk conflict to achieve their goals, and have actions more predictable from their context. Fiction set in the future often tells indirect morality tales about today’s world, by having familiar issues and divisions remain important in the future, so that we can celebrate or criticize today’s groups indirectly, via crediting or blaming fictional groups for future outcomes (Bickham 1997). Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 1048-1053
, clipped on Thursday, November 3, 2016 11:47:50 PM
In general, we tend to more abstractly evaluate the actions of others, or of ourselves at other times, relative to how we evaluate our own immediate actions. This seems to help us to be unknowingly hypocritical, upholding high social ideals even as we usually act on less ideal priorities. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 1075-1077
, clipped on Sunday, November 6, 2016 1:31:20 AM
While the speed of light sets minimum delays, very long cheap delays are possible, such as via sending hard disks via plane or boat. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 1549-1550
, clipped on Sunday, November 13, 2016 5:23:09 PM
Computer logic gates erase bits (i.e., increase entropy) in two different ways. Ordinarily each simple gate erases one bit logically, because it converts two input bits into one output bit. In addition, each gate erases other bits non-logically, because the gate performs its logical operation quickly and away from thermodynamic equilibrium. Today, the vast majority of bits erased in computers are done non-logically. Thus there is today little point in structuring computer gates to avoid logical erasure. Around 2035, however, the rate of non-logical bit erasure should fall to the rate of logical erasure. After that point, if energy cost per computation is to fall much further, then computers must switch to using “reversible” designs that only rarely erase bits logically. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 1765-1770
, clipped on Wednesday, November 16, 2016 2:07:54 AM
It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self–love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 269-271
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:34:18 PM
How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 279-281
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:35:15 PM
It is not the soft power of humanity, it is not that feeble spark of benevolence which Nature has lighted up in the human heart, that is thus capable of counteracting the strongest impulses of self-love. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 304-305
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:36:52 PM
It is reason, principle, conscience, the inhabitant of the breast, the man within, the great judge and arbiter of our conduct. It is he who, whenever we are about to act so as to affect the happiness of others, calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it; and that when we prefer ourselves so shamefully and so blindly to others, we become the proper objects of resentment, abhorrence, and execration. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 312-316
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:37:29 PM
Even if you’re alone with no chance of being caught, even if no one knows you’re stealing, you know. And as you contemplate committing the act, you imagine how an outsider, an impartial spectator of your crime, would react to your moral failure. You step outside yourself and view your actions through the eyes of another. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 352-354
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:40:11 PM
Adam Smith was not a big fan of the pursuit of fame and fortune. His view of what we truly want, of what really makes us happy, cuts to the core of things. It takes him only twelve words to get to the heart of the matter: Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely. The simplicity of this sentence is deceptive for two reasons. First, Smith uses words somewhat differently than we do, so understanding the phrase takes a little bit of work. Second, Smith packs a lot of richness into those twelve words. The first part of Smith’s summary of human desire—that people want to be loved—seems pretty straightforward, although Smith doesn’t mean loved the way we mean it today, as connected to romance and family. He means it in a fuller sense. He means that we want people to like us, respect us, and care about us. We want to be appreciated, desired, praised, and cherished. We want people to pay attention to us and take us seriously. We want them to want our presence, to enjoy our company. People do exist who claim not to care about what others think of them, but often it’s a show, a form of protection from the possibility that they are not loved, not respected, and not appreciated. Often the people who appear not to care what others think about them are the ones who desperately crave approval. Most people want to be loved. And it comes to us naturally, Smith says; it’s part of our essence. More than that, he says, “the chief part of human happiness arises from the consciousness of being beloved.” Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 447-459
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:47:00 PM
Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of love. He naturally dreads, not only to be hated, but to be hateful; or to be that thing which is the natural and proper object of hatred. He desires, not only praise, but praiseworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise. He dreads, not only blame, but blameworthiness; or to be that thing which, though it should be blamed by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of blame. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 476-480
, clipped on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 11:47:57 PM
Other actions, on the contrary, call forth our approbation, and we hear every body around us express the same favourable opinion concerning them. Every body is eager to honour and reward them. They excite all those sentiments for which we have by nature the strongest desire; the love, the gratitude, the admiration of mankind. We become ambitious of performing the like; and thus naturally lay down to ourselves a rule of another kind, that every opportunity of acting in this manner is carefully to be sought after. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 664-668
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:04:11 AM
The Universe is full of dots. Connect the right ones and you can draw anything. The important question is not whether the dots you picked are really there, but why you chose to ignore all the others. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 721-723
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:08:49 AM
...upon coming into the world, we soon find that wisdom and virtue are by no means the sole objects of respect; nor vice and folly, of contempt. We frequently see the respectful attentions of the world more strongly directed towards the rich and the great, than towards the wise and the virtuous. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 1014-1016
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:31:49 AM
Something inside us reveres those who are revered. We idolize those who are idolized. We love those who are loved. Part of it is an awe for excellence. We will watch astounding feats on the Internet simply because they’re astounding and we can’t imagine how they can be done, even when they are no more practical than solving a Rubik’s Cube. We will watch and admire expertise that has no practical purpose. After all, the ability to hit a baseball moving unpredictably at one hundred miles an hour with a wooden stick is really not practical at all. A great heart surgeon would seem to be more admirable. But no one wants to sit in the car of a great heart surgeon unless that heart surgeon is world renowned, and maybe even that isn’t enough. No heart surgeon reaches the reach of LeBron James. There is something ineffable about fame that draws us to it. Maybe Smith’s insight into our desire to be loved is part of the answer. Somehow, being near people who are loved is exhilarating. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 1034-1041
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:33:55 AM
Scarce a word, scarce a gesture, can fall from him that is altogether neglected. In a great assembly he is the person upon whom all direct their eyes; it is upon him that their passions seem all to wait with expectation, in order to receive that movement and direction which he shall impress upon them; and if his behaviour is not altogether absurd, he has, every moment, an opportunity of interesting mankind, and of rendering himself the object of the observation and fellow-feeling of every body about him. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 1064-1067
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 12:36:28 AM
some cultures, it’s as if a memo went out saying “There’s a sucker born every minute; all you have to do is find such people and exploit them.” In other cultures, a memo seems to have gone out that says, “Be a decent human being. It’s OK to make money, but keep your word, and don’t exploit people in distress.” It’s a fabulous advantage to live in a society where people resist the urge to exploit others, keeping their word and honoring commitments and contracts even when that means foregoing a short-run benefit. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 1951-1955
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 9:28:41 PM
There’s a similar lesson to be learned for parenting. Parents struggle to leave their kids alone. We hover and urge and nudge our kids in directions we think will benefit them later in life. And sometimes we’re thinking of ourselves; we try to keep our kids from making mistakes we made even when those mistakes helped us become who we are. Or we push our kids to take paths we regret missing. Russ Roberts
, How Adam Smith Can Change Your Life: An Unexpected Guide to Human Nature and Happiness.
loc. 2120-2123
, clipped on Thursday, December 15, 2016 9:39:24 PM
Readers tempted to see pipes as a primitive technology should know that pipes rank high on “product complexity,” meaning that nations must master an unusually wide range of abilities to make pipes well. Specifically, in 2013 pipes had an average complexity rank of 350 out of the 1239 product types ranked (Hausmann et al. 2014). Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 1931-1934
, clipped on Friday, December 16, 2016 11:53:33 PM
Cluttered spaces tend to cause and result from creativity, and cluttered offices often help workers to manage great detail (Vohs et al. 2013). Workers with cluttered offices often know where to find most everything in them, even if outsiders can make little sense of the apparent disorder. Yes, clutter often results from and leads to stress and disorganization, and so may usually be avoided. Even so, some em workers likely gain from and accept clutter, and clutter may also be used to signal membership in creative communities. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 2246-2250
, clipped on Saturday, December 17, 2016 12:14:14 AM
We’re not searching for anything except people. We don’t need other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. One world is enough, even there we feel stifled. We desire to find our own idealized image; they’re supposed to be globes, civilizations more perfect than ours; in other worlds we expect to find the image of our own primitive past. Stanislaw Lem
, Solaris.
loc. 1178-1181
, clipped on Saturday, December 17, 2016 2:08:16 AM
Solaristics, wrote Muntius, is a substitute for religion in the space age. It is faith wrapped in the cloak of science; contact, the goal for which we are striving, is as vague and obscure as communion with the saints or the coming of the Messiah. Exploration is a liturgy couched in methodological formulas; the humble work of researchers is the expectation of consummation, of Annunciation, for there are not nor can there be any bridges between Solaris and Earth. This obvious fact, like many others—the absence of shared experiences, the absence of conveyable concepts—was rejected by solaricists, the same way the faithful reject arguments that would subvert the underpinnings of their faith. Stanislaw Lem
, Solaris.
loc. 2836-2841
, clipped on Sunday, December 18, 2016 6:02:47 PM
Solaristics, then, is the posthumous child of long-dead myths, the final flower of mystical yearnings that people no longer have the courage to utter aloud; while the cornerstone hidden deep in the foundations of this edifice is the hope of Redemption. Stanislaw Lem
, Solaris.
loc. 2847-2849
, clipped on Sunday, December 18, 2016 6:04:41 PM
Do you believe that you will die? Yes, man is mortal, I am a man, ergo ... No, that isn’t what I mean. I know that you know that. What I’m asking is: Have you ever actually believed it, believed it completely, believed not with your mind but with your body, actually felt that one day the fingers now holding this very piece of paper will be yellow and icy ... ? No, of course you don’t believe it—which is the reason why, up to now, you haven’t jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement, why you’ve gone on eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.... Yevgeny Zamyatin
, We.
loc. 3027-3031
, clipped on Tuesday, January 3, 2017 11:18:16 PM
As we analyze a thing into its parts or into its properties, we tend to magnify these, to exaggerate their apparent independence, and to hide from ourselves (at least for a time) the essential integrity and individuality of the composite whole. We divided the body into its organs, the skeleton into its bones, as in very much the same fashion we make a subjective analysis of the mind, according to the teaching of psychology, into component factors: but we know very well that judgement and knowledge, courage or gentleness, love or fear, have no separate existence, but are somehow mere manifestations, or imaginary coefficients, of a most complex integral.10 Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 637-642
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 2:39:03 AM
The misnaming of fields of study is so common as to lead to what might be general systems laws. For example, the mathematician, Frank Harary, once suggested this "law" to me: Any field with the word "science" in its name is guaranteed not to be a science. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 713-715
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 2:46:06 AM
Actually, sometimes we can gain from modeling on a poorly known system A fresh point of view can be helpful if something is known about the analog. At the very least, an analog jiggles the mind-and heaven knows our minds need a little jiggling. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 814-816
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 5:10:41 AM
We do not create the world. We make a model. Making models is what organismists do; making models is what painters do; and making models is also what scientists do, despite any protestations to the contrary. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 821-822
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 5:11:37 AM
It should be noted, however, that the reductionists have not yet succeeded in reducing all phenomena to physical and chemical primitives. Whether they can or not is a neat philosophical question, not a scientific one. The fact remains that there are lots and lots of medium number systems—not all of them "living systems" by any means—that have not been "explained" in terms of physical and chemical primitives. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 839-842
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 5:14:15 AM
My advice to any young man at the beginning of his career is to try to look for the mere outlines of big things with his fresh, untrained, and unprejudiced mind.9 - H. Selye Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 950-952
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 5:25:12 AM
To be a successful generalist, one must study the art of ignoring data and of seeing only the "mere outlines" of things. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 1009-1010
, clipped on Wednesday, January 4, 2017 10:16:21 AM
Mathematicians may flatter themselves that they possess new ideas which mere human language is as yet unable to express. Let them make the effort to express these ideas in appropriate words without the aid of symbols, and if they succeed they will not only lay us laymen under a lasting obligation, but, we venture to say, they will find themselves very much enlightened during the process, and will even be doubtful whether the ideas as expressed in symbols had ever quite found their way out of the equations into their minds. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 1689-1692
, clipped on Thursday, January 5, 2017 2:07:37 AM
If we have limited memories, decomposing a system into noninteracting parts may enable us to predict behavior better than we could without the decomposition. This is the method of science, which would be unnecessary were it not for our limited brains. The very existence of science is thus the best proof that human mental capacities are, in fact, limited. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 3055-3057
, clipped on Thursday, January 5, 2017 9:10:32 AM
Trying to cope with unfamiliar, complex phenomena, we try to 1. get a "complete" view—one broad enough to encompass all phenomena of interest—so we are not surprised; 2. get a "minimal" view—one that lumps together states that are unnecessarily discriminated—so we do not overtax our observational powers; 3. get an "independent" view—one that decomposes observed states into noninteracting qualities—so as to reduce the mental effort required. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 3149-3153
, clipped on Thursday, January 5, 2017 9:15:13 AM
Count-to-Three Principle: If you cannot think of three ways of abusing a tool, you do not understand how to use it. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 4321-4322
, clipped on Thursday, January 5, 2017 11:15:26 AM
Science may be thought of as the process of learning which ways of looking at things yield invariant laws. The laws of science may thus be descriptions of how the world looks ("Eureka"—I have found), or prescriptions for how to look at the world ("heuristic"—how to find). We really have no way of knowing which. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 4407-4409
, clipped on Thursday, January 5, 2017 11:22:21 AM
Principle of Indeterminability: We cannot with certainty attribute observed constraint either to system or environment. Weinberg, Gerald
, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking.
loc. 4656-4657
, clipped on Thursday, January 5, 2017 11:58:33 AM
“As a young man, when I heard about ingenious inventions, I tried to invent them by myself, even without reading the author. In doing so, I perceived, by degrees, that I was making use of certain rules.” G. Polya
, How to Solve It.
loc. 3220-3221
, clipped on Friday, January 6, 2017 7:34:14 AM
“You can undertake without hope and persevere without success.” Thus may speak an inflexible will, or honor and duty, or a nobleman with a noble cause. This sort of determination, however, would not do for the scientist, who should have some hope to start with, and some success to go on. In scientific work, it is necessary to apportion wisely determination to outlook. You do not take up a problem, unless it has some interest; you settle down to work seriously if the problem seems instructive; you throw in your whole personality if there is a great promise. If your purpose is set, you stick to it, but you do not make it unnecessarily difficult for yourself. You do not despise little successes, on the contrary, you seek them: If you cannot solve the proposed problem try to solve first some related problem. G. Polya
, How to Solve It.
loc. 3234-3243
, clipped on Friday, January 6, 2017 7:35:11 AM
“Home is people,” she says to Asael, softly. Asael blinks. “Home is what you take with you, not what you leave behind.” N. K. Jemisin
, The Fifth Season.
loc. 3016-3017
, clipped on Saturday, January 7, 2017 7:02:49 AM
Makeup, while the world is ending. You don’t know whether to be awed or affronted by that. N. K. Jemisin
, The Fifth Season.
loc. 3554-3554
, clipped on Saturday, January 7, 2017 9:21:30 AM
He’s always good at guessing her thoughts. “You can’t make anything better,” he says, heavily. “The world is what it is. Unless you destroy it and start all over again, there’s no changing it.” He sighs, rubs his face against her breast. “Take what you can get out of it, Syen. Love your son. Even live the pirate life if that makes you happy. But stop looking for anything better than this.” N. K. Jemisin
, The Fifth Season.
loc. 4965-4968
, clipped on Saturday, January 7, 2017 11:31:23 AM
“Someday, you must tell me what it’s like there. Why all who come out of that place seem so very competent… and so very afraid.” N. K. Jemisin
, The Fifth Season.
loc. 5170-5171
, clipped on Saturday, January 7, 2017 12:31:24 PM
“This was where The Little Engine That Could once sat.” She lapsed into silence and we all stood there respectfully, staring at an empty space in the air. Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 1561-1562
, clipped on Sunday, January 8, 2017 9:11:25 AM
“You see? I know where every single book used to be in the library.” She pointed to the shelf opposite. “Over there was Catch-22, which was a hugely popular fishing book and one of a series, I believe.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 1573-1575
, clipped on Sunday, January 8, 2017 9:13:06 AM
People appear to achieve grit by gaining a deep purpose and personal meaning from their activities, by giving and getting help via strong bonds with friends and teammates, by making a game out of difficult situations, by being confident but realistic, by preparing well and often, by facing and thinking through their fears, by having a “growth mindset” that focuses on learning and improving, by debriefing often and noting what they could have done better, by celebrating small wins, and by regularly finding things to laugh at (Barker 2015b Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 3412-3416
, clipped on Monday, January 9, 2017 8:52:25 AM
“You pseudo-rationalists always drag up the spoon issue, don’t you? Our Munsell works in mysterious ways. Top Chromatologians have thought long and hard over the spoon question, and have come to the conclusion that, since the Word of Munsell is infallible, there must be some greater plan to which we are not yet privy.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 3585-3587
, clipped on Monday, January 9, 2017 1:51:14 PM
This was true, and since one’s career path was never decided by ability or intellect, it didn’t much matter anyway. Lessons were generally restricted to reading, writing, French, music, geography, sums, cooking and Rule-followment, which meant sitting in a circle and agreeing on how important the Rules were. Most pupils referred to the subject as “nodding.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 3744-3747
, clipped on Monday, January 9, 2017 2:07:59 PM
We’d heard about them but hadn’t considered that we would ever be able to observe them in any meaningful way. Like the Pyramids, the Great Sweat, Chuck Naurice, Tariq Al-Simpson, M’Donna and the Rainbowsians, we all knew they had once existed, but there was no record, or proof—they were now just labels on lost memories, cascading down the years from resident to resident, echoes of lost knowledge. Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 4387-4390
, clipped on Tuesday, January 10, 2017 1:07:28 AM
People tend to be more passionate and sensitive about their opinions on politics and law. This is in part because such topics are related to morality and social norms, and in part because data and theory in such areas tend to be weaker, often allowing a wider range of opinions to be consistent with our best data and theories. Because of this sensitivity, many readers are especially likely to be offended by, or lose respect for, authors who discuss politics or law. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 5248-5252
, clipped on Tuesday, January 10, 2017 7:22:18 AM
Ems are likely to move back toward farmer-like explicit and distinct social classes, and more frequent overt rituals wherein ems with different roles take on different ritualized behaviors. Compared with us, ems are likely to be more stratified into explicit classes, and to play out more frequent explicit and stylized synchronized behaviors. Robin Hanson
, The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life when Robots Rule the Earth.
loc. 6220-6222
, clipped on Tuesday, January 10, 2017 8:31:38 AM
“I understand the theory about traveling—that it involves moving between two points, usually different ones.” “But not always,” said Yewberry, eager not to give me the intellectual upper hand. “True,” I conceded. Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 5402-5405
, clipped on Tuesday, January 10, 2017 10:36:05 AM
“Because there’s someone else here in East Carmine. Someone hopelessly unsuitable. It’s all a really bad idea and will lead to trouble of the worst sort. But no matter what, every minute in her presence makes my life a minute more complete.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 5986-5987
, clipped on Thursday, January 12, 2017 11:51:46 PM
I realized that this world, blighted and imperfect as it is, would be better with you in it.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 6554-6555
, clipped on Saturday, January 14, 2017 12:18:17 AM
“The best lies to tell,” said Jane, “are the ones people want to believe.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 6926-6926
, clipped on Saturday, January 14, 2017 9:04:55 AM
“Continuous sustainability. A community where everyone has their place, everyone knows their place and works ceaselessly to maintain continuance. If you were to dispassionately consider the principal aim of the society to be longevity rather than fairness, then everything is downgraded to simply a means of attaining that goal. Rather than waiting for a resident to prove themselves disharmonious, the system simply flags them early and sends them off to Reboot as a precaution. If you think about it, the whole notion is quite ingenious.” Jasper Fforde
, Shades of Grey.
loc. 6939-6943
, clipped on Saturday, January 14, 2017 9:06:33 AM
Or you’re so worried about doing the right thing all the time that you become worried about how much you’re worrying. Or you feel so guilty for every mistake you make that you begin to feel guilty about how guilty you’re feeling. Or you get sad and alone so often that it makes you feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it. Welcome to the Feedback Loop from Hell. Chances are you’ve engaged in it more than a few times. Maybe you’re engaging in it right now: “God, I do the Feedback Loop all the time—I’m such a loser for doing it. I should stop. Oh my God, I feel like such a loser for calling myself a loser. I should stop calling myself a loser. Ah, fuck! I’m doing it again! See? I’m a loser! Argh!” Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 322-327
, clipped on Thursday, January 19, 2017 12:26:44 AM
If you find yourself consistently giving too many fucks about trivial shit that bothers you—your ex-boyfriend’s new Facebook picture, how quickly the batteries die in the TV remote, missing out on yet another two-for-one sale on hand sanitizer—chances are you don’t have much going on in your life to give a legitimate fuck about. And that’s your real problem. Not the hand sanitizer. Not the TV remote. I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some. I think what most people—especially educated, pampered middle-class white people—consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 469-474
, clipped on Thursday, January 19, 2017 12:40:32 AM
“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.” Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 613-614
, clipped on Friday, January 20, 2017 12:20:00 AM
Emotions are part of the equation of our lives, but not the entire equation. Just because something feels good doesn’t mean it is good. Just because something feels bad doesn’t mean it is bad. Emotions are merely signposts, suggestions that our neurobiology gives us, not commandments. Therefore, we shouldn’t always trust our own emotions. In fact, I believe we should make a habit of questioning them. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 662-666
, clipped on Friday, January 20, 2017 12:25:39 AM
Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make money and be popular and well-respected and admired and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into the room. Everybody wants that. It’s easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 689-694
, clipped on Friday, January 20, 2017 12:28:10 AM
What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame. You have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. It can’t all be roses and unicorns all the time. Pleasure is the easy question. And pretty much all of us have a similar answer. The more interesting question is the pain. What is the pain that you want to sustain? That’s the hard question that matters, the question that will actually get you somewhere. It’s the question that can change a perspective, a life. It’s what makes me, me, and you, you. It’s what defines us and separates us and ultimately brings us together. For most of my adolescence and young adulthood, I fantasized about being a musician—a rock star, in particular. Any badass guitar song I heard, I would always close my eyes and envision myself up on stage, playing it to the screams of the crowd, people absolutely losing their minds to my sweet finger-noodling glory. This fantasy could keep me occupied for hours on end. For me, it was never a question of if I’d ever be up playing in front of screaming crowds, but when. I had it all planned out. I was simply biding my time before I could invest the proper amount of energy and effort into getting out there and making my mark. First I needed to finish school. Then I needed to make some extra money to buy gear. Then I needed to find enough free time to practice. Then I had to network and plan my first project. Then . . . and then nothing. Despite my fantasizing about this for over half my lifetime, the reality never came to fruition. And it took me a long time and a lot of struggle to finally figure out why: I didn’t actually want it. I was in love with the result—the image of me on stage, people cheering, me rocking out, pouring my heart into what I was playing—but I wasn’t in love with the process. And because of that, I failed at it. Repeatedly. Hell, I didn’t even try hard enough to fail at it. I hardly tried at all. The daily drudgery of practicing, the logistics of finding a group and rehearsing, the pain of finding gigs and actually getting people to show up and give a shit, the broken strings, the blown tube amp, hauling forty pounds of gear to and from rehearsals with no car. It’s a mountain of a dream and a mile-high climb to the top. And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the summit. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 711-731
, clipped on Friday, January 20, 2017 12:32:05 AM
The common cultural narratives would tell me that I somehow failed myself, that I’m a quitter or a loser, that I just didn’t “have it,” that I gave up on my dream and that maybe I let myself succumb to the pressures of society. But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story. I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way. Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench-press a small house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it. This is not about willpower or grit. This is not another admonishment of “no pain, no gain.” This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness, along with slightly better, slightly upgraded problems. See: it’s a never-ending upward spiral. And if you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 731-743
, clipped on Friday, January 20, 2017 12:33:19 AM
Thank God for family. And thank God for a couple thousand miles of distance. When everyone was home at the same time, I could generally take it for about half an hour before I retreated into the basement. Usually, Dad followed about ten minutes later. There’d be the mutual eye-rolling, and we’d settle down without a word, to read or watch TV. My father and I were both loners by disposition. We could sit in the same room for hours, not say five words to each other, and both be completely comfortable. It drove my mother crazy. Taylor, Dennis
, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1).
loc. 302-306
, clipped on Saturday, January 21, 2017 11:45:43 AM
Seeing myself and seeing me seeing myself made me feel existentially dizzy, Taylor, Dennis
, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1).
loc. 544-544
, clipped on Saturday, January 21, 2017 7:49:23 PM
theory. I’d let myself be switched off before I’d save myself by climbing on someone else’s back. Taylor, Dennis
, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1).
loc. 887-888
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 8:43:38 AM
Who was I? Was I Bob? Or was Bob dead? In engineering terms, what was the metric used to ascribe Bob-hood? Bob was more than a hunk of meat. Bob was a person, and a person was a history, a set of desires, thoughts, goals, and opinions. Bob was the accumulation of all that Bob had been for thirty-one years. The meat was dead, but the things that made Bob different from a chipmunk were alive. In me. I am Bob. Or at least, I am the important parts that made Bob. Taylor, Dennis
, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1).
loc. 955-959
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 8:49:18 AM
The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it measured self-esteem by how positively people felt about themselves. But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 790-792
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 9:43:48 AM
My parents are good people. I don’t blame them for any of this (not anymore, at least). And I love them very much. They have their own stories and their own journeys and their own problems, just as all parents do. And just as all of their parents do, and so on. And like all parents, my parents, with the best of intentions, imparted some of their problems to me, as I probably will to my kids. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 898-901
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 9:56:57 AM
It wasn’t so much the sex I craved, although the sex was fun. It was the validation. I was wanted; I was loved; for the first time since I could remember, I was worthy. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 912-913
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 9:58:42 AM
Because construing everything in life so as to make yourself out to be constantly victimized requires just as much selfishness as the opposite. It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 927-929
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 9:59:55 AM
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn’t minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn’t hurt. It doesn’t mean you aren’t legitimately a victim in some circumstances. It just means that you’re not special. Often, it’s this realization—that you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain—that is the first and most important step toward solving them. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 929-934
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 10:00:31 AM
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter. This sort of thinking is dangerous. Once you accept the premise that a life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you basically accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless. And this mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others. The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. It’s anti-entitlement. People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 994-1001
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 12:20:20 PM
All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s a message that tastes good going down, but in reality is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain. The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies—that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive. After all, that constant pressure to be something amazing, to be the next big thing, will be lifted off your back. The stress and anxiety of always feeling inadequate and constantly needing to prove yourself will dissipate. And the knowledge and acceptance of your own mundane existence will actually free you to accomplish what you truly wish to accomplish, without judgment or lofty expectations. You will have a growing appreciation for life’s basic experiences: the pleasures of simple friendship, creating something, helping a person in need, reading a good book, laughing with someone you care about. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1001-1012
, clipped on Sunday, January 22, 2017 12:21:15 PM
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times. Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. “This is when I feel happy.” “This makes me feel sad.” “This gives me hope.” Unfortunately, there are many people who suck at even this most basic level of self-awareness. I know because I’m one of them. My wife and I sometimes have a fun back-and-forth that goes something like this: HER. What’s wrong? ME. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all. HER. No, something’s wrong. Tell me. ME. I’m fine. Really. HER. Are you sure? You look upset. ME, with nervous laughter. Really? No, I’m okay, seriously. [Thirty minutes later . . . ] ME. . . . And that’s why I’m so fucking pissed off! He just acts as if I don’t exist half the time. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1103-1115
, clipped on Monday, January 23, 2017 12:58:46 AM
But there’s another, even deeper level of the self-awareness onion. And that one is full of fucking tears. The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me? Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1124-1126
, clipped on Monday, January 23, 2017 1:00:10 AM
Always Being Right.Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assumptions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, and make decisions based on our emotional whims. As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, so if your metric for life success is to be right—well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing all of the bullshit to yourself. The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information. It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1267-1274
, clipped on Monday, January 23, 2017 1:12:15 AM
Values are about prioritization. Everybody would love a good cannoli or a house in the Bahamas. The question is your priorities. What are the values that you prioritize above everything else, and that therefore influence your decision-making more than anything else? Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1320-1322
, clipped on Monday, January 23, 2017 1:18:11 AM
it was considerably better than my current defensive armament, which consisted of harsh words and heavy disapproval. Probably not effective against Klingons. Taylor, Dennis
, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) (Bobiverse Book 1).
loc. 1261-1262
, clipped on Monday, January 23, 2017 8:18:35 AM
A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems. Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing. If I hit you with my car, I am both at fault and likely legally responsible to compensate you in some way. Even if hitting you with my car was an accident, I am still responsible. This is the way fault works in our society: if you fuck up, you’re on the hook for making it right. And it should be that way. But there are also problems that we aren’t at fault for, yet we are still responsible for them. For example, if you woke up one day and there was a newborn baby on your doorstep, it would not be your fault that the baby had been put there, but the baby would now be your responsibility. You would have to choose what to do. And whatever you ended up choosing (keeping it, getting rid of it, ignoring it, feeding it to a pit bull), there would be problems associated with your choice—and you would be responsible for those as well. Judges don’t get to choose their cases. When a case goes to court, the judge assigned to it did not commit the crime, was not a witness to the crime, and was not affected by the crime, but he or she is still responsible for the crime. The judge must then choose the consequences; he or she must identify the metric against which the crime will be measured and make sure that the chosen metric is carried out. We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life. Here’s one way to think about the distinction between the two concepts. Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day. You are choosing to read this. You are choosing to think about the concepts. You are choosing to accept or reject the concepts. It may be my fault that you think my ideas are lame, but you are responsible for coming to your own conclusions. It’s not your fault that I chose to write this sentence, but you are still responsible for choosing to read it (or not). There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1448-1472
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 9:36:25 AM
As I looked back on our relationship, I started to notice problems I had never noticed before, problems that I was to blame for and that I could have done something to solve. I realized that it was likely that I hadn’t been a great boyfriend, and that people don’t just magically cheat on somebody they’ve been with unless they are unhappy for some reason. I’m not saying that this excused what my ex did—not at all. But recognizing my mistakes helped me to realize that I perhaps hadn’t been the innocent victim I’d believed myself to be. That I had a role to play in enabling the shitty relationship to continue for as long as it did. After all, people who date each other tend to have similar values. And if I dated someone with shitty values for that long, what did that say about me and my values? I learned the hard way that if the people in your relationships are selfish and doing hurtful things, it’s likely you are too, you just don’t realize it. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1488-1496
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 9:39:04 AM
Beliefs of this sort—that I’m not attractive enough, so why bother; or that my boss is an asshole, so why bother—are designed to give us moderate comfort now by mortgaging greater happiness and success later on. They’re terrible long-term strategies, yet we cling to them because we assume we’re right, because we assume we already know what’s supposed to happen. In other words, we assume we know how the story ends. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1707-1710
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 10:31:40 AM
Just as we look back in horror at the lives of people five hundred years ago, I imagine people five hundred years from now will laugh at us and our certainties today. They will laugh at how we let our money and our jobs define our lives. They will laugh at how we were afraid to show appreciation for those who matter to us most, yet heaped praise on public figures who didn’t deserve anything. They will laugh at our rituals and superstitions, our worries and our wars; they will gawk at our cruelty. They will study our art and argue over our history. They will understand truths about us of which none of us are yet aware. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1721-1726
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 10:33:39 AM
But perhaps the answer is to trust yourself less. After all, if our hearts and minds are so unreliable, maybe we should be questioning our own intentions and motivations more. If we’re all wrong, all the time, then isn’t self-skepticism and the rigorous challenging of our own beliefs and assumptions the only logical route to progress? This may sound scary and self-destructive. But it’s actually quite the opposite. It’s not only the safer option, but it’s liberating as well. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1835-1839
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 10:42:38 AM
Well, next time you’re at a swanky cocktail party and you want to impress somebody, try dropping Manson’s law of avoidance on them: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. That means the more something threatens to change how you view yourself, how successful/unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it. There’s a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the world. Anything that shakes up that comfort—even if it could potentially make your life better—is inherently scary. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 1924-1928
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 10:34:19 PM
I try to live with few rules, but one that I’ve adopted over the years is this: if it’s down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I’m the one who’s screwed up. I have learned this from experience. I have been the asshole acting out based on my own insecurities and flawed certainties more times than I can count. It’s not pretty. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2040-2043
, clipped on Tuesday, January 24, 2017 10:43:58 PM
is the case for many millennial children, my parents looked on as if I were some sort of prodigy. To them, the fact that I could program the VCR without looking at the instruction manual made me the Second Coming of Tesla. It’s easy to look back at my parents’ generation and chuckle at their technophobia. But the further I get into adulthood, the more I realize that we all have areas of our lives where we’re like my parents with the new VCR: we sit and stare and shake our heads and say, “But how?” When really, it’s as simple as just doing it. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2153-2157
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:03:37 PM
When I was young, any time my family got a new VCR or stereo, I would press every button, plug and unplug every cord and cable, just to see what everything did. With time, I learned how the whole system worked. And because I knew how it all worked, I was often the only person in the house who used the stuff. As is the case for many millennial children, my parents looked on as if I were some sort of prodigy. To them, the fact that I could program the VCR without looking at the instruction manual made me the Second Coming of Tesla. It’s easy to look back at my parents’ generation and chuckle at their technophobia. But the further I get into adulthood, the more I realize that we all have areas of our lives where we’re like my parents with the new VCR: we sit and stare and shake our heads and say, “But how?” When really, it’s as simple as just doing it. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2151-2157
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:03:54 PM
“How? How do you just walk up and talk to a person? How can somebody do that?” I had all sorts of screwed-up beliefs about this, like that you weren’t allowed to speak to someone unless you had some practical reason to, or that women would think I was a creepy rapist if I so much as said, “Hello.” The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me. And thus, my VCR question: “How do you just walk up and talk to a person?” Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapable of stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simple place where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak. Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they’re feeling. Their goal is to get back to “feeling good” again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2177-2187
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:07:55 PM
The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something, in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity at all. The desire to avoid rejection at all costs, to avoid confrontation and conflict, the desire to attempt to accept everything equally and to make everything cohere and harmonize, is a deep and subtle form of entitlement. Entitled people, because they feel as though they deserve to feel great all the time, avoid rejecting anything because doing so might make them or someone else feel bad. And because they refuse to reject anything, they live a valueless, pleasure-driven, and self-absorbed life. All they give a fuck about is sustaining the high a little bit longer, to avoid the inevitable failures of their life, to pretend the suffering away. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2341-2350
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:24:50 PM
When you have murky areas of responsibility for your emotions and actions—areas where it’s unclear who is responsible for what, whose fault is what, why you’re doing what you’re doing—you never develop strong values for yourself. Your only value becomes making your partner happy. Or your only value becomes your partner making you happy. This is self-defeating, of course. And relationships characterized by such murkiness usually go down like the Hindenburg, with all the drama and fireworks. People can’t solve your problems for you. And they shouldn’t try, because that won’t make you happy. You can’t solve other people’s problems for them either, because that likewise won’t make them happy. The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves. Rather, a healthy relationship is when two people solve their own problems in order to feel good about each other. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2419-2427
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:30:20 PM
Instead, victims and savers both use each other to achieve emotional highs. It’s like an addiction they fulfill in one another. Ironically, when presented with emotionally healthy people to date, they usually feel bored or lack “chemistry” with them. They pass on emotionally healthy, secure individuals because the secure partner’s solid boundaries don’t feel “exciting” enough to stimulate the constant highs necessary in the entitled person. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2448-2451
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:32:46 PM
If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so. If your partner is going to make a sacrifice for you, it needs to because he or she genuinely wants to, not because you’ve manipulated the sacrifice through anger or guilt. Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations. It can be difficult for people to recognize the difference between doing something out of obligation and doing it voluntarily. So here’s a litmus test: ask yourself, “If I refused, how would the relationship change?” Similarly, ask, “If my partner refused something I wanted, how would the relationship change?” Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2455-2461
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:33:58 PM
For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no. Without that negation, without that occasional rejection, boundaries break down and one person’s problems and values come to dominate the other’s. Conflict is not only normal, then; it’s absolutely necessary for the maintenance of a healthy relationship. If two people who are close are not able to hash out their differences openly and vocally, then the relationship is based on manipulation and misrepresentation, and it will slowly become toxic. Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship, for the simple reason that without trust, the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything. A person could tell you that she loves you, wants to be with you, would give up everything for you, but if you don’t trust her, you get no benefit from those statements. You don’t feel loved until you trust that the love being expressed toward you comes without any special conditions or baggage attached to it. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2489-2496
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:36:44 PM
If you haven’t figured it out yet, our immortality projects are our values. They are the barometers of meaning and worth in our life. And when our values fail, so do we, psychologically speaking. What Becker is saying, in essence, is that we’re all driven by fear to give way too many fucks about something, because giving a fuck about something is the only thing that distracts us from the reality and inevitability of our own death. And to truly not give a single fuck is to achieve a quasi-spiritual state of embracing the impermanence of one’s own existence. In that state, one is far less likely to get caught up in various forms of entitlement. Mark Manson
, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
loc. 2682-2687
, clipped on Wednesday, January 25, 2017 11:53:23 PM
'The name's Schitt,' he replied, 'Jack Schitt.' Jasper Fforde
, The Eyre Affair.
loc. 963-963
, clipped on Friday, January 27, 2017 11:24:33 PM
I agreed, and she went to find a chicken that she could boil all the taste out of, her anger at Dad for the moment forgotten. Mycroft Jasper Fforde
, The Eyre Affair.
loc. 1246-1246
, clipped on Sunday, January 29, 2017 12:10:12 AM
It is, nevertheless, an illusion – and one as dangerous as it is widespread – that in contemporary democracies the more a leader dominates his or her political party and Cabinet, the greater the leader. A more collegial style of leadership is too often characterized as a weakness, the advantages of a more collective political leadership too commonly overlooked. Archie Brown
, The Myth of the Strong Leader.
loc. 114-116
, clipped on Tuesday, January 31, 2017 2:00:25 AM
'No,' replied Bowden. 'I haven't really had time to find myself a wife, although I am not against the idea in principle. It's just that SpecOps is not really a great place for meeting people and I'm not, I confess, a great socialiser. I've been short— listed for a post opening the equivalent of a LiteraTec office in Ohio; it seems to me the perfect opportunity to take a wife.' 'The money's good over there and the facilities are excellent. I'd consider it myself given the opportunity,' I replied. I meant it, too. 'Would you? Would you really?' asked Bowden with a flush of excitement that was curiously at odds with his slightly cold demeanour. 'Sure. Change of scenery,' I stammered, wanting to change the subject in case Bowden got the wrong idea. 'Have you - ah — been a LiteraTec long?' Jasper Fforde
, The Eyre Affair.
loc. 1940-1946
, clipped on Thursday, February 2, 2017 8:01:21 PM
'Love is like oxygen, Bowden. When's the happy day?' 'Oh, she doesn't know yet,' replied Bowden, sighing. 'She is everything a woman should be. Strong and resourceful, loyal and intelligent.' Jasper Fforde
, The Eyre Affair.
loc. 2292-2294
, clipped on Friday, February 3, 2017 7:55:28 PM
When I was out there I wanted us to win, to kill the foe. I revelled in the glory of battle and the camaraderie that only conflict can create. No bond is stronger than that welded in conflict; no greater friend is there than the one who stood next to you as you fought.' Jasper Fforde
, The Eyre Affair.
loc. 2678-2680
, clipped on Friday, February 3, 2017 8:41:54 PM
'I get the point. I don't know. Maybe those sorts of yes or no life-and-death decisions are easier to make because they are so black and white. I can cope with them because it's easier. Human emotions, well . . . they're just a fathomless collection of greys and I don't do so well on the mid-tones.' Jasper Fforde
, The Eyre Affair.
loc. 4793-4795
, clipped on Sunday, February 5, 2017 9:40:25 AM
The first: Doubts about the rationality of voters are empirically justified. The second: Voter irrationality is precisely what economic theory implies once we adopt introspectively plausible assumptions about human motivation. The third: Voter irrationality is the key to a realistic picture of democracy. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 267-269
, clipped on Sunday, February 5, 2017 10:32:33 PM
As we never cease to point out, each man is in practice an excellent economist, producing or exchanging according as he finds it more advantageous to do the one or the other. —Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 598-600
, clipped on Sunday, February 5, 2017 11:31:48 PM
In real-world political settings, the price of ideological loyalty is close to zero.59 So we should expect people to “satiate” their demand for political delusion, to believe whatever makes them feel best. After all, it’s free. The fanatical protectionist who votes to close the borders risks virtually nothing, because the same policy wins no matter how he votes. Either the borders remain open, and the protectionist has the satisfaction of saying, “I told you so”; or the borders close, and the protectionist has the satisfaction of saying, “Imagine how bad things would have been if we hadn’t closed the borders!” Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 623-629
, clipped on Sunday, February 5, 2017 11:35:27 PM
It is a not improbable conjecture that the feeling that humanity was becoming over-civilized, that life was getting too complicated and over-refined, dates from the time when the cave-men first became such. It can hardly be supposed—if the cave-men were at all like their descendants—that none among them discoursed with contempt on the cowardly effeminacy of living under shelter or upon the exasperating inconvenience of constantly returning for food and sleep to the same place instead of being free to roam at large in wide-open spaces. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 1258-1262
, clipped on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 9:42:24 AM
Yet while elevation, mental and physical, of the masses is going on far more rapidly than ever before—while the lowering of the death-rate proves that the average life is less trying, there swells louder and louder the cry that the evils are so great that nothing short of a social revolution can cure them. In presence of obvious improvements . . . it is proclaimed, with increasing vehemence, that things are so bad that society must be pulled to pieces and re-organised on another plan. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 1294-1298
, clipped on Tuesday, February 7, 2017 10:44:07 AM
The civics textbook motto, “If everybody thought that way, democracy would produce horrible results,” could well be true. But as an appeal to citizen self-interest, the motto is a bald fallacy of composition. If everyone knows nothing about politics, we are worse off; but it does not follow that if I know nothing about politics, I am worse off. If one person stands up at a concert, that person sees better, but if everyone stands up, no one sees better. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 2110-2114
, clipped on Wednesday, February 8, 2017 8:02:29 AM
Two forces lie at the heart of economic models of choice: preferences and prices. A consumer’s preferences determine the shape of his demand curve for oranges; the market price he faces determines where along that demand curve he resides. What makes this insight deep is its generality. Economists use it to analyze everything from having babies to robbing banks. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 2770-2772
, clipped on Thursday, February 9, 2017 9:09:31 AM
Nearly all economists assume that people vote instrumentally; that is, they vote to get the policies they prefer. What else would they do? Brennan and Lomasky point to the expressive function of voting. Fans at a football game cheer not to help the home team win, but to express their loyalty. Similarly, citizens might vote not to help policies win, but to express their patriotism, their compassion, or their devotion to the environment. This is not hair-splitting. One implication is that inefficient policies like tariffs or the minimum wage might win because expressing support for them makes people feel good about themselves. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3120-3125
, clipped on Thursday, February 9, 2017 10:26:50 AM
If your vote does not change the outcome, you can safely vote for “feel good” policies even if you know they will be disastrous in practice. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3127-3128
, clipped on Thursday, February 9, 2017 10:27:22 AM
Support for counterproductive policies and mistaken beliefs about how the world works normally come as a package. Rational irrationality emphasizes this link; expressive voting theory—despite its strengths—neglects it. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3191-3193
, clipped on Thursday, February 9, 2017 10:31:37 AM
For example, suppose income growth and job security cause higher economic literacy. Then given a negative economic shock, income growth and job security would decline, reducing the median voter’s economic literacy, increasing the demand for foolish economic policies, which in turn hurts economic performance further. I refer to this downward spiral as “the idea trap.”65 Perhaps it can help solve the central puzzle of development economics: Why poor countries stay poor. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3589-3594
, clipped on Thursday, February 9, 2017 5:34:18 PM
If voters are systematically mistaken about what policies work, there is a striking implication: They will not be satisfied by the politicians they elect. A politician who ignores the public’s policy preferences looks like a corrupt tool of special interests. A politician who implements the public’s policy preferences looks incompetent because of the bad consequences. Empirically, the shoe fits: In the GSS, only 25% agree that “people we elect to Congress try to keep the promises they have made during the election,” and only 20% agree that “most government administrators can be trusted to do what is best for the country.”71 Why does democratic competition yield so few satisfied customers? Because politicians are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The public calls them venal for failing to deliver the impossible. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3621-3627
, clipped on Thursday, February 9, 2017 5:36:22 PM
To get ahead in politics, leaders need a blend of naive populism and realistic cynicism. No wonder the modal politician has a law degree. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3819-3820
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 12:34:43 PM
Faith helps explain politicians’ tendency to dodge pointed questions with vague answers.23 How can refusing to take a position (or changing the subject) be strategically better than candidly endorsing a moderate position?24 Put yourself in the shoes of a voter who opposes the moderate view but has a degree of faith in a candidate’s good intentions. If the candidate announces his allegiance to the moderate view, faith in him dissolves. But as long as the candidate is silent or vague, it does not tax your faith to maintain, “He’s a decent man, he must agree with me.” From politicians’ point of view, the critical fact is that voters on both sides of the issue can “reason” in the same fashion. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3866-3874
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 12:39:12 PM
The ability to wash his hands of his underlings’ actions gives a leader extra slack. If he wants something unpopular to happen, he does not have to become unpopular himself. Instead, he publicly stands with the majority, but privately leads his subordinates to undercut him. In its crassest form, he could tell his subordinates, off the record, that his public statements are the opposite of his true wishes. But it is easier to appoint people who want to do the unpopular thing, then look the other way. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 3939-3943
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 12:44:30 PM
If people are more susceptible to some messages than others, exposure to balanced media can bring out people’s “inner protectionist” or “inner pessimist.” Coverage consistent with our prejudices resonates, so even a neutral stream of messages propels us deeper into error. Left to their own devices, viewers overreact only to evidence that they personally stumble upon. If the media magically vanished, their former audience would have to search harder for reasons to fear foreigners, and might grow less antiforeign out of laziness. The news industry, no matter how balanced, stops this from happening. It ensures that the public gets a steady stream of antiforeign coverage to which it can overreact. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 4058-4063
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 1:03:27 PM
There is at the core of the celebration of markets a relentless tautology. If we begin, by assumption, with the premise that nearly everything can be understood as a market and that markets optimize outcomes, then everything comes back to the same conclusion—marketize! If, in the event, a particular market doesn’t optimize, there is only one possible inference: it must be insufficiently marketlike. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 4172-4175
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 2:30:16 PM
Twisting a marginal trade-off into a binary choice is fundamentalism trying to sound reasonable. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 4338-4338
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 2:49:56 PM
Bastiat, similarly, makes logic and common sense appealing by ridiculing those who lack them. Take his famous Candlemakers’ Petition: We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him. . . . This rival . . . is none other than the sun. [I]f you shut off as much as possible all access to natural light, and thereby create a need for artificial light, what industry in France will not ultimately be encouraged?72 The petition does more than teach economics. It turns protectionism into a joke. In the process, Bastiat depicts economists not as pedants, but as the life of the intellectual party. Without compromising his intellectual integrity, Bastiat makes readers’ desire to think well of themselves work in his favor. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 4613-4622
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 3:13:06 PM
The analogy between voting and shopping is false: Democracy is a commons, not a market. Individual voters do not “buy” policies with votes. Rather they toss their vote into a big common pool. The social outcome depends on the pool’s average content. Bryan Caplan
, The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies.
loc. 4699-4701
, clipped on Saturday, February 11, 2017 3:18:16 PM
Shameful, immodest. I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely. Atwood, Margaret
, The Handmaid's Tale.
loc. 810-812
, clipped on Sunday, February 12, 2017 1:27:50 AM
This washroom used to be for boys. The mirrors have been replaced here too by oblongs of dull gray metal, but the urinals are still there, on one wall, white enamel with yellow stains. They look oddly like babies' coffins. I marvel again at the nakedness of men's lives: the showers right out in the open, the body exposed for inspection and comparison, the public display of privates. What is it for? What purposes of reassurance does it serve? The flashing of a badge, look, everyone, all is in order, I belong here. Why don't women have to prove to one another that they are women? Some form of unbuttoning, some split-crotch routine, just as casual. A doglike sniffing. Atwood, Margaret
, The Handmaid's Tale.
loc. 931-935
, clipped on Sunday, February 12, 2017 11:17:20 AM
Is, I say. Is, is, only two letters, you stupid shit, can't you manage to remember it, even a short word like that? Atwood, Margaret
, The Handmaid's Tale.
loc. 3034-3035
, clipped on Saturday, February 18, 2017 8:10:48 PM
I can see now what it's for, what it was always for: to keep the core of your self out of reach enclosed, protected. Atwood, Margaret
, The Handmaid's Tale.
loc. 3528-3529
, clipped on Saturday, February 18, 2017 9:05:23 PM
I’d no particular ambitions beyond being either widely admired or stealthily influential—I was torn between the two. It hardly mattered, as no major seemed to lead reliably to either. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 122-123
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:11:34 AM
My parents persisted in pretending we were a close-knit family, a family who enjoyed a good heart-to-heart, a family who turned to each other in times of trial. In light of my two missing siblings, this was an astonishing triumph of wishful thinking; I could almost admire it. At the same time, I am very clear in my own mind. We were never that family. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 261-263
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:37:11 AM
Antagonism in my family comes wrapped in layers of code, sideways feints, full deniability. I believe the same can be said of many families. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 297-299
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:42:09 AM
The sound of my mother at the door made my pencil hop to. Mercantilism. Guild monopolies. Thomas More’s Utopia. “Did you know,” I asked her, “that there’s still war in Utopia? And slaves?” Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 363-365
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:49:24 AM
in retrospect, the lesson seemed to be that what you accomplish will never matter so much as where you fail. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 376-377
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:52:35 AM
Sometimes you best avoid talking by being quiet, but sometimes you best avoid talking by talking. I can still talk when I need to. I haven’t forgotten how to talk. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 520-521
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 12:38:30 PM
Language does this to our memories—simplifies, solidifies, codifies, mummifies. An oft-told story is like a photograph in a family album; eventually, it replaces the moment it was meant to capture. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 658-659
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 12:52:59 PM
Our parents, on the other hand, had shut their mouths and the rest of my childhood took place in that odd silence. They never reminisced about the time they had to drive halfway back to Indianapolis because I’d left Dexter Poindexter, my terry-cloth penguin (threadbare, ravaged by love—as who amongst us is not) in a gas station restroom, although they often talk about the time our friend Marjorie Weaver left her mother-in-law in the exact same place. Better story, I grant you. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 753-756
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 1:08:53 PM
I know from Grandma Donna, and not our parents, that I once buried a dime in some cake batter as a surprise, and one of the graduate students chipped her tooth on it, and everybody thought Fern had done it, until I spoke up, so brave and honest. Not to mention generous, since the dime had been my own. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 759-761
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 1:09:47 PM
Sometimes I had to wrap myself around their legs and refuse to let loose, just to get their attention. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 940-941
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 1:33:01 PM
Maybe later, after Fern left, I saw how I should have felt and revised my memory accordingly. People do that. People do that all the time. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1011-1011
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 1:41:10 PM
My mother wasn’t strong enough to hear it; she would never come out of her room again if I told. The only thing I could do for her now was to be okay. I worked at that as if it were my job. No complaints to management about worker conditions. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1520-1522
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 6:19:13 PM
The spoken word converts individual knowledge into mutual knowledge, and there is no way back once you’ve gone over that cliff. Saying nothing was more amendable, and over time I’d come to see that it was usually your best course of action. I’d come to silence hard, but at fifteen I was a true believer. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1594-1596
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 6:28:21 PM
Scully was appallingly gregarious—so outgoing she was practically incoming. Everything seemed to happen in our room. I’d come back from class or dinner, or I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and there’d be a half-dozen freshmen, sitting with their backs against the walls, carrying on about the Whac-A-Mole dynamics of the homes they’d just left. Their parents were so weird! Like Scully, they’d just figured that out. Every single one of them had weird parents. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1638-1641
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 6:32:37 PM
Awkward laugh, eyes darting about like pinballs, cheeks aflame. She was so embarrassed I felt bad for her. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1681-1682
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 6:36:55 PM
When there is an invisible elephant in the room, one is from time to time bound to trip over a trunk. I took my old escape route and I still knew the way. I fell asleep just as fast as I could. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1716-1717
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 6:40:55 PM
I didn’t want a world in which I had to choose between blind human babies and tortured monkey ones. To be frank, that’s the sort of choice I expect science to protect me from, not give me. I handled the situation by not reading more. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 1788-1790
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 6:47:58 PM
My mother always said that it’s very rude when people who can’t sleep wake up people who can. My father had a different perspective. “You can’t imagine,” he’d told her once over a bleary breakfast, when he’d poured his orange juice into his coffee and then salted it as well. “You can’t imagine the white-hot fury someone who can’t sleep feels toward the beautiful dreamer beside him.” Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 2184-2187
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:14:03 PM
Suddenly, weirdly, I felt a pang at the thought of losing her. Life is all arrivals and departures. “I hardly knew you,” I said. “And now you’re leaving me.” Her uncanny valley eyes stared up. She snapped her reptilian jaw. I made her wrap her arms around my neck as if she were also sorry. Her knitting needles poked my ear sharply until I shifted her. “Please don’t go,” she said. Or maybe I said that. It was definitely one of us. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 2319-2322
, clipped on Monday, February 20, 2017 11:26:41 PM
I’d been seeing Ezra’s habit of starring in his own life as a vanity; I’d been amused by it. Now I saw the utility. If I were playing a part, I could establish a distance, pretend to only pretend to be feeling the things I was feeling. The scene was cinematic, despite the sound track of my snuffling. To my right and my left, the tracks vanished into the fog. The train whistle approached. I could have been seeing my brother off to war. To the big city to make his fortune. To search the goldfields for our missing father. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 2725-2728
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 12:31:43 AM
It became a personal catchphrase for him—whenever things were not to his liking, he’d say that—I’m seeing so much of America today. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 2784-2785
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 12:37:18 AM
“The world runs,” Lowell said, “on the fuel of this endless, fathomless misery. People know it, but they don’t mind what they don’t see. Make them look and they mind, but you’re the one they hate, because you’re the one that made them look.” Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 2859-2860
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 12:43:57 AM
I wonder sometimes if I’m the only one spending my life making the same mistake over and over again or if that’s simply human. Do we all tend toward a single besetting sin? Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 2961-2963
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 12:54:17 AM
“You caught that that was bullshit, right?” Todd asked me later, and for just an instant I thought the bullshit part was that we were friends. But no, he just meant that his mother liked to throw her tiny weight around and didn’t really care in whose service. I could see how that might not always be a good quality in a mother, but this didn’t seem to be one of those times. I thought there were moments to complain about your parents and moments to be grateful, and it was a shame to mix those moments up. I made a mental note to remember this in my own life, but it got lost the way mental notes do. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3191-3195
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 1:13:57 AM
That I didn’t know her in the way I’d always thought I did. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3327-3328
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 1:27:10 AM
When I run the world, librarians will be exempt from tragedy. Even their smaller sorrows will last only for as long as you can take out a book. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3357-3358
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 1:30:29 AM
But no one is easier to delude than a parent; they see only what they wish to see. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3378-3378
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 1:33:26 AM
Maybe you think you can, but you really can’t. Maybe anosognosia, the inability to see your own disability, is the human condition and I’m the only one who doesn’t suffer from it. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3424-3426
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 1:52:25 AM
So I’ve always been grateful for that one final request. It was a great gift to let me take a burden, however imaginary, from him. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3447-3448
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 1:55:41 AM
I did not say that I’d read about Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov, who in the 1920s made several attempts to create a human-chimp hybrid, the elusive humanzee. He’d inseminated chimps with human sperm, though his first thought had been to go the other way—human mothers, chimp sperm. These are the dreams that make us human, Mother. Pass that hemlock over to me when you’re done with it. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3556-3558
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 2:06:49 AM
Mom took another sip and turned her softly sagging face away from mine. “I wanted you to have an extraordinary life,” she said. Karen Joy Fowler
, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
loc. 3572-3573
, clipped on Tuesday, February 21, 2017 2:09:35 AM
The first element is the administrative ordering of nature and society-the transformative state simplifications described above. By themselves, they are the unremarkable tools of modern statecraft; they are as vital to the maintenance of our welfare and freedom as they are to the designs of a would-be modern despot. They undergird the concept of citizenship and the provision of social welfare just as they might undergird a policy of rounding up undesirable minorities. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 214-217
, clipped on Sunday, February 26, 2017 2:05:17 AM
The second element is what I call a high-modernist ideology. It is best conceived as a strong, one might even say muscle-bound, version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress, the expansion of production, the growing satisfaction of human needs, the mastery of nature (including human nature), and, above all, the rational design of social order commensurate with the scientific understanding of natural laws. It originated, of course, in the West, as a by-product of unprecedented progress in science and industry. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 218-221
, clipped on Sunday, February 26, 2017 2:06:20 AM
The third element is an authoritarian state that is willing and able to use the full weight of its coercive power to bring these high-modernist designs into being. The most fertile soil for this element has typically been times of war, revolution, depression, and struggle for national liberation. In such situations, emergency conditions foster the seizure of emergency powers and frequently delegitimize the previous regime. They also tend to give rise to elites who repudiate the past and who have revolutionary designs for their people. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 240-244
, clipped on Sunday, February 26, 2017 2:09:00 AM
A fourth element is closely linked to the third: a prostrate civil society that lacks the capacity to resist these plans. War, revolution, and economic collapse often radically weaken civil society as well as make the populace more receptive to a new dispensation. Late colonial rule, with its social engineering aspirations and ability to run roughshod over popular opposition, occasionally met this last condition. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 244-247
, clipped on Sunday, February 26, 2017 2:09:20 AM
The achievement of German forestry science in standardizing techniques for calculating the sustainable yield of commercial timber and hence revenue was impressive enough. What is decisive for our purposes, however, was the next logical step in forest management. That step was to attempt to create, through careful seeding, planting, and cutting, a forest that was easier for state foresters to count, manipulate, measure, and assess. The fact is that forest science and geometry, backed by state power, had the capacity to transform the real, diverse, and chaotic old-growth forest into a new, more uniform forest that closely resembled the administrative grid of its techniques. To this end, the underbrush was cleared, the number of species was reduced (often to monoculture), and plantings were done simultaneously and in straight rows on large tracts. These management practices, as Henry Lowood observes, "produced the monocultural, even-age forests that eventually transformed the Normalbaum from abstraction to reality. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 400-407
, clipped on Monday, February 27, 2017 9:16:57 AM
A condition of its rigor was that it severely bracketed, or assumed to be constant, all variables except those bearing directly on the yield of the selected species and on the cost of growing and extracting them. As we shall see with urban planning, revolutionary theory, collectivization, and rural resettlement, a whole world lying "outside the brackets" returned to haunt this technical vision. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 462-465
, clipped on Tuesday, February 28, 2017 12:22:11 AM
In place of hollow trees that had been home to woodpeckers, owls, and other tree-nesting birds, the foresters provided specially designed boxes. Ant colonies were artificially raised and implanted in the forest, their nests tended by local schoolchildren. Several species of spiders, which had disappeared from the monocropped forest, were reintroduced.26 What is striking about these endeavors is that they are attempts to work around an impoverished habitat still planted with a single species of conifers for production pur- poses.27 In this case, "restoration forestry" attempted with mixed results to create a virtual ecology, while denying its chief sustaining condition: diversity. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 487-491
, clipped on Tuesday, February 28, 2017 6:01:05 AM
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive. Eagleman, David
, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
loc. 153-155
, clipped on Saturday, March 4, 2017 7:13:40 AM
truth, God lives a life very much like ours—we were created not only in His image but in His social situation as well. God spends most of His time in pursuit of happiness. He reads books, strives for self-improvement, seeks activities to stave off boredom, tries to keep in touch with fading friendships, wonders if there's something else He should be doing with His time. Over the millennia, God has grown bitter. Nothing continues to satisfy. Time drowns Him. He envies man his brief twinkling of a life, and those He dislikes are condemned to suffer immortality with Him. Eagleman, David
, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
loc. 607-611
, clipped on Saturday, March 4, 2017 10:35:51 AM
These reunions reveal a group of individuals touchingly searching for a common theme. They appeal to your name as a unifying structure, but they come to realize that the name that existed on Earth, the you that moved serially through these different identities, was like a bundle of sticks from different trees. They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, they concede, and you were none. Eagleman, David
, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
loc. 954-957
, clipped on Sunday, March 5, 2017 6:01:17 PM
And then you are here. You are simultaneously engaged in her conversation and thinking about something else; she both gives herself to you and does not give herself to you; you find her objectionable and you deeply love her; she worships you and wonders what she might have missed with someone else. Eagleman, David
, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
loc. 1072-1074
, clipped on Sunday, March 5, 2017 6:12:42 PM
Such a scene is typical of the afterlife, and illustrates how much both parties have overestimated us. This game always ends in disappointment for both sides, who are freshly distraught to learn that being let into the secrets behind the scenes has little effect on our experience. The secret codes of life—whether presented as a gift or a burden—go totally unappreciated. And once again the Rewarder and the Punisher skulk off, struggling to understand why knowing the code behind the wine does not diminish its pleasure on your tongue, why knowing the inescapability of heartache does not reduce its sting, why glimpsing the mechanics of love does not alter its intoxicating appeal. Eagleman, David
, Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives.
loc. 1325-1329
, clipped on Monday, March 6, 2017 8:16:00 PM
Every act of measurement was an act marked by the play of power relations Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 634-634
, clipped on Tuesday, March 7, 2017 8:09:53 AM
They are all like that, the eggheads. The most important thing for them is to come up with a name. Until he comes up with one, you feel really sorry for him, he looks so lost. But when he finds a label like “graviconcentrate,” he thinks he’s figured it all out and perks right up. Strugatsky, Arkady
, Roadside Picnic (Rediscovered Classics).
loc. 444-446
, clipped on Wednesday, March 8, 2017 10:50:08 PM
Customs are better understood as a living, negotiated tissue of practices which are continually being adapted to new ecological and social circumstances-including, of course, power relations. Customary systems of tenure should not be romanticized; they are usually riven with inequalities based on gender, status, and lineage. But because they are strongly local, particular, and adaptable, their plas ticity can be the source of microadjustments that lead to shifts in prevailing practice. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 787-790
, clipped on Wednesday, March 8, 2017 11:02:07 PM
Figure out yourself what I want—because I know it can’t be bad! The hell with it all, I just can’t think of a thing other than those words of his—HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!” Strugatsky, Arkady
, Roadside Picnic (Rediscovered Classics).
loc. 2754-2756
, clipped on Sunday, March 12, 2017 2:33:19 PM
“Nah. Could be anybody.” “Horst never got . . . abusive with you, or anything . . . ?” “Horst? a dove. Well, maybe except for that one time he started choking me . . .” “He what?” “Oh? He never told you about that.” “Horst actually—” “Put it this way, Heidi—he had his hands around my neck, and he was squeezing? What would you call that?” “What happened?” “Oh, there was a game on, he got distracted, Brett Favre or somebody did something, I don’t know, anyway he relaxed his grip, went off to the fridge, got a beer. Can of Bud Light, I believe. We kept arguing, of course.” “Wow, close call.” “Not really. I have always depended on the kindness of stranglers.” A quick paradiddle with her chopsticks on Heidi’s head. Pynchon, Thomas
, Bleeding Edge.
loc. 3399-3406
, clipped on Saturday, March 18, 2017 7:22:41 PM
The shorthand formulas through which tax officials must apprehend reality are not mere tools of observation. By a kind of fiscal Heisenberg principle, they frequently have the power to transform the facts they take note of. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1009-1011
, clipped on Sunday, March 19, 2017 8:12:41 AM
Where the new tenure system was a colonial imposition-that is, where it was totally unfamiliar, where it was imposed by alien conquerors using an unintelligible language and institutional context, and where local practices bore no resemblance to freehold tenure-the consequences were far-reaching. The permanent settlement in India, for example, created a new class who, because they paid the taxes on the land, became full owners with rights of inheritance and sale where none had existed earlier.92 At the same time, literally millions of cultivators, tenants, and laborers lost their customary rights of access to the land and its products. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1020-1025
, clipped on Sunday, March 19, 2017 8:16:34 AM
second point about an urban order easily legible from outside is that the grand plan of the ensemble has no necessary relationship to the order of life as it is experienced by its residents. Although certain state services may be more easily provided and distant addresses more easily located, these apparent advantages may be negated by such perceived disadvantages as the absence of a dense street life, the intrusion of hostile authorities, the loss of the spatial irregularities that foster coziness, gathering places for informal recreation, and neighborhood feeling. The formal order of a geometrically regular urban space is just that: formal order. Its visual regimentation has a ceremonial or ideological quality, much like the order of a parade or a barracks. The fact that such order works for municipal and state authorities in administering the city is no guarantee that it works for citizens. Provisionally, then, we must remain agnostic about the relation between formal spatial order and social experience. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1179-1186
, clipped on Sunday, March 19, 2017 8:37:11 AM
first, that, as in the Chinese case, state initiative created new surnames rather than simply recording existing surnames. It is thus often impossible to know whether a state-recorded surname has any social existence outside the role of the text in which it is inscribed. Second, the variable imposition of permanent surnames within a territory-in this case Tuscanyserves as a rough-and-ready gauge of state capacity. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1332-1335
, clipped on Sunday, March 19, 2017 9:42:42 AM
The increasing intensity of interaction with the state and statelike structures (large manors, the church) exactly parallels the development of permanent, heritable patronyms. Thus, when Edward I clarified the system of landholding, establishing primogeniture and hereditary copyhold tenure for manorial land, he provided a powerful incentive for the adoption of permanent patronyms. Taking one's father's surname became, for the eldest son at least, part of a claim to the property on the father's death.50 Now that property claims were subject to state validation, surnames that had once been mere bureaucratic fantasies took on a social reality of their own. One imagines that for a long time English subjects had in effect two names-their local name and an "official," fixed patronym. As the frequency of interaction with impersonal administrative structures increased, the official name came to prevail in all but a man's intimate circle. Those subjects living at a greater distance, both socially and geographically, from the organs of state power, as did the Tuscans, acquired permanent patronyms much later. The upper classes and those living in the south of England thus acquired permanent surnames before the lower classes and those living in the north did. The Scottish and Welsh acquired them even later. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1373-1382
, clipped on Sunday, March 19, 2017 9:15:16 PM
Universal last names are a fairly recent historical phenomenon. Tracking property ownership and inheritance, collecting taxes, maintaining court records, performing police work, conscripting soldiers, and controlling epidemics were all made immeasurably easier by the clarity of full names and, increasingly, fixed addresses. While the utilitarian state was committed to a complete inventory of its population, liberal ideas of citizenship, which implied voting rights and conscription, also contributed greatly to the standardization of naming practices. The legislative imposition of permanent surnames is particularly clear in the case of Western European Jews who had no tradition of last names. A Napoleonic decree "concernant les Juifs qui n'ont pas de nom de famille et de prenoms fixes," in 1808, mandated last names." Austrian legislation of 1787, as part of the emancipation process, required Jews to choose last names or, if they refused, to have fixed last names chosen for them. In Prussia the emancipation of the Jews was contingent upon the adoption of surnames.60 Many of the immigrants to the United States, Jews and non-Jews alike, had no permanent surnames when they set sail. Very few, however, made it through the initial paperwork without an official last name that their descendants carry still. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1435-1443
, clipped on Sunday, March 19, 2017 11:33:32 PM
An illegible society, then, is a hindrance to any effective intervention by the state, whether the purpose of that intervention is plunder or public welfare. As long as the state's interest is largely confined to grabbing a few tons of grain and rounding up a few conscripts, the state's ignorance may not be fatal. When, however, the state's objective requires changing the daily habits (hygiene or health practices) or work performance (quality labor or machine maintenance) of its citizens, such ignorance can well be disabling. A thoroughly legible society eliminates local monopolies of information and creates a kind of national transparency through the uniformity of codes, identities, statistics, regulations, and measures. At the same time it is likely to create new positional advantages for those at the apex who have the knowledge and access to easily decipher the new state-created format. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1556-1562
, clipped on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:12:44 AM
This caricature of society as a military parade ground is overdrawn, but the grain of truth that it embodies may help us understand the grandiose plans we will examine later.86 The aspiration to such uniformity and order alerts us to the fact that modern statecraft is largely a project of internal colonization, often glossed, as it is in imperial rhetoric, as a "civilizing mission." The builders of the modern nation-state do not merely describe, observe, and map; they strive to shape a people and landscape that will fit their techniques of observation.R7 Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1633-1637
, clipped on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:20:42 AM
All the state simplifications that we have examined have the character of maps. That is, they are designed to summarize precisely those aspects of a complex world that are of immediate interest to the mapmaker and to ignore the rest. To complain that a map lacks nuance and detail makes no sense unless it omits information necessary to its function. A city map that aspired to represent every traffic light, every pothole, every building, and every bush and tree in every park would threaten to become as large and as complex as the city that it depicted.' And it certainly would defeat the purpose of mapping, which is to abstract and summarize. A map is an instrument designed for a purpose. We may judge that purpose noble or morally offensive, but the map itself either serves or fails to serve its intended use. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1671-1677
, clipped on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:24:16 AM
The answer, I believe, lies in the fact that it is typically progressives who have come to power with a comprehensive critique of existing society and a popular mandate (at least initially) to transform it. These progressives have wanted to use that power to bring about enormous changes in people's habits, work, living patterns, moral conduct, and worldview.' They have deployed what Vaclav Havel has called "the armory of holistic social engineering."' Utopian aspirations per se are not dangerous. As Oscar Wilde remarked, "A map of the world which does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing."° Where the utopian vision goes wrong is when it is held by ruling elites with no commitment to democracy or civil rights and who are therefore likely to use unbridled state power for its achievement. Where it goes brutally wrong is when the society subjected to such utopian experiments lacks the capacity to mount a determined resistance. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1710-1717
, clipped on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:29:26 PM
Aided by hindsight as it is, this unsympathetic account of highmodernist audacity is, in one important respect, grossly unfair. If we put the development of high-modernist beliefs in their historical context, if we ask who the enemies of high modernism actually were, a far more sympathetic picture emerges. Doctors and public-health engineers who did possess new knowledge that could save millions of lives were often thwarted by popular prejudices and entrenched political interests. Urban planners who could in fact redesign urban housing to be cheaper, more healthful, and more convenient were blocked by realestate interests and existing tastes. Inventors and engineers who had devised revolutionary new modes of power and transportation faced opposition from industrialists and laborers whose profits and jobs the new technology would almost certainly displace. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1855-1861
, clipped on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:54:25 PM
Before we turn to later versions of high modernism, we should recall two important facts about their nineteenth-century forebears: first, that virtually every high-modernist intervention was undertaken in the name of and with the support of citizens seeking help and protection, and, second, that we are all beneficiaries, in countless ways, of these various high-modernist schemes. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1864-1867
, clipped on Tuesday, March 21, 2017 11:54:59 PM
The third and by far most important barrier to thoroughgoing highmodernist schemes has been the existence of working, representative institutions through which a resistant society could make its influence felt. Such institutions have thwarted the most draconian features of high-modernist schemes in roughly the same way that publicity and mobilized opposition in open societies, as Amartya Sen has argued, have prevented famines. Rulers, he notes, do not go hungry, and they are unlikely to learn about and respond readily to curb famine unless their institutional position provides strong incentives. The freedoms of speech, of assembly, and of the press ensure that widespread hunger will be publicized, while the freedoms of assembly and elections in representative institutions ensure that it is in the interest of elected officials' self-preservation to prevent famine when they can. In the same fashion, high-modernist schemes in liberal democratic settings must accommodate themselves sufficiently to local opinion in order to avoid being undone at the polls. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 1968-1976
, clipped on Wednesday, March 22, 2017 12:48:30 AM
It is impossible to read much of Le Corbusier or to see many of his architectural drawings without noticing his love (mania?) for simple, repetitive lines and his horror of complexity. He makes a personal commitment to austere lines and represents that commitment as an essential characteristic of human nature. In his own words, "an infinity of combinations is possible when innumerable and diverse elements are brought together. But the human mind loses itself and becomes fatigued by such a labyrinth of possibilities. Control becomes impossible. The spiritual failure that must result is disheartening.... Reason ... is an unbroken straight line. Thus, in order to save himself from this chaos, in order to provide himself with a bearable, acceptable framework for his existence, one productive of human well-being and control, man has projected the laws of nature into a system that is a manifestation of the human spirit itself: geometry."" Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2044-2050
, clipped on Saturday, March 25, 2017 11:49:07 PM
Le Corbusier would have liked to endow his love of straight lines and right angles with the authority of the machine, of science, and of nature. Neither the brilliance of his designs nor the heat of his polemic, however, could succeed in justifying this move. The machines to which he most adoringly referred-the locomotive, the airplane, and the automobile-embody rounder or more elliptical shapes than right angles (the teardrop being the most streamlined of shapes). As for science, any shape is geometrical: the trapezoid, the triangle, the circle. If sheer simplicity or efficiency was the criterion, why not prefer the circle or sphere-as the minimum surface enclosing the maximum space-to the square or the rectangle? Nature, as Le Corbusier claimed, might be mathematical, but the complex, intricate, "chaotic" logic of living forms has only recently been understood with the aid of computers.15 No, the great architect was expressing no more, and no less, than an aesthetic ideology-a strong taste for classic lines, which he also considered to be "Gallic" lines: "sublime straight lines, and oh, sublime French rigor." 16 It was one powerful way of mastering space. What's more, it provided a legible grid that could be easily grasped at a glance and that could be repeated in every direction, ad infinitum. As a practical matter, of course, a straight line was often impractical and ruinously expensive. Where the topography was irregular, building a straight, flat avenue without daunting climbs and descents would require great feats of digging and leveling. Le Corbusier's kind of geometry was rarely cost effective. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2058-2069
, clipped on Saturday, March 25, 2017 11:50:24 PM
The despot is not a man. It is the Plan. The correct, realistic, exact plan, the one that will provide your solution once the problem has been posited clearly, in its entirety, in its indispensable harmony. This plan has been drawn up well away from the frenzy in the mayor's office or the town hall, from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society's victims. It has been drawn up by serene and lucid minds. It has taken account of nothing but human truths. It has ignored all current regulations, all existing usages, and channels. It has not considered whether or not it could be carried out with the constitution now in force. It is a biological creation destined for human beings and capable of realization by modern techniques. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2148-2153
, clipped on Saturday, March 25, 2017 11:59:59 PM
The wisdom of the plan sweeps away all social obstacles: the elected authorities, the voting public, the constitution, and the legal structure. At the very least, we are in the presence of a dictatorship of the planner; at most, we approach a cult of power and remorselessness that is reminiscent of fascist imagery" Despite the imagery, Le Corbusier sees himself as a technical genius and demands power in the name of his truths. Technocracy, in this instance, is the belief that the human problem of urban design has a unique solution, which an expert can discover and execute. Deciding such technical matters by politics and bargaining would lead to the wrong solution. As there is a single, true answer to the problem of planning the modern city, no compromises are possible. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2154-2159
, clipped on Sunday, March 26, 2017 12:00:45 AM
Stalin's commissars found his plans for Moscow as well as his project for the Palace of Soviets too radical.38 The Soviet modernist El Lis- sitzky attacked Le Corbusier's Moscow as a "city of nowhere, ... [a city] that is neither capitalist, nor proletarian, nor socialist, ... a city on paper, extraneous to living nature, located in a desert through which not even a river must be allowed to pass (since a curve would contradict the style)."39 As if to confirm El Lissitzky's charge that he had designed a "city of nowhere," Le Corbusier recycled his design virtually intact-aside from removing all references to Moscow-and presented it as La ville radieuse, suitable for central Paris. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2175-2180
, clipped on Sunday, March 26, 2017 12:02:39 AM
His objection to the slums was twofold. First, they failed aesthetically to meet his standards of discipline, purpose, and order. "Is there anything," he asked rhetorically, "more pitiful than an undisciplined crowd?" Nature, he added, is "all discipline" and will "sweep them away" even if nature operates by a logic "contrary to the interests of mankind."46 Here he signals that the founders of the modern city must be prepared to act ruthlessly. The second danger of the slums was that, besides being noisy, dangerous, dusty, dark, and disease-ridden, they harbored a potential revolutionary menace to the authorities. He understood, as Haussmann had, that crowded slums were and had always been an obstacle to efficient police work. Switching back and forth between Louis XIV's Paris and imperial Rome, Le Corbusier wrote: "From the huddle of hovels, from the depths of grimy lairs (in Rome-the Rome of the Caesars-the plebes lived in an inextricable chaos of abutting and warren-like skyscrapers), there sometimes came the hot gust of rebellion; the plot would be hatched in the dark recesses of an accumulated chaos in which any kind of police activity was extremely difficult.... St. Paul of Tarsus was impossible to arrest while he stayed in the slums, and the words of his Sermons were passed like wildfire from mouth to mouth" Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2220-2229
, clipped on Sunday, March 26, 2017 12:07:24 AM
Most of those who have moved to Brasilia from other cities are amazed to discover "that it is a city without crowds." People complain that Brasilia lacks the bustle of street life, that it has none of the busy street corners and long stretches of storefront facades that animate a sidewalk for pedestrians. For them, it is almost as if the founders of Brasilia, rather than having planned a city, have actually planned to prevent a city. The most common way they put it is to say that Brasilia "lacks street corners," by which they mean that it lacks the complex intersections of dense neighborhoods comprising residences and public cafes and restaurants with places for leisure, work, and shopping. While Brasilia provides well for some human needs, the functional separation of work from residence and of both from commerce and entertainment, the great voids between superquadra, and a road system devoted exclusively to motorized traffic make the disappearance of the street corner a foregone conclusion. The plan did eliminate traffic jams; it also eliminated the welcome and familiar pedestrian jams that one of Holston's informants called "the point of social conviviality." Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2357-2365
, clipped on Sunday, March 26, 2017 12:19:36 AM
A fundamental mistake that urban planners made, Jacobs claims, was to infer functional order from the duplication and regimentation of building forms: that is, from purely visual order. Most complex systems, on the contrary, do not display a surface regularity; their order must be sought at a deeper level. "To see complex systems of functional order as order, and not as chaos, takes understanding. The leaves dropping from the trees in the autumn, the interior of an airplane engine, the entrails of a rabbit, the city desk of a newspaper, all appear to be chaos if they are seen without comprehension. Once they are seen as systems of order, they actually look different." At this level one could say that Jacobs was a "functionalist," a word whose use was banned in Le Corbusier's studio. She asked, What function does this structure serve, and how well does it serve it? The "order" of a thing is determined by the purpose it serves, not by a purely aesthetic view of its surface order.R1 Le Corbusier, by contrast, seemed to have firmly believed that the most efficient forms would always have a classical clarity and order. The physical environments Le Corbusier designed and built had, as did Brasilia, an overall harmony and simplicity of form. For the most part, however, they failed in important ways as places where people would want to live and work. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 2480-2489
, clipped on Sunday, March 26, 2017 12:31:16 AM
He decided, at the end of a devastating civil war and a grain-procurement crisis, to shelve collectivization and encourage small-scale production and petty trade. Some have suggested that in his last writings he was more favorably disposed to peasant farming and, it is speculated, would not have forced through the brutal collectivization that Stalin ordered in 1929. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3164-3166
, clipped on Sunday, March 26, 2017 11:49:39 PM
Once Luxemburg began thinking of the revolution as analogous to a complex natural process, she concluded that the role of a vanguard party was inevitably limited. Such processes are far too complicated to be well understood, let alone directed or planned in advance. She was deeply impressed by the autonomous popular initiatives taken all over Russia after the shooting of the crowd before the Winter Palace in 1905. Her description, which I quote at length, invokes metaphors from nature to convey her conviction that centralized control is an illusion. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3246-3249
, clipped on Monday, March 27, 2017 12:00:32 AM
But the major, recurrent theme of Luxemburg's criticism of Lenin and the Bolsheviks generally was that their dictatorial methods and their mistrust of the proletariat made for bad educational policy. It thwarted the development of the mature, independent working class that was necessary to the revolution and to the creation of socialism. Thus she attacked both the German and Russian revolutionists for substituting the ego of the vanguard party for the ego of the proletariat-a substitution that ignored the fact that the objective was to create a self-conscious workers' movement, not just to use the proletariat as instruments. Like a confident and sympathetic guardian, she anticipated false steps as part of the learning process. "However, the nimble acrobat," she charged, referring to the Social Democratic Party, "fails to see that the true subject to whom this role of director falls is the collective ego of the working class which insists on its right to make its own mistakes and learn the historical dialectic by itself. Finally, we must frankly admit to ourselves that the errors made by a truly revolutionary labor movement are historically infinitely more fruitful and valuable than the infallibility of the best of all possible 'central committees.' Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3277-3285
, clipped on Monday, March 27, 2017 12:03:58 AM
As we shall see later, the industrial model was applicable to some, but not all, of agriculture. It was nonetheless applied indiscriminately as a creed rather than a scientific hypothesis to be examined skeptically. The modernist confidence in huge scale, centralization of production, standardized mass commodities, and mechanization was so hegemonic in the leading sector of industry that it became an article of faith that the same principles would work, pari passu, in agriculture. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3663-3667
, clipped on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 11:36:19 PM
The advantages industrial farms did have over smaller producers were of another kind. Their very size gave them an edge in access to credit, political influence (relevant to taxes, support payments, and the avoidance of foreclosure), and marketing muscle. What they gave away in agility and quality labor they often made up for in their considerable political and economic clout. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3685-3687
, clipped on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 11:38:28 PM
At another level, collectivization was, in a curious state-centric way, a qualified success. Collectivization proved a rough-and-ready instrument for the twin goals of traditional statecraft: appropriation and political control. Though the Soviet kolkhoz may have failed badly at generating huge surpluses of foodstuffs, it served well enough as a means whereby the state could determine cropping patterns, fix real rural wages, appropriate a large share of whatever grain was produced, and politically emasculate the countryside. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3774-3778
, clipped on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 11:45:49 PM
The great achievement, if one can call it that, of the Soviet state in the agricultural sector was to take a social and economic terrain singularly unfavorable to appropriation and control and to create institutional forms and production units far better adapted to monitoring, managing, appropriating, and controlling from above. The rural society that the Soviet state inherited (and for a time encouraged) was one in which the allies of the czarist state, the great landlords and the aristocratic officeholders, had been swept away and been replaced by smallholding and middle peasants, artisans, private traders, and all sorts of mobile laborers and lumpen elements.37 Confronting a tumultuous, footloose, and "headless" (acephalous) rural society which was hard to control and which had few political assets, the Bolsheviks, like the scientific foresters, set about redesigning their environment with a few simple goals in mind. They created, in place of what they had inherited, a new landscape of large, hierarchical, state-managed farms whose cropping patterns and procurement quotas were centrally mandated and whose population was, by law, immobile. The system thus devised served for nearly sixty years as a mechanism for procurement and control at a massive cost in stagnation, waste, demoralization, and ecological failure. That collectivized agriculture persisted for sixty years was a tribute less to the plan of the state than to the improvisations, gray markets, bartering, and ingenuity that partly compensated for its failures. Just as an "informal Brasilia," which had no legitimate place in official plans, arose to make the city viable, so did a set of informal practices lying outside the formal command economy-and often outside Soviet law as well-arise to circumvent some of the colossal waste and inefficiencies built into the system. Collectivized agriculture, in other words, never quite operated according to the hierarchical grid of its production plans and procurements. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3778-3792
, clipped on Tuesday, March 28, 2017 11:46:44 PM
Scholars who agree on little else are in accord on this point: the overriding purpose of collectivization was to ensure the seizure of grain. Fitzpatrick begins her study of the collectives with this assertion: "The main purpose of collectivization was to increase state grain procurements and reduce the peasants' ability to withhold grain from the market. This purpose was obvious to peasants from the start, since the collectivization drive of the winter of 1929-30 was the culmination of more than two years of bitter struggle between the peasants and the state over grain procurements."54 Robert Conquest concurs: "The collective farms were essentially a chosen mechanism for extracting grain and other products." Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 3916-3921
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 7:53:45 AM
First, having taken from the peasants both their (relative) independence and autonomy as well as their land and grain, the state created a class of essentially unfree laborers who responded with all the forms of foot-dragging and resistance practiced by unfree laborers everywhere. Second, the unitary administrative structure and imperatives of central planning created a clumsy machine that was utterly unresponsive to local knowledge or to local conditions. Finally, the Leninist political structure of the Soviet Union gave agriculture officials little or no incentive to adapt to, or negotiate with, its rural subjects. The very capacity of the state to essentially reenserf rural producers, dismantle their institutions, and impose its will, in the crude sense of appropriation, goes a long way toward explaining the state's failure to realize anything but a simulacrum of the highmodernist agriculture that Lenin so prized. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4042-4048
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 8:14:23 AM
"But the local recruits learned their jobs well, for the villages and their 1,000 [square] meter compounds, carefully marked by pegs and sod cuts, have followed the geometric grid pattern required by the guidelines. In fact, some villages have been too rigidly laid out; for example, one farmer had to move his large, wellconstructed tukul [traditional thatched house] some 20 feet so that it would be Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4641-4644
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 7:59:08 PM
The plan was carefully replicated in each location, inasmuch as this was not a regime inclined to tolerate local improvisation. "But the local recruits learned their jobs well, for the villages and their 1,000 [square] meter compounds, carefully marked by pegs and sod cuts, have followed the geometric grid pattern required by the guidelines. In fact, some villages have been too rigidly laid out; for example, one farmer had to move his large, wellconstructed tukul [traditional thatched house] some 20 feet so that it would be 'in line' with all the other buildings in its row." Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4640-4644
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 7:59:19 PM
If the plans for villagization were so rational and scientific, why did they bring about such general ruin? The answer, I believe, is that such plans were not scientific or rational in any meaningful sense of those terms. What these planners carried in their mind's eye was a certain aesthetic, what one might call a visual codification of modern rural production and community life. Like a religious faith, this visual codification was almost impervious to criticism or disconfirming evidence. The belief in large farms, monocropping, "proper" villages, tractorplowed fields, and collective or communal farming was an aesthetic conviction undergirded by a conviction that this was the way in which the world was headed-a teleology. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4716-4721
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 8:07:22 PM
The image of coordination and authority aspired to here recalls that of mass exercises-thousands of bodies moving in perfect unison according to a meticulously rehearsed script. When such coordination is achieved, the spectacle may have several effects. The demonstration of mass coordination, its designers hope, will awe spectators and participants with its display of powerful cohesion. The awe is enhanced by the fact that, as in the Taylorist factory, only someone outside and above the display can fully appreciate it as a totality; the individual participants at ground level are small molecules within an organism whose brain is elsewhere. The image of a nation that might operate along these lines is enormously flattering to elites at the apex-and, of course, demeaning to a population whose role they thus reduce to that of ciphers. Beyond impressing observers, such displays may, in the short run at least, constitute a reassuring self-hypnosis which serves to reinforce the moral purpose and self-confidence of the elites. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4742-4749
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 9:03:35 PM
Communities planned at a single stroke-Brasilia or the planned village in Tanzania or Ethiopia-are to older, unplanned communities as Esperanto is to, say, English or Burmese. One can in fact design a new language that in many respects is more logical, simpler, more universal, and less irreg ular and that would technically lend itself to more clarity and precision. This was, of course, precisely the objective of Esperanto's inventor, Lazar Zamenhof, who also imagined that Esperanto, which was also known as international language, would eliminate the parochial nationalisms of Europe.' 14 Yet it is also perfectly obvious why Esperanto, which lacked a powerful state to enforce its adoption, failed to replace the existing vernaculars or dialects of Europe. (As social linguists are fond of saying, "A national language is a dialect with an army.") It was an exceptionally thin language, without any of the resonances, connotations, ready metaphors, literature, oral history, idioms, and traditions of practical use that any socially embedded language already had Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4789-4796
, clipped on Wednesday, March 29, 2017 9:07:40 PM
Lest there be any misunderstanding about my purpose here, I want to emphasize that this is not a general offensive against modern agronomic science, let alone an attack on the culture of scientific research. Modern agronomic science, with its sophisticated plant breeding, plant pathology, analysis of plant nutrition, soil analysis, and technical virtuosity, is responsible for creating a fund of technical knowledge that is by now being used in some form by even the most traditional cultivators. My purpose, rather, is to show how the imperial pretensions of agronomic science-its inability to recognize or incorporate knowledge created outside its paradigm-sharply limited its utility to many cultivators. Whereas farmers, as we shall see, seem pragmatically alert to knowledge coming from any quarter should it serve their purposes, modern agricultural planners are far less receptive to other ways of knowing. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 4939-4945
, clipped on Thursday, March 30, 2017 2:14:17 AM
The record shows, it seems to me, that a substantial part of the problem lies in the systematic and necessary limitations of scientific work whenever the ultimate purpose of that work is practical adoption by a diverse set of practitioners working in a large variety of conditions. That is, some of the problems lie deeper than the institutional temptations to central control, the pathologies of administration, or the penchant for aesthetically satisfying but uneconomic show projects. Even under the best of circumstances, the laboratory results and the data from the experimental plots of research stations are a long country mile from the human and natural environments where they must ultimately find a home. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 5385-5390
, clipped on Saturday, April 1, 2017 7:56:43 AM
Only in the past decade has serious attention been given to the fact that the large agricultural firm is ... able to achieve benefits by externalizing certain costs. The disadvantages of large scale operation fall largely outside the decision-making framework of the large farm firm. Problems of waste disposal, pollution control, added burdens on public service, deterioration of rural social structures, impairment of the tax base, and the political consequences of a concentration of economic power have typically not been considered as costs of large scale, by the firm. They are unquestionably costs to the larger community. In theory, large scale operation should enable the firm to bring a wide range of both costs and benefits within its internal decision-making framework. In practice the economic and political power that accompanies large scale provides constant temptation to the large firm to take the benefits and pass on the costs." Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 5478-5485
, clipped on Saturday, April 1, 2017 10:39:12 AM
Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: "You can drop a mouse down a thousandyard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes." Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 6487-6491
, clipped on Sunday, April 2, 2017 6:51:22 PM
Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes.4 Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences.5 Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact. Aldo Leopold captured the spirit of caution required: "The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts" Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 6491-6494
, clipped on Sunday, April 2, 2017 6:51:59 PM
Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops. In planning housing, it would mean "designing in" flexibility for accommodating changes in family structures or living styles. In a factory it may mean selecting a location, layout, or piece of machinery that allows for new processes, materials, or product lines down the road. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 6494-6497
, clipped on Sunday, April 2, 2017 6:52:14 PM
Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design. Professor James C. Scott
, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed.
loc. 6498-6499
, clipped on Sunday, April 2, 2017 6:52:25 PM
Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kubiai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home, and a little, square of Venice where he gambolled as a child. Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 198-201
, clipped on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 10:04:39 PM
Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches. Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 213-213
, clipped on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 10:05:58 PM
Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the name of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices’ accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old postcards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one. Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 225-230
, clipped on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 10:09:04 PM
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.’ Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 309-310
, clipped on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 10:20:47 PM
‘Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.’ ‘Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.’_ Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 312-314
, clipped on Wednesday, April 5, 2017 10:21:08 PM
‘You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.’ Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 655-657
, clipped on Saturday, April 8, 2017 6:47:52 AM
‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’_ Italo Calvino
, Invisible Cities (transl. William Weaver).
loc. 1188-1191
, clipped on Saturday, April 8, 2017 2:01:28 PM
If we believe in calories-in/calories-out, and that in turn leads us to conclude that we have to run half-marathons five days a week (in our forties, and more in our fifties, and more in our sixties …) to maintain our weight, it may, once again, be time to question our underlying beliefs. Maybe it’s something other than the calories we consume and expend that determines whether we get fat. Gary Taubes
, Why We Get Fat.
loc. 700-703
, clipped on Saturday, April 8, 2017 6:29:25 PM
“Obesity, too many people believe, is explained by overeating; actually it should be recognized that this is simply restating the problem in a different way, and reaffirming (somewhat unnecessarily …) one’s faith in the First Law of Thermodynamics. To ‘explain’ obesity by overeating is as illuminating a statement as an ‘explanation’ of alcoholism by chronic overdrinking.” Gary Taubes
, Why We Get Fat.
loc. 1119-1122
, clipped on Saturday, April 8, 2017 7:17:56 PM
That growth is the cause and overeating the effect is almost assuredly true for our fat tissue as well. To paraphrase what the German internist Gustav von Bergmann said about this idea more than eighty years ago, we would never even consider the possibility that children grow taller because they eat too much and exercise too little (or that they stunt their growth by exercising too much). So why assume that these are valid explanations for growing fat (or remaining lean)? “That which the body needs to grow it always finds,” von Bergmann wrote, “and that which it needs to become fat, even if it’s ten times as much, the body will save for itself from the annual balance.” Gary Taubes
, Why We Get Fat.
loc. 1391-1395
, clipped on Saturday, April 8, 2017 9:58:29 PM
The girl who picketed in front of the World’s Fair back in 2012, waving a sign saying “NO IT ISN’T?” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 1141-1142
, clipped on Sunday, April 16, 2017 1:06:15 AM
“MOST OF IT RUNS ON SAPPHIRES ON PATHS, BUT I USE RUBY ON RAILS FOR THE DATABASES.” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 1963-1964
, clipped on Monday, April 17, 2017 6:05:23 PM
Lick was unique in bringing to the field a deep appreciation for human beings: our capacity to perceive, to adapt, to make choices, and to devise completely new ways of tackling apparently intractable problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities every bit as subtle and as worthy of respect as a computer's ability to execute an algorithm. And that was why to him, the real challenge would always lie in adapting computers to the humans who used them, thereby exploiting the strengths of each. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 294-297
, clipped on Saturday, April 22, 2017 7:15:20 PM
But in fact, his grounding in psychology would prove central to his very conception of computers. Virtually all the other computer pioneers of his generation would come to the field in the 1940s and 1950s with backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or electrical engineering, technological orientations that led them to focus on gadgetry—on making the machines bigger, faster, and more reliable. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 291-294
, clipped on Saturday, April 22, 2017 7:15:38 PM
But in fact, his grounding in psychology would prove central to his very conception of computers. Virtually all the other computer pioneers of his generation would come to the field in the 1940s and 1950s with backgrounds in mathematics, physics, or electrical engineering, technological orientations that led them to focus on gadgetry—on making the machines bigger, faster, and more reliable. Lick was unique in bringing to the field a deep appreciation for human beings: our capacity to perceive, to adapt, to make choices, and to devise completely new ways of tackling apparently intractable problems. As an experimental psychologist, he found these abilities every bit as subtle and as worthy of respect as a computer's ability to execute an algorithm. And that was why to him, the real challenge would always lie in adapting computers to the humans who used them, thereby exploiting the strengths of each. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 291-297
, clipped on Saturday, April 22, 2017 7:15:54 PM
“I like ziggurats! You know, humans are different from angels, in that they have this weird long thing here” – Samyazaz pointed at his crotch – “and I felt bad about not having one of those. But if I build big enough ziggurats, then I feel better about myself!” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 3796-3798
, clipped on Saturday, April 22, 2017 10:21:40 PM
The resemblances between San Francisco and the Biblical Jerusalem are uncanny. The highest point in Jerusalem was King Solomon’s Temple Mount; the highest point in San Francisco is the suspiciously-named Mount Davidson. To the north of the Temple was the Golden Gate, leading to the city of Tiberias; to the north of Mount Davidson is the Golden Gate Bridge, leading to the city of Tiburon. Southwest of Jerusalem city center was the Roman legions’ camp (Latin: “castrum”); southwest of San Francisco city center is the Castro District. To the south of Jerusalem lay Gehennam, the Valley of Sulfur; to the south of San Francisco lies Silicon Valley. To the east of Jerusalem was the giant dungheap where the Israelites would throw their refuse; to the east of San Francisco is Oakland. Like I said, uncanny. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 3962-3967
, clipped on Saturday, April 22, 2017 10:35:22 PM
As a rule, anyone desirous of an audience, or even a place in society, might profit from the following motto: “If you can’t say something positive about humanity, then say something equivocal.” Ligotti, Thomas
, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror.
loc. 89-90
, clipped on Sunday, April 23, 2017 4:15:02 PM
“The Universe sucks,” I said. “Deal with it.” “The whole problem is that we can’t deal with it! If the universe just sucked a little, we could deal with it. But nobody can deal with the full extent of the universe’s suckiness. Not when it happens to them personally. Not even when they witness it first hand. The only reason anyone can deal with it at all is because they never really think about it, they keep it off in their peripheral vision where it never really shows up clearly. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 4728-4731
, clipped on Sunday, April 23, 2017 6:56:47 PM
Ontologically, Mainländer’s thought is delirious; metaphorically, it explains a good deal about human experience; practically, it may in time prove to be consistent with the idea of creation as a structure of creaking bones being eaten from within by a pestilent marrow. Ligotti, Thomas
, The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror.
loc. 444-446
, clipped on Sunday, April 30, 2017 12:11:46 AM
“My friend is going to die!” “People die all the time!” “Not Ana! She’s never died at Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 6898-6899
, clipped on Friday, May 5, 2017 12:05:41 AM
“My friend is going to die!” “People die all the time!” “Not Ana! She’s never died at all!” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 6898-6899
, clipped on Friday, May 5, 2017 12:05:54 AM
It is possible that those who paid for their nets will be richer and better educated, and have a better understanding of why they need a bed net; those who got them for free might have been chosen by an NGO precisely because they were poor. But there could also be the opposite pattern: Those who got them for free are the well connected, whereas the poor and isolated had to pay full price. Either way, we cannot draw any conclusion from the way they used their net. For this reason, the cleanest way to answer such questions is to mimic the randomized trials that are used in medicine to evaluate the effectiveness of new drugs. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 238-242
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:04:59 AM
The message of this book, however, goes well beyond poverty traps. As we will see, ideology, ignorance, and inertia—the three Is—on the part of the expert, the aid worker, or the local policy maker, often explain why policies fail and why aid does not have the effect it should. It is possible to make the world a better place—probably not tomorrow, but in some future that is within our reach—but we cannot get there with lazy thinking. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 367-370
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:18:05 AM
At least in terms of food availability, today we live in a world that is capable of feeding every person that lives on the planet. On the occasion of the World Food Summit in 1996, the FAO estimated that world food production in that year was enough to provide at least 2,700 calories per person per day.10 This is the result of centuries of innovation in food supply, thanks no doubt to great innovations in agricultural science, but attributable also to more mundane factors such as the adoption of the potato into the diet after the Spanish discovered it in Peru in the sixteenth century and imported it to Europe. One study finds that potatoes may have been responsible for 12 percent of the global increase in population between 1700 and 1900.11 Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 484-490
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:27:39 AM
on the path to prosperity was almost surely very important at some point in history, and it may still be important in some circumstances today. The Nobel Prize Laureate and economic historian Robert Fogel calculated that in Europe during the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, food production did not provide enough calories to sustain a full working population. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 519-522
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:31:36 AM
The idea that better nutrition would propel someone on the path to prosperity was almost surely very important at some point in history, and it may still be important in some circumstances today. The Nobel Prize Laureate and economic historian Robert Fogel calculated that in Europe during the Renaissance and the Middle Ages, food production did not provide enough calories to sustain a full working population. This could explain why there were large numbers of beggars—they were literally incapable of any work.14 The pressure of just getting enough food to survive seems to have driven some people to take rather extreme steps: There was an epidemic of “witch” killing in Europe during the “little ice age” (from the mid-sixteenth century to 1800), when crop failures were common and fish was less abundant. Witches were most likely to be single women, particularly widows. The logic of the S—shape suggests that when resources are tight, it makes “economic sense” to sacrifice some people, so that the rest have enough food to be able to work and earn enough to survive. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 519-527
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:31:47 AM
Antoine Parmentier, an eighteenth-century French pharmacist who was an early fan of the potato, clearly anticipating resistance, offered the public a set of recipes he had invented using potatoes, including the classic dish Hachis Parmentier (essentially what the British call shepherd’s pie, a layered casserole composed of ground meat with a covering of mashed potatoes). He thereby set off a trajectory that ultimately led, through many twists and turns, to the invention of “freedom fries.” Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 642-645
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:41:52 AM
We are often inclined to see the world of the poor as a land of missed opportunities and to wonder why they don’t put these purchases on hold and invest in what would really make their lives better. The poor, on the other hand, may well be more skeptical about supposed opportunities and the possibility of any radical change in their lives. They often behave as if they think that any change that is significant enough to be worth sacrificing for will simply take too long. This could explain why they focus on the here and now, on living their lives as pleasantly as possible, celebrating when occasion demands it. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 709-713
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 12:48:14 AM
If patients are somehow convinced that they need shots to get better, there is little chance that they could ever learn they are wrong. Because most diseases that prompt visits to the doctor are self-limiting (i.e., they will disappear no matter what), there is a good chance that patients will feel better after a single shot of antibiotics. This naturally encourages spurious causal associations: Even if the antibiotics did nothing to cure the ailment, it is normal to attribute any improvement to them. By contrast, it is not natural to attribute causal force to inaction: If a person with the flu goes to the doctor, and the doctor does nothing, and the patient then feels better, the patient will correctly infer that it was not the doctor who was responsible for the cure. And rather than thanking the doctor for his forbearance, the patient will be tempted to think that it was lucky that everything worked out this time but that a different doctor should be seen for future problems. This creates a natural tendency to overmedicate in a private, unregulated market. This is compounded by the fact that, in many cases, the prescriber and the provider are the same person, either because people turn to their pharmacists for medical advice, or because private doctors also stock and sell medicine. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1072-1081
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:48:59 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:50:57 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:51:04 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:51:06 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, at least for a little while, that they have an effect. This Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:51:11 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:51:18 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, at least for a little while, that they have an effect. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:51:29 AM
In fact, the poor are much less likely to go to the doctor for potentially life-threatening conditions like chest pains and blood in their urine than with fevers and diarrhea. The poor in Delhi spend as much on short-duration ailments as the rich, but the rich spend much more on chronic diseases.34 So it may well be that the reason chest pains are a natural candidate for being a bhopa disease (an older woman once explained to us the dual concepts of bhopa diseases and doctor diseases—bhopa diseases are caused by ghosts, she insisted, and need to be treated by traditional healers), as are strokes, is precisely that most people cannot afford to get them treated by doctors. It is probably for the same reason that in Kenya, traditional healers and preachers have been particularly in demand to cure HIV/AIDS (their services are proudly advertised on hand-painted billboards in every town). There was not much that allopathic doctors could really do (at least until anti-retrovirals became more affordable), so why not try the traditional healer’s herbs and spells? They were cheap and at the very least gave the patient a sense of doing something. And since symptoms and opportunistic infections come and go, it is possible to believe, at least for a little while, that they have an effect. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1094-1104
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:51:32 AM
In the end, the mistrust of incentives for immunization comes down to an article of faith for both those on the right and the left of the mainstream political spectrum: Don’t try to bribe people to do things that you think they ought to do. For the right, this is because it will be wasted; for the conventional left, which includes much of the public health community and the good doctor from Seva Mandir, this is because it degrades both what is given and the person who gets it. Instead, we should focus on trying to convince the poor of the benefits of immunization. We think that both of these views are somewhat wrongheaded ways to think about this and other similar problems, for two reasons. First, what the 2-pounds-of-dal experiments demonstrate is that in Udaipur at least, the poor might appear to believe in all kinds of things, but there is not much conviction behind many of those beliefs. They do not fear the evil eye so much that they would pass up the dal. This must mean that they actually know they are in no position to have a strong basis to evaluate the costs and benefits of vaccines. When they actually know what they want—marrying their daughter to someone from the right caste or religion, to take an unfortunate but important example—they are not at all easy to bribe. So, although some beliefs the poor have are undoubtedly strongly held, it is a mistake to consider that it is always the case. There is a second reason this is wrong. Both the right wing and the left wing seem to assume that action follows intention: that if people were convinced of the value of immunization, children would be immunized. This is not always true, and the implications are far-reaching. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1140-1152
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 11:56:36 AM
In 2002, Robert Jensen of the University of California at Los Angeles teamed up with some of these centers to organize recruiting sessions for young women in randomly selected villages in rural areas where recruiters would typically not go, in three states in northern India. Not surprisingly, compared to other randomly chosen villages that did not see any such recruiting efforts, there was an increase in the employment of young women in business process outsourcing centers (BPOs) in these villages. Much more remarkably, given that this is the part of India probably most notorious for discrimination against women, three years after the recruiting started, girls age five to eleven were about 5 percentage points more likely to be enrolled in school in the villages where there was recruiting. They also weighed more, suggesting that parents were taking better care of them: They had discovered that educating girls had economic value, and were happy to invest. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1347-1354
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 5:39:30 PM
Some years ago we had organized a parent-child collage session in an informal school run by Seva Mandir in rural Udaipur. We had brought a stack of colorful magazines and asked parents to cut some pictures out from them to represent what they thought education would bring to their children. The idea was for them to build a collage with the help of their children. The collages all ended up looking rather similar: The pictures were studded with gold and diamond jewelry and various recent models of cars. There were other images available in the magazines—peaceful rural vistas, fishing boats, coconut trees—but if the evidence of the collages is to be believed, this is not what education is all about. Parents seem to see education primarily as a way for their children to acquire (considerable) wealth. The anticipated route to those riches is, for most parents, a government job (as a teacher, for example), or failing that, some kind of office job. In Madagascar, parents of children from 640 schools were asked what they thought a child who had completed primary education would do for a living, and what a child who had completed secondary education would do. Seventy percent thought that a secondary-school graduate would get a government job, when in fact 33 percent of them actually get those jobs. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1525-1534
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 6:59:16 PM
Misperception can be critical. In reality, there should not be an education-based poverty trap: Education is valuable at every level. But the fact that parents believe that the benefits of education are S—shaped leads them to behave as if there were a poverty trap, and thereby inadvertently to create one. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1574-1576
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 7:18:33 PM
A combination of unrealistic goals, unnecessarily pessimistic expectations, and the wrong incentives for teachers contributes to ensure that education systems in developing countries fail their two basic tasks: giving everyone a sound basic set of skills, and identifying talent. Moreover, in some ways the job of delivering quality education is getting harder. The world over, education systems are under stress. Enrollment has gone up faster than resources, and with the growth in the high-tech sectors, there is a worldwide increase in the demand for the kind of peoples who used to become teachers. Now they are becoming programmers, computer systems managers, and bankers instead. This is going to be a particularly serious issue for finding good teachers at the secondary level and beyond. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1704-1710
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 7:45:04 PM
Recognizing that schools have to serve the students they do have, rather than the ones they perhaps would like to have, may be the first step to having a school system that gives a chance to every child. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 1782-1783
, clipped on Sunday, May 7, 2017 9:09:06 PM
One thing is relatively clear: For the most part, poor people, even adolescent girls, make conscious choices about their own fertility and sexuality and find ways—though perhaps not pleasant ways—to control it. If young women get pregnant even though it is extremely costly for them, it must reflect someone’s active decision. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2008-2011
, clipped on Monday, May 8, 2017 6:57:07 AM
What all of this underscores is the violence, active and passive, subsumed within the functioning of the traditional family. This was, until fairly recently, ignored by most (though not all) economists, who preferred to leave that black box closed. Yet most societies rely on the goodwill of the parents to make sure that children get fed, schooled, socialized, and taken care of more generally. Given that these are the same parents who contrive to let their little girls die, how much faith should we place in their ability to get this done effectively? Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2143-2147
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 12:21:25 AM
A friend of ours from the world of high finance always says that the poor are like hedge-fund managers—they live with huge amounts of risk. The only difference is in their levels of income. In fact, he grossly understates the case: No hedge-fund manager is liable for 100 percent of his losses, unlike almost every small business owner and small farmer. Moreover, the poor often have to raise all of the capital for their businesses, either out of the accumulated “wealth” of their families or by borrowing from somewhere, a circumstance most hedge-fund managers never have to face. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2270-2274
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 6:37:37 PM
For the most part, it seems that, once again, things were not a lot worse for the poor than in any other year, precisely because their situation is always rather bad. They were dealing with problems that were all too familiar. For the poor, every year feels like being in the middle of a colossal financial crisis. Not only do the poor lead riskier lives than the less poor, but a bad break of the same magnitude is likely to hurt them more. First, a cut in consumption is more painful for someone who consumes very little to start with. When a not-so-poor household needs to cut back on consumption, members may sacrifice some cell phone minutes, buy meat less often, or send the children to a less expensive boarding school. This is clearly painful. But for the poor, a large cut in income might mean cutting into essential expenditures: Over the previous year, adults in 45 percent of the extremely poor households we surveyed in rural Udaipur District had to cut the size of their meals at some point. And cutting meals is something the poor hate: Respondents who had to cut the size of their meals reported themselves to be Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2335-2343
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 6:43:54 PM
For the most part, it seems that, once again, things were not a lot worse for the poor than in any other year, precisely because their situation is always rather bad. They were dealing with problems that were all too familiar. For the poor, every year feels like being in the middle of a colossal financial crisis. Not only do the poor lead riskier lives than the less poor, but a bad break of the same magnitude is likely to hurt them more. First, a cut in consumption is more painful for someone who consumes very little to start with. When a not-so-poor household needs to cut back on consumption, members may sacrifice some cell phone minutes, buy meat less often, or send the children to a less expensive boarding school. This is clearly painful. But for the poor, a large cut in income might mean cutting into essential expenditures: Over the previous year, adults in 45 percent of the extremely poor households we surveyed in rural Udaipur District had to cut the size of their meals at some point. And cutting meals is something the poor hate: Respondents who had to cut the size of their meals reported themselves to be much unhappier than those who did not need to do it. Figure 1: The Effect of a Shock on Ibu Tina’s Fortunes Second, when the relationship between income today and future income is S—shaped, the effect on the poor of a bad break may actually be much worse than temporary unhappiness. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2335-2347
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 6:43:59 PM
For the most part, it seems that, once again, things were not a lot worse for the poor than in any other year, precisely because their situation is always rather bad. They were dealing with problems that were all too familiar. For the poor, every year feels like being in the middle of a colossal financial crisis. Not only do the poor lead riskier lives than the less poor, but a bad break of the same magnitude is likely to hurt them more. First, a cut in consumption is more painful for someone who consumes very little to start with. When a not-so-poor household needs to cut back on consumption, members may sacrifice some cell phone minutes, buy meat less often, or send the children to a less expensive boarding school. This is clearly painful. But for the poor, a large cut in income might mean cutting into essential expenditures: Over the previous year, adults in 45 percent of the extremely poor households we surveyed in rural Udaipur District had to cut the size of their meals at some point. And cutting meals is something the poor hate: Respondents who had to cut the size of their meals reported themselves to be much unhappier than those who did not need to do it. Figure 1: The Effect of a Shock on Ibu Tina’s Fortunes Second, when the relationship between income today Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2335-2346
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 6:44:02 PM
For the most part, it seems that, once again, things were not a lot worse for the poor than in any other year, precisely because their situation is always rather bad. They were dealing with problems that were all too familiar. For the poor, every year feels like being in the middle of a colossal financial crisis. Not only do the poor lead riskier lives than the less poor, but a bad break of the same magnitude is likely to hurt them more. First, a cut in consumption is more painful for someone who consumes very little to start with. When a not-so-poor household needs to cut back on consumption, members may sacrifice some cell phone minutes, buy meat less often, or send the children to a less expensive boarding school. This is clearly painful. But for the poor, a large cut in income might mean cutting into essential expenditures: Over the previous year, adults in 45 percent of the extremely poor households we surveyed in rural Udaipur District had to cut the size of their meals at some point. And cutting meals is something the poor hate: Respondents who had to cut the size of their meals reported themselves to be much unhappier than those who did not need to do it. Figure 1: The Effect of a Shock on Ibu Tina’s Fortunes Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2335-2345
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 6:44:05 PM
Betsey Hartman and Jim Boyce’s book about life in rural Bangladesh in the mid—1970s17 describes two neighboring families, one Hindu and one Muslim, that were not particularly close to each other. The Hindu family lost its main earner and was starving; in desperation, the woman of that family would creep across the fence into the other family’s yard and steal some edible leaves from time to time. Hartman discovered that the Muslim family knew what was going on but decided to turn a blind eye. “I know her character isn’t bad,” the man said. “If I were in her position, I would probably steal, too. When little things disappear, I try not to get angry. I think Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2466-2471
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 7:12:27 PM
Betsey Hartman and Jim Boyce’s book about life in rural Bangladesh in the mid—1970s17 describes two neighboring families, one Hindu and one Muslim, that were not particularly close to each other. The Hindu family lost its main earner and was starving; in desperation, the woman of that family would creep across the fence into the other family’s yard and steal some edible leaves from time to time. Hartman discovered that the Muslim family knew what was going on but decided to turn a blind eye. “I know her character isn’t bad,” the man said. “If I were in her position, I would probably steal, too. When little things disappear, I try not to get angry. I think ‘The person who took this is hungrier than me.’” Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2466-2472
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 7:12:33 PM
This view of insurance as mainly a moral duty to help someone in need explains why, in the Nigerian villages, villagers helped each other out on an individual basis, instead of all contributing to a common pot, despite the fact that sharing risk in this other way would be more efficient. It might also explain why Ibu Emptat’s daughter gave her mother a TV but did not cover her health costs. She did not want to be the one child who was responsible for her parents’ health care (and didn’t want to presume the generosity of her siblings). So she chose to do something nice for them without biting off more than she could chew. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2478-2482
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 7:13:57 PM
It is true that insurance is unlike most transactions that the poor are used to. It is something that you pay for, hoping that you will never need to make use of it. When talking to SKS clients, we met many people who were upset when their health insurance premiums were not reimbursed even though they hadn’t made any claims over the past year. It is certainly possible to explain the concept of insurance better, but it is hard to imagine that a population that ingeniously found a loophole in the SKS system couldn’t figure out the basic principle of insurance. Townsend, as a part of his effort to sell weather insurance, carried out an exercise to figure out whether people understand how the insurance works. While visiting each farmer, the salesman read aloud a brief description of a hypothetical insurance product (temperature insurance) and then asked the potential client several simple hypothetical questions about when the policy would pay out. The respondents had the correct answers three-fourths of the time. It is not clear that the average American or French person would do much better. It is therefore no surprise that the attempts to explain the rainfall insurance product better had no impact on farmers’ willingness to purchase. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2565-2574
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 7:21:50 PM
Yet even this simple story raises questions. There are many fruit wholesalers in Chennai. Why didn’t one of them, or an enterprising moneylender, decide to slightly drop the interest rate charged to the women? That individual should have been able to capture the entire market, still keeping a reasonable margin. Why did the fruit sellers have to wait for people like Muhammad Yunus or Padmaja Reddy? In this sense, the advocates of microfinance are being too modest: They must be doing something more than introducing competition where there was a monopoly. On the other hand, they may also be too sanguine about the potential of small loans to lift people out of poverty. For all the individual anecdotes of fruit sellers turning into fruit magnates that can be found on the various Web sites of microfinance institutions, there are still many poor fruit sellers in Chennai. Many of them do not borrow from microfinance institutions, even though there are several in their town. Are they forgoing their tickets out of poverty, or is microfinance less of a miracle than we have been told? Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2650-2658
, clipped on Tuesday, May 9, 2017 8:35:56 PM
Because the main constraint on lending to the poor is the cost of gathering information about them, it makes sense that they would mostly borrow from people who already know them, such as their neighbors, their employers, the people they trade with, or one of the local moneylenders, and that is exactly what happens. Strange as it might seem, this emphasis on contract enforcement could also drive the poor to borrow from those who have the power to really hurt them if they were to default, since such lenders would not need to spend as much time monitoring (their borrowers wouldn’t dare to stray) and the loans would be cheaper. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2728-2732
, clipped on Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:32:42 AM
The innovation of people like Muhammad Yunus and Padmaja Reddy, then, was not just the idea of lending to the poor at more reasonable rates. It was figuring out how to do it. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2768-2769
, clipped on Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:36:47 AM
The rigidity and specificity of the standard microcredit model mean, for one thing, that since group members are responsible for each other, women who don’t enjoy poking into other people’s business don’t want to join. Group members may be reluctant to include those they don’t know well in their groups, which must discriminate against newcomers. Joint liability works against those who want to take risks: As a group member you always want all other group members to play it as safe as possible. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 2895-2898
, clipped on Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:47:17 AM
The microfinance movement has demonstrated that, despite the difficulties, it is possible to lend to the poor. Although one may debate the extent to which MFI loans transform the lives of the poor, the simple fact that MFI lending has reached its current scale is a remarkable achievement. There are very few other programs targeted at the poor that have managed to reach so many people. However, the structure of the program, which is the source of its success in lending to the poor, is such that we cannot count on it to be a stepping-stone for larger businesses to be created and financed. Finding ways to finance medium-scale enterprises is the next big challenge for finance in developing countries. 8 Saving Brick by Brick Driving from the city center toward the less affluent suburbs in almost any developing country, one is struck by the number of unfinished houses. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3025-3033
, clipped on Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:57:55 AM
The microfinance movement has demonstrated that, despite the difficulties, it is possible to lend to the poor. Although one may debate the extent to which MFI loans transform the lives of the poor, the simple fact that MFI lending has reached its current scale is a remarkable achievement. There are very few other programs targeted at the poor that have managed to reach so many people. However, the structure of the program, which is the source of its success in lending to the poor, is such that we cannot count on it to be a stepping-stone for larger businesses to be created and financed. Finding ways to finance medium-scale enterprises is the next big challenge for finance in developing countries. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3025-3030
, clipped on Wednesday, May 10, 2017 12:58:01 AM
Taken together, this evidence makes us seriously doubt the idea that the average small business owner is a natural “entrepreneur,” in the way we generally understand the term, meaning someone whose business has the potential to grow and who is able to take risks, work hard, and keep trying to make it happen even in the face of multiple hardships. We are, of course, not saying that there are no genuine entrepreneurs among the poor—we have met many such people. But there are also many of them who run a business that is doomed to remain small and unprofitable. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3694-3698
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 10:01:37 AM
The enterprises of the poor often seem more a way to buy a job when a more conventional employment opportunity is not available than a reflection of a particular entrepreneurial urge. Many of the businesses are run because someone in the family has (or is believed to have) some time on hand and every little bit helps. This person is often a woman, and she typically does it in addition to her housework; indeed it is not clear that she always has much of a choice when the opportunity to start a business comes up. It is only recently that men in the West have learned to at least pay lip service to the many things that their wife who “does not work” does for them; it would not be astonishing if their developing-country counterparts ascribed more leisure to their spouses than they actually enjoy. It is entirely possible, therefore, that many business owners, and especially female business owners, do not particularly enjoy running a business, and indeed, dread the thought of expanding it. This may be why, when women business owners in Sri Lanka were offered $250 nominally for investing in their business, many of them did something else with it, unlike the male business owners we encountered above who invested the money and got high returns from it. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3712-3720
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 10:04:17 AM
A steady and predictable income makes it possible to commit to future expenditure and also makes it much easier and cheaper to borrow now. So, if a member of a family has a steady job, schools will accept their children more readily; hospitals will give more expensive treatments, knowing they will be paid; and other members of the family may be able to make the investments in their own businesses that are necessary to allow them to grow. This is why a “good job” is important. A good job is a steady, well-paid job, a job that allows a person the mental space needed to do all those things the middle class does well. This is an idea that economists have often resisted, on the reasonable grounds that good jobs may be expensive jobs, and expensive jobs might mean fewer jobs. But if good jobs mean that children grow up in an environment where they are able to make the most of their talents, it may well be worth the sacrifice of creating somewhat fewer of them. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3776-3782
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 10:10:24 AM
This statement was a good reflection of an institutionalist view that has strong currency in development economics today. The real problem of development, in this view, is not one of figuring out good policies: It is to sort out the political process. If the politics are right, good policies will eventually emerge. And conversely, without good politics, it is impossible Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3867-3869
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 12:11:48 PM
We are often asked why we do what we do: “Why bother?” These are the “small” questions. William Easterly, for one, criticized randomized control trials (RCTs) on his blog in these terms: “RCTs are infeasible for many of the big questions in development, like the economy-wide effects of good institutions or good macroeconomic policies.” Then, he concluded that “embracing RCTs has led development researchers to lower their ambitions.”3 This statement was a good reflection of an institutionalist view that has strong currency in development economics today. The real problem of development, in this view, is not one of figuring out good policies: It is to sort out the political process. If the politics are right, good policies will eventually emerge. And conversely, without good politics, it is impossible to design or implement good policies, at least not on any scale. There is no point to figuring out the best way to spend a dollar on schools, if 87 cents will never reach the school anyway. It follows (or so it is assumed) that “big questions” require “big answers”—social revolutions, such as a transition to effective democracy. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3863-3871
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 12:12:01 PM
If rural school headmasters could fight corruption, perhaps it is not necessary to wait for the overthrow of the government or the profound transformation of society before better policies can be implemented. Careful thinking and rigorous evaluations can help us design systems to keep corruption and inefficiency in check. We are not “lowering our ambitions”: Incremental progress and the accumulation of these small changes, we believe, can sometimes end in a quiet revolution. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 3887-3890
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 12:13:23 PM
The risk of corruption and neglect is thus endemic in any government, but it is likely to be more severe in three circumstances: First, in cases when the government is trying to get people to do things whose value they don’t appreciate, such as wearing a helmet on a motorcycle, or immunizing a child. Second, when what people are getting is worth a lot more than they are paying for it; for example, a hospital bed provided free to those who need it, regardless of income, invites a bribe from richer people who want to jump the queue. Third, when bureaucrats are underpaid, overworked, and not well monitored, and have little to lose by getting fired anyway. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4216-4220
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:31:43 PM
The nurses’ workload was based on an ideology that wants to see nurses as dedicated social workers, designed in ignorance of the conditions on the ground, that lives on, mostly just on paper, because of inertia. Altering the rules to make the jobs doable might not be sufficient to get the nurses to come to work regularly, but it has to be a necessary first step. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4267-4270
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:35:24 PM
We agree with both of them: The focus on the broad INSTITUTIONS as a necessary and sufficient condition for anything good to happen is somewhat misplaced. The political constraints are real, and they make it difficult to find big solutions to big problems. But there is considerable slack to improve institutions and policy at the margin. Careful understanding of the motivations and the constraints of everyone (poor people, civil servants, taxpayers, elected politicians, and so on) can lead to policies and institutions that are better designed, and less likely to be perverted by corruption or dereliction of duty. These changes will be incremental, but they will sustain and build on themselves. They can be the start of a quiet revolution. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4370-4375
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:49:55 PM
First, the poor often lack critical pieces of information and believe things that are not true. They are unsure about the benefits of immunizing children; they think there is little value in what is learned during the first few years of education; they don’t know how much fertilizer they need to use; they don’t know which is the easiest way to get infected with HIV; they don’t know what their politicians do when in office. When their firmly held beliefs turn out to be incorrect, they end up making the wrong decision, sometimes with drastic consequences—think of the girls who have unprotected sex with older men or the farmers who use twice as much fertilizer as they should. Even when they know that they don’t know, the resulting uncertainty can be damaging. For example, the uncertainty about the benefits of immunization combines with the universal tendency to procrastinate, with the result that a lot of children don’t get immunized. Citizens who vote in the dark are more likely to vote for someone of their ethnic group, at the cost of increasing bigotry and corruption. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4390-4398
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:51:23 PM
We saw many instances in which a simple piece of information makes a big difference. However, not every information campaign is effective. It seems that in order to work, an information campaign must have several features: It must say something that people don’t already know (general exhortations like “No sex before marriage” seem to be less effective); it must do so in an attractive and simple way (a film, a play, a TV show, a well-designed report card); and it must come from a credible source (interestingly, the press seems to be viewed as credible). One of the corollaries of this view is that governments pay a huge cost in terms of lost credibility when they say things that are misleading, confusing, or false. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4398-4403
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:51:41 PM
Second, the poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are, the more the “right” decisions are made for you. The poor have no piped water, and therefore do not benefit from the chlorine that the city government puts into the water supply. If they want clean drinking water, they have to purify it themselves. They cannot afford ready-made fortified breakfast cereals and therefore have to make sure that they and their children get enough nutrients. They have no automatic way to save, such as a retirement plan or a contribution to Social Security, so they have to find a way to make sure that they save. These decisions are difficult for everyone because they require some thinking now or some other small cost today, and the benefits are usually reaped in the distant future. As such, procrastination very easily gets in the way. For the poor, this is compounded by the fact that their lives are already much more demanding than ours: Many of them run small businesses in highly competitive industries; most of the rest work as casual laborers and need to constantly worry about where their next job will come from. This means that their lives could be significantly improved by making it as easy as possible to do the right thing—based on everything else we know—using the power of default options and small nudges: Salt fortified with iron and iodine could be made cheap enough that everyone buys it. Savings accounts, the kind that make it easy to put in money and somewhat costlier to take it out, can be made easily available to everyone, if need be, by subsidizing the cost for the bank that offers them. Chlorine could be made available next to every source where piping water is too expensive. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4403-4415
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:52:02 PM
Second, the poor bear responsibility for too many aspects of their lives. The richer you are, the more the “right” decisions are made for you. The poor have no piped water, and therefore do not benefit from the chlorine that the city government puts into the water supply. If they want clean drinking water, they have to purify it themselves. They cannot afford ready-made fortified breakfast cereals and therefore have to make sure that they and their children get enough nutrients. They have no automatic way to save, such as a retirement plan or a contribution to Social Security, so they have to find a way to make sure that they save. These decisions are difficult for everyone because they require some thinking now or some other small cost today, and the benefits are usually reaped in the distant future. As such, procrastination very easily gets in the way. For the poor, this is compounded by the fact that their lives are already much more demanding than ours: Many of them run small businesses in highly competitive industries; most of the rest work as casual laborers and need to constantly worry about where their next job will come from. This means that their lives could be significantly improved by making it as easy as possible to do the right thing—based on everything else we know—using the power of default options and small nudges: Salt fortified with iron and iodine could be made cheap enough that everyone buys it. Savings accounts, the kind that make it easy to put in money and somewhat costlier to take it out, can be made easily available to everyone, if need be, by subsidizing the cost for the bank that offers them. Chlorine could be made available next to every source where piping water is too expensive. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4403-4415
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:52:09 PM
Third, there are good reasons that some markets are missing for the poor, or that the poor face unfavorable prices in them. The poor get a negative interest rate from their savings accounts (if they are lucky enough to have an account) and pay exorbitant rates on their loans (if they can get one) because handling even a small quantity of money entails a fixed cost. The market for health insurance for the poor has not developed, despite the devastating effects of serious health problems in their lives because the limited insurance options that can be sustained in the market (catastrophic health insurance, formulaic weather insurance) are not what the poor want. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4415-4420
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:52:21 PM
Fourth, poor countries are not doomed to failure because they are poor, or because they have had an unfortunate history. It is true that things often do not work in these countries: Programs intended to help the poor end up in the wrong hands, teachers teach desultorily or not at all, roads weakened by theft of materials collapse under the weight of overburdened trucks, and so forth. But many of these failures have less to do with some grand conspiracy of the elites to maintain their hold on the economy and more to do with some avoidable flaw in the detailed design of policies, and the ubiquitous three Is: ignorance, ideology, and inertia. Nurses are expected to carry out jobs that no ordinary human being would be able to complete, and yet no one feels compelled to change their job description. The fad of the moment (be it dams, barefoot doctors, microcredit, or whatever) is turned into a policy without any attention to the reality within which it is supposed to function. We were once told by a senior government official in India that the village education committees always include the parent of the best student in the school and the parent of the worst student in the school. When we asked how they decided who were the best and worst children, given that there are no tests until fourth grade, she quickly changed subjects. And yet even these absurd rules, once in place, keep going out of sheer inertia. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4434-4444
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:53:30 PM
Finally, expectations about what people are able or unable to do all too often end up turning into self-fulfilling prophecies. Children give up on school when their teachers (and sometimes their parents) signal to them that they are not smart enough to master the curriculum; fruit sellers don’t make the effort to repay their debt because they expect that they will fall back into debt very quickly; nurses stop coming to work because nobody expects them to be there; politicians whom no one expects to perform have no incentive to try improving people’s lives. Changing expectations is not easy, but it is not impossible: After seeing a female pradhan in their village, villagers not only lost their prejudice against women politicians but even started thinking that their daughter might become one, too; teachers who are told that their job is simply to make sure that all the children can read can accomplish that task within the duration of a summer camp. Most important, the role of expectations means that success often feeds on itself. When a situation starts to improve, the improvement itself affects beliefs and behavior. This is one more reason one should not necessarily be afraid of handing things out (including cash) when needed to get a virtuous cycle started. Abhijit Banerjee
, Poor Economics.
loc. 4449-4458
, clipped on Saturday, May 13, 2017 6:54:25 PM
First, Bush no longer described his desk library as a tool for trained librarians, as he had in previous discussions, but rather characterized it as a device that anyone could use. More than that, he stressed that the desk library wouldn't just help those nonprofessional users do the same old filing and retrieving a little faster; it would also support and improve their very "processes of thought." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 632-635
, clipped on Monday, May 15, 2017 7:01:19 PM
In any case, Bush continued, once a Memex user had created an associative trail, he or she could copy it and exchange it with others. This meant that the construction of trails would quickly become a community endeavor, which would over time produce a vast, ever-expanding, and ever more richly cross-linked web of all human knowledge. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 651-653
, clipped on Monday, May 15, 2017 7:02:28 PM
Today we speak of "the computer" as if it were a single thing that had to be invented only once. But as Wiener's list of features suggests, the modern digital computer is actually a combination of at least half a dozen separate inventions, most of which involved not just another gadget but a shift in the way people thought about computing. At the time of Wiener's memo, moreover, it was far from clear whether he or anyone else had put the individual pieces together in the right way; those conceptual transitions were still very much works in progress. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 694-698
, clipped on Monday, May 15, 2017 7:05:50 PM
Hopper would later gain fame both as a teacher and as a pioneer in the development of high-level programming languages. Yet perhaps her best-known contribution came in the summer of 1945, when she and her colleagues were tracking down a glitch in the Mark II and discovered a large moth that had gotten crushed by one of the relay switches and shorted it out. She taped the dead moth into the logbook with the notation "First case of an actual bug being found." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 901-904
, clipped on Monday, May 15, 2017 10:45:44 PM
Turing went at his mathematics in much the same strange spirit. Indeed, when he tackled a problem, he often wouldn't even glance at the mathematical literature to see what others had accomplished before him; he preferred to reinvent the wheel himself. And so it was with the decidability problem: he simply turned it over and over in his mind until finally the answer was clear to him. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1111-1113
, clipped on Monday, May 15, 2017 11:07:05 PM
By some miracle, the obscure McCulloch and Pitts had come across the decidability paper written by the equally obscure Turing, understood its significance, and taken Turing's work as one inspiration for their own. Moreover, McCulloch and Pitts now found themselves arriving at much the same destination as Turing. Their own paper, published in 1943 as "A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity," was essentially a demonstration that their idealized neural networks were functionally equivalent to Turing machines. That is, any problem that a Turing machine could solve, an appropriately designed network could also solve. And conversely, anything that was beyond a Turing machine's power—such as the decidability problem—was likewise beyond a network's power. As the science historian William Aspray has written, "With the Turing machines providing an abstract characterization of thinking in the machine world and McCulloch and Pitts's neuron nets providing one in the biological world, the equivalence result suggested a unified theory of thought that broke down barriers between the physical and biological worlds."14 Or, as McCulloch himself would put it in his 1965 autobiography Embodiments of Mind, he and Pitts had proved the equivalence of all general Turing machines, whether "man-made or begotten." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1303-1313
, clipped on Tuesday, May 16, 2017 7:49:56 PM
At issue was the second great abstraction in the "First Draft": the "stored program" concept. Up until that point, most of the pioneering computers had embodied at least part of the problem-solving process in their actual physical structure. The classic example was Bush's Differential Analyzer, in which the problem was represented by the arrangement of gears and shafts. The brilliant idea behind the stored-program concept was to make a clean split, to separate the problem-solving sequence from the hardware entirely. The act of computation thus became an abstract process that we now know as software, a series of commands encoded in a string of binary 1s and 0s and stored in the computer's memory. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1390-1395
, clipped on Tuesday, May 16, 2017 7:59:00 PM
a stored-program computer, like a Turing machine, could treat its program instructions as just another kind of data. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1397-1398
, clipped on Tuesday, May 16, 2017 7:59:37 PM
The mess promptly landed in the lap of the army, whose role as the funding agency for both ENIAC and EDVAC gave it final authority in the matter. The whole unedifying saga would drag on for another year, ending only in April 1947, when exasperated army attorneys at last threw out everybody's patent claims on the ground that von Neumann's "First Draft" paper represented prior public disclosure. They decreed that the stored-program idea rightfully belonged in the public domain. And there it has remained. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1424-1428
, clipped on Tuesday, May 16, 2017 8:01:49 PM
Vision and echolocation have many features in common. One narrow range of radiation—light in the case of vision, ultrasounds in the case of echolocation—provides information relevant to a wide variety of cognitive and practical goals. Why, then, is vision so common and echolocation so rare? Because, in most environments, vision is much more effective. Echolocation is adaptive only in an ecological niche where vision is impossible or badly impaired—for instance, when dwelling in caves and hunting at night, as bats do. Dan Sperber
, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.
loc. 68-71
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 12:04:10 AM
Imagine, by way of comparison, that, against the odds, biological wheels had evolved in one animal species. We would have no idea how this evolution had taken place. Still, if these wheels allowed the animals to move with remarkable efficiency in their natural environment, we would have a good idea why they had evolved; in other terms, we would understand their function. We might expect animal wheels, like all biological organs, to have weaknesses and to occasionally malfunction. What we would not expect, though, is to find some systematic flaw in this locomotion system that compromised the very performance of its function—for instance, a regular difference in size between wheels on opposite sides, making it hard for the animals to stay on course. A biological mechanism described as an ill-adapted adaptation is more likely to be a misdescribed mechanism. Reason as standardly described is such a case. Psychologists claim to have shown that human reason is flawed. The idea that reason does its job quite poorly has become commonplace. Experiment after experiment has convinced psychologists and philosophers that people make egregious mistakes in reasoning. And it is not just that people reason poorly, it is that they are systematically biased. The wheels of reason are off balance. Dan Sperber
, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.
loc. 94-103
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 12:07:15 AM
“How do you open a lock? With a key. How do you open a metaphorical lock that’s called “lock” even though it’s really a geographical feature involved in sailing? With a metaphorical key that’s called “key” even though it’s really a geographical features involved in sailing. This is sand from the Florida Keys, melted into glass and shaped by the locksmiths of San Francisco.” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 7269-7272
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 9:40:03 PM
The problem with knowing theodicy is that it makes it really hard to pray. You can’t say “I’m in trouble, so please help me,” because you know that many people are in trouble and die anyway. You can’t say “I was a good person, so help me,” because you know that many people were very good and died anyway. You can’t say “I know you have some plan for me that I haven’t fulfilled yet,” because you know that many people died without fulfilling anything. Some scholars say that prayer changes nothing but that it is very important that you do it anyway, but when your ship is hurtling towards a rocky bank such subtleties lose their compellingness. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 7336-7341
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 9:45:12 PM
“Theoretical kabbalah is very interesting if you are the CEO of Gogmagog. But us? We are simple, innocent people, Mr. Young. We have no need for grand ivory tower theorizing. All we want is a warm meal, a soft bed, and to burn the fucking system to the ground. I don’t need theorists. I need assassins, hackers, burglars, and chemists. I need people who can do tricks.” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 7622-7625
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 10:12:26 PM
“One man whose name means ‘a multitude’. That is the kabbalistic lesson: a single good man is equivalent to a multitude of good men. Because he can convince others, set up incentives, build institutions, drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming. If I had been with Abraham, I would not have stopped at ten people. I would have told God to save the city for the sake of one righteous man, and God would have done it, because one man can be a great multitude when kabbalistically necessary.” “And then what? Fine. You convince God to save Sodom. And what do you get? A city full of Sodomites. The scum of the earth. Worms and maggots infesting the world. And now they’ll never stop, because you showed them they’ll never face punishment for their crimes. They’re all yours. What does it gain you?” “I keep them from you,” said Jalaketu. “I’m telling the truth when I say I don’t like you,” said Thamiel. “Please don’t believe this is one of those times where the Devil always lies and you can’t trust him. I really don’t like you and I am really looking forward to the part a few years from now where God gives me the advantage over you and you end up wholly in my power. Remember that.” “I remember,” said the Comet King. He Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 7756-7766
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 10:24:20 PM
“If humanity is good,” repeated the Comet King. “Surely you understand how unbelievably, unutterably, colossally unlikely that is, and has always…” “There’s always a chance.” “If humanity was good, if even the tiniest, most miniscule fraction of humanity was good, God would have saved Sodom. Abraham asked Him that, and He agreed, because He knew it was the easiest bargain He’d ever make. A bet without risk.” “Lot was good,” said the Comet King. “One man!” “One man whose name means ‘a multitude’. That is the kabbalistic lesson: a single good man is equivalent to a multitude of good men. Because he can convince others, set up incentives, build institutions, drag the rest of the world kicking and screaming. If I had been with Abraham, I would not have stopped at ten people. I would have told God to save the city for the sake of one righteous man, and God would have done it, because one man can be a great multitude when kabbalistically necessary.” Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 7751-7759
, clipped on Wednesday, May 17, 2017 10:24:43 PM
It was that word information, Shannon explained to the great mathematician at one point: he had never liked it. The technical distinction between information and meaning was too much a violation of common usage, he felt, and would just end up confusing people. Could von Neumann suggest anything better? Von Neumann's answer was immediate, as Shannon later recounted the story: "You should call it entropy, and for two reasons." First, von Neumann told the younger man, his formula for the information content of a message was mathematically identical to the physicists' formula for entropy, a mathematical variable related to the flow of heat.* (Shannon was astounded to learn this; he had derived his formulation totally on his own.) But second, and much more important, said von Neumann, "most people don't know what entropy really is, and if you use the word entropy in an argument, you will win every time!" Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1788-1795
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 8:21:19 AM
Given the central role of communication in his new science, Wiener explained, his first thought had been to derive a name from the Greek word for "messenger." Unfortunately, that word was angelos, which in English had long since taken on the specific meaning of "a messenger from God." Somehow, a new science of angelics wasn't quite what he was looking for. So instead, said Wiener, he had decided to focus on the theme of control. In Latin, he knew, the word for "steersman" was gubernator, from which we get the English word governor. That was better, since the word governor could sometimes refer to a device used to control the speed of an engine. More often, though, it referred to a human "governor," or steersman for policy: the wrong connotation again. However, the Latin gubernator turned out to be a corruption of the Greek word for "steersman," kybernetes. And that, Wiener felt, could be transmuted into English very nicely, as cybernetics. Selfridge and Pitts agreed that cybernetics was indeed an excellent name for the new science. And so, blissfully ignorant that he had just given later generations the means to coin an endless string of buzzwords—cyberspace, cybercash, cyberpunk, cybersex, ad infinitum—Wiener continued writing. Cybernetics was not an easy book to write, says Selfridge, who watched Wiener struggle through many revisions. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1856-1867
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:11:33 AM
Given the central role of communication in his new science, Wiener explained, his first thought had been to derive a name from the Greek word for "messenger." Unfortunately, that word was angelos, which in English had long since taken on the specific meaning of "a messenger from God." Somehow, a new science of angelics wasn't quite what he was looking for. So instead, said Wiener, he had decided to focus on the theme of control. In Latin, he knew, the word for "steersman" was gubernator, from which we get the English word governor. That was better, since the word governor could sometimes refer to a device used to control the speed of an engine. More often, though, it referred to a human "governor," or steersman for policy: the wrong connotation again. However, the Latin gubernator turned out to be a corruption of the Greek word for "steersman," kybernetes. And that, Wiener felt, could be transmuted into English very nicely, as cybernetics. Selfridge and Pitts agreed that cybernetics was indeed an excellent name for the new science. And so, blissfully ignorant that he had just given later generations the means to coin an endless string of buzzwords—cyberspace, cybercash, cyberpunk, cybersex, ad infinitum—Wiener continued writing. Cybernetics was not an easy book to write, says Selfridge, who watched Wiener struggle through many revisions. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1856-1867
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:11:40 AM
Given the central role of communication in his new science, Wiener explained, his first thought had been to derive a name from the Greek word for "messenger." Unfortunately, that word was angelos, which in English had long since taken on the specific meaning of "a messenger from God." Somehow, a new science of angelics wasn't quite what he was looking for. So instead, said Wiener, he had decided to focus on the theme of control. In Latin, he knew, the word for "steersman" was gubernator, from which we get the English word governor. That was better, since the word governor could sometimes refer to a device used to control the speed of an engine. More often, though, it referred to a human "governor," or steersman for policy: the wrong connotation again. However, the Latin gubernator turned out to be a corruption of the Greek word for "steersman," kybernetes. And that, Wiener felt, could be transmuted into English very nicely, as cybernetics. Selfridge and Pitts agreed that cybernetics was indeed an excellent name for the new science. And so, blissfully ignorant that he had just given later generations the means to coin an endless string of buzzwords—cyberspace, cybercash, cyberpunk, cybersex, ad infinitum—Wiener continued writing. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 1856-1866
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:11:47 AM
"The first industrial revolution, the revolution of the 'dark, satanic mills,' was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery," he wrote. "The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2026-2028
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:33:11 AM
"The first industrial revolution, the revolution of the 'dark, satanic mills,' was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery," he wrote. "The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2026-2028
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:33:15 AM
"The first industrial revolution, the revolution of the 'dark, satanic mills,' was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery," he wrote. "The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2026-2028
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:33:17 AM
"The first industrial revolution, the revolution of the 'dark, satanic mills,' was the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery," he wrote. "The modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2026-2028
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:33:19 AM
Information was what computers and brains were about. It was the one central concept that unified communication, computation, and control and made them all seem like different facets of one underlying reality. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2121-2123
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:41:55 AM
"If all the Industrial Revolution accomplished was to turn people into drones in a factory," he was sometimes heard to say, "then what was the point?" Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2165-2166
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:45:48 AM
"the modeler observes through the screen of an oscilloscope selected aspects of the model's behavior and adjusts the model's parameters . . . until its behavior satisfies his criteria. To anyone who has had the pleasure of close interaction with a good, fast, responsive analog simulation, a mathematical model consisting of mere pencil marks on paper is likely to seem a static, lifeless thing." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2172-2175
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 10:47:00 AM
Convinced that psychologists should work with the engineers from the very beginning of the design process as opposed to coming in at the end, when it was too late to change anything, Lick had organized the Project Lincoln radar-display group jointly with the engineer Herbert Weiss, with a team membership that was half and half. It did not start out well. "The engineers never took to it at all," says Bert Green, who had been just finishing up his Ph.D. at Princeton when Lick recruited him. Like most technical people of that era (and many today), the engineers tended to view human-factors issues as a fuzzy-minded obsession with trivia such as the shapes of knobs and the colors of dials, things that were a distraction from the serious business of designing hardware. Moreover, it must be said that Lick's band of greenhorns gave them reason for that view. "The engineers would come ask, 'How bright should this display be?' " recalls Green. "Well, we'd all been trained as academic psychologists. So we'd say, 'Come back in three months, after we do the experiments.' But they wanted the answer right now." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2366-2374
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 8:32:48 PM
They simply paid for the Memory Test Computer out of Division 6's "advanced research" budget, which they could dip into for whatever they considered needful—with no committee meetings, no studying the question to death, and nobody's pointing out a thousand ways they ought to do it differently. "As long as [our decisions] were plausible and could be explained," agreed Forrester, "we could carry other people with Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2528-2531
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 11:08:27 PM
They simply paid for the Memory Test Computer out of Division 6's "advanced research" budget, which they could dip into for whatever they considered needful—with no committee meetings, no studying the question to death, and nobody's pointing out a thousand ways they ought to do it differently. "As long as [our decisions] were plausible and could be explained," agreed Forrester, "we could carry other people with us." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2528-2531
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 11:08:34 PM
Take software, for example. Lincoln Lab's initial guess for the programming requirements on SAGE—that it would require perhaps a few thousand lines of computer code to run the entire air-defense system—was turning out to be the most laughable underestimate of the whole project. True, the Lincoln Lab team was hardly alone in that regard. Many computer engineers still regarded programming as an afterthought: what could be so hard about writing down a logical sequence of commands? Nonetheless, the Lincoln Lab programmers were being asked to create what would now be called a real-time operating system for the most complex computer/communications system in the world, and they had no modern tools to help them—no Fortran, no Cobol, no Algol; no computer languages, period. All they had was the most basic, hardware-level computerese, alphanumeric codes that corresponded to operations like "Add the contents of register A to the contents of register B and place the results in register C." Anyone who tried to program with such codes quickly discovered that it was terribly easy to make mistakes in even the simplest algorithms. And the SAGE system was anything but simple. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2611-2619
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 11:16:06 PM
As a general rule of thumb, for example, music teachers proved to be particularly adept. And much to the project leaders' astonishment (this being the 1950s) women often turned out to be more proficient than men at worrying about the details while simultaneously keeping the big picture in mind. One of the project's best programming groups was 80 percent female. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 2628-2631
, clipped on Thursday, May 18, 2017 11:17:16 PM
Hebrew has “narad”, meaning to go down or descend. Greek has “Nereid”, the goddesses of the deep. English has “nerd”, a technologically-minded smart person, and “neared”, ie having drawn closer. Put it all together, and we get somewhere down very deep, filled with smart people and technology, dedicated to watching for things that might be drawing closer to them. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 8623-8626
, clipped on Friday, May 19, 2017 11:25:56 PM
Genocide is a good way to kill people, but not a good way to damn them. Desperation brings out the best in people. Starve people to death, and some of them will give their last crust of bread to a stranger. Torture them, and they’ll bear all sorts of horrors to protect people they love. Kill them, and they’ll die with prayers on their lips. Give a man a crisis, and the best in him will rise up in a sudden glory. It’s the grind of everyday life that brings out his little hatreds and petty cruelties. Shoot a man’s wife, and he will jump in front of the bullet and sacrifice his own life for hers; force him to live in a one-room apartment with her, and within a month he’ll be a domestic abuser. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 8755-8760
, clipped on Friday, May 19, 2017 11:44:09 PM
Genesis 4:5 says that “The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering, but on Cain and his offering he did not look with favor.” The situation is kabbalistically reenacted every four years, when a candidate named some variant of “Cain” must lose at some stage in a US Presidential election. In 2016 it was Tim Kaine. In 2012 it was Herman Cain. In 2008 the unlucky role fell to war hero John McCain, who ran a strong race based on a platform of campaign finance reform and military leadership. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 9466-9469
, clipped on Saturday, May 20, 2017 10:17:41 AM
You say you have problems as great as my own I am forced to admit it is true But the thing is that my problems happen to me Whereas yours only happen to you. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 9631-9632
, clipped on Saturday, May 20, 2017 10:28:57 AM
The 2016 Republican primaries went the way any nominative determinist would have predicted. The guy named Walker left early. The guy named Bush got mowed down. The guy named Rand ran as a libertarian. The guy named Cruz (Latin, meaning “cross”) ran on a platform of evangelical Christianity. The guy named Marco (Latin, meaning “warlike”), ran on a platform of neoconservative imperialism. The guy named Benjamin (Hebrew, meaning “son of my right hand”) ran on a platform laid out in his book Clever Hands. And the guy named Trump beat all of them. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 9758-9762
, clipped on Saturday, May 20, 2017 10:46:56 AM
Things were hardly more subtle on the Democratic side. Bernie connected his first name with fire early on, eg “Feel The Bern”; his surname derives from Greek Alexander, “defender of man”. Put together, we get “defender of the fired man”, eg a supporter of the unemployed and underemployed. But Hillary Clinton, named for Sir Edmund Hillary (whose own name combines “hill” and “aerie”, two words for high places) quickly climbed to the top. She became the clear favorite after narrowly defeating Sanders in Iowa, a state granted disproportionate power in Presidential elections presumably because its name is the Tetragrammaton. Scott Alexander
, Unsong.
loc. 9763-9767
, clipped on Saturday, May 20, 2017 10:47:10 AM
Since the users would be sharing the computer's processing time as well as its storage space, McCarthy took to calling his scheme time-sharing. And characteristically, he wasn't too impressed with himself for having thought it up. "Time-sharing to me was one of these ideas that seemed quite inevitable," he says. "When I was first learning about computers, I [thought] that even if [time-sharing] wasn't the way it was already done, surely it must be what everybody had in mind to do." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 3622-3625
, clipped on Tuesday, May 23, 2017 12:11:15 AM
Finally, Lick's article reveals considerable ambivalence about artificial intelligence. He knew that AI was important to symbiosis, since smart assistants are presumably better than dumb ones. And he was clearly fascinated by the subject; as he said on another occasion, AI seemed to offer "the most direct path toward the understanding of intellectual processes."25 Yet he also knew far too much about the brain and its complexities to believe the hype about AI, which was abundant even then. Assertions by Minsky and others to the contrary, computers were nowhere near replicating basic human abilities such as judgment or common sense. So for a long time to come, Lick wrote, humans and computers would have to work together. With tongue only partly in cheek, moreover, he referred to a recent study he'd done for the air force predicting that artificial intelligence wouldn't be of much use for another twenty years: "That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and fifteen years to use it. The fifteen may be ten or five hundred, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 3917-3925
, clipped on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 11:38:38 PM
small, tethered model of a Curtiss 'Robin' years ago in the wind of an electric fan in Curtiss-Wright's display room on Washington Street in St. Louis," he wrote in one paper Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 3992-3993
, clipped on Wednesday, May 24, 2017 11:50:14 PM
small, tethered model of a Curtiss 'Robin' years ago in the wind of an electric fan in Curtiss-Wright's display room on Washington Street in St. Louis," he wrote in one paper Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 3992-3993
, clipped on Thursday, May 25, 2017 7:02:07 AM
But in this case, Lick didn't automatically dismiss it as the work of a crackpot, if only because he'd met the author once or twice before. At age thirty-seven, ten years younger than Lick himself, he was a handsome, dark-haired, but rather lonely fellow—the quiet sort who ordinarily might not stick in your memory. But then once you got to know him a bit, you saw that much of this man's quietness came from his habit of listening—deeply, profoundly listening to everything that was happening around him, and trying to work out its most fundamental meaning. And then when he did talk, his soft, diffident baritone somehow managed to be hypnotic in its intensity. His name was Douglas Engelbart. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 4620-4626
, clipped on Thursday, May 25, 2017 7:42:34 PM
"Lick was the first person to believe in me," says Engelbart. "And he was the first person to stick his neck out and give me a chance. In fact, if he hadn't done that, if he hadn't stuck his neck out and given me money, I don't think anybody ever would have done so. That was why I trusted him. Lick was like my big brother." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 4763-4765
, clipped on Thursday, May 25, 2017 8:00:34 PM
Although Lick never publicly described his first response to "Framework," it must have included a strong component of déjà vu. Here was the entire idea of human-computer symbiosis, re-created by a complete unknown out in the middle of nowhere. Lick had to admire that—even though Engelbart had been quite right in anticipating some skepticism on his part ("Later," says Engelbart, "a couple of his friends told me that his reaction was, 'Well, he's way out there'—meaning far from MIT—'in Palo Alto, so we probably can't expect much. But he's using the right words, so we're sort of honor-bound to fund him' "). So by early 1963, Engelbart had funding for his project. Of course, he didn't receive a huge amount of money, thanks to Lick's steadily growing list of academic dependents. But it was a start. And at age thirty-seven, Douglas Engelbart was feeling, well, something this quiet, lonely man hadn't felt very often before, certainly not in relation to his augmentation ideas. "Lick was the first person to believe in me," says Engelbart. "And he was the first person to stick his neck out and give me a chance. In fact, if he hadn't done that, if he hadn't stuck his neck out and given me money, I don't think anybody ever would have done so. That was why I trusted him. Lick was like my big brother." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 4756-4765
, clipped on Thursday, May 25, 2017 8:00:44 PM
"They looked at it as, 'Oh, you want to do time-sharing? You've got all this government money to do time-sharing? Sure, our machine is good for that.' Or maybe to say it more accurately, 'We are determined to prove to you that our machine is good for that, because our machine is the best one that we could possibly build.' " Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 5519-5521
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 10:01:09 PM
Seeing the deference being given to Dr. Roberts must have been a particular kind of purgatory for Mr. Robert W. Taylor. Nonetheless, Taylor was determined to make this work. It was a testament to his management skills that he endured the situation without ever saying a word in public. Neither he, nor Roberts, nor anyone else describes their working relationship as being anything but cordial. Taylor was willing to let Roberts and the rest of the world believe anything they wanted—so long as the network got built. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 5939-5943
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 10:42:41 PM
The motivation was not to improve the Pentagon's ability to fight such a war, but rather to lower the likelihood of its having to. Vulnerable communications systems were highly destabilizing, went the argument: a commander in chief who feared the sudden loss of communication would feel obligated to fire off every weapon he had at the first sign of attack, lest they quickly be rendered useless. Conversely, a commander in chief blessed with survivable command and control could afford to wait it out, see what developed, and make some effort at a measured response. Indeed, Baran and his colleagues even advocated sharing the packet-switching technology with the Soviets, on the grounds that having survivable communications on both sides would be the most stable configuration of all. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 10995-11000
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 10:56:57 PM
ARPA's computing program continued to lead its charmed life, rather like a person sleepwalking through a battlefield without getting a scratch. One reason was DDR&E Johnny Foster, who resisted any and all attempts to focus ARPA's efforts purely on Vietnam. The DoD had other concerns during this period, after all, starting with the Soviets' rapidly expanding nuclear capability. Underlying the strategic balance, Foster knew, was the technological balance. And since ARPA had been founded precisely to help maintain that balance, it couldn't be allowed to degenerate into a counterinsurgency office. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 6138-6143
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 11:03:01 PM
The students, meanwhile, felt much the same way. Given the nature of interactive computing, in fact, even the fieriest activists among them could argue that they were co-opting the Pentagon, and not vice versa. They were striking a blow for intellectual freedom. They were liberating human potential. And not incidentally, they were liberating a few dollars that might otherwise be spent on B-52s. "That was the lie we told ourselves," recalls a wry Bob Metcalfe, then an undergraduate computer-science major at MIT: "Our money was bloody on only one side." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 6195-6199
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 11:08:19 PM
Engelbart's answer, of course, was the oN-Line System, or NLS. In the eighteen months since the Michigan PI meeting, he and his team had gotten it working very well indeed, especially once they'd taken delivery of their SDS 940 time-sharing system. NLS now offered all the attributes of what would later be called a word-processing program: full-screen text editing with automatic word wrap; cutting, pasting, corrections, and insertions; automatic formatting and printing—the works. It likewise offered the functionality of what would later be called an outline processor, enabling the user to organize the text as a series of headings and subheadings; collapse or expand headings to any level of detail; move a heading and all its subheadings as a unit; automatically number the headings; and so on. It also implemented what would later come to be known as hyperlinks, Vannevar Bush's old notion of user-defined associations between one written concept and another. And for those situations where users wanted something that wasn't already built in, it offered a programming language that allowed them to construct the functionality themselves. NLS, like Fernando Corbató's CTSS, was an open system. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 6344-6352
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 11:23:21 PM
And with that, he says, he felt he'd been there long enough. "I don't think it's good for someone to stay in that office for very long, really," he says. "There's sort of a czar mentality that creeps in: absolute power corrupts absolutely." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 6684-6686
, clipped on Friday, May 26, 2017 11:53:41 PM
What characterized the "winners," of course, was their fervent, almost religious conviction that they were on the verge of creating truly intelligent machines—not just understanding intelligence, or modeling intelligence, but creating it. It was a belief that flowed from Minsky himself, says another graduate student of that era, Patrick Winston, who would later succeed Minsky as the director of the lab. "I think he wanted to make a contribution as fundamental as Darwin's and Freud's. So everyone had a mission, everybody worked hard, everybody stayed up all night." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 6858-6862
, clipped on Saturday, May 27, 2017 12:10:17 AM
No mystery about where to start: Taylor's motto was "Never hire 'good' people, because ten good people together can't do what a single great one can do." And Butler Lampson was among the greatest—"my choice as the finest computer scientist of the century," says Taylor. Others in Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 7614-7617
, clipped on Saturday, May 27, 2017 5:16:49 PM
No mystery about where to start: Taylor's motto was "Never hire 'good' people, because ten good people together can't do what a single great one can do." And Butler Lampson was among the greatest—"my choice as the finest computer scientist of the century," says Taylor. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 7614-7617
, clipped on Saturday, May 27, 2017 5:16:56 PM
Too empty for Gary Starkweather. He'll never forget that first day, he says, when he found himself standing alone in a vacant room, staring at the bare cinder-block walls, and wondering if he'd just made the biggest mistake of his life. Back in Rochester, after all, he'd had friends, family, and roots, not to mention a beautifully equipped optics lab. Here in Palo Alto he was three thousand miles from where he'd grown up. His wife and their two little children were strangers in the community. They were still in shock from the housing prices. And now here he was in this barren "laboratory" with the reality hitting him square in the face: he was going to have to rebuild everything. From scratch. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 7638-7643
, clipped on Saturday, May 27, 2017 5:18:47 PM
"Bob didn't want people who had to be managed," says Alan Kay, who had served as a consultant to PARC since the previous fall. "He liked people who were outspoken, who were very confident, who would argue back with him. And true to his word, he did not meddle with people's technical decisions. His idea was that he was there essentially to manage the personalities, to keep people from killing each other." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 7751-7754
, clipped on Saturday, May 27, 2017 5:26:08 PM
Now, in all fairness, Goldman concedes, the new recruits did give the Xerox management a much-needed overhaul, and they did keep the company from choking on its own growth. But that actually became a big part of the problem: success reinforced their own worst instincts. Talk about subservience to Plan—these were numbers guys, who thought that letting people pursue wild and crazy ideas was tantamount to letting them play in a sandbox; who thought that nothing was real until they could reduce it to entries on a spreadsheet; who thought that everything could be predicted, analyzed, controlled, and managed. At one point in the mid-1970s, Goldman recalls, "I tried to explain Moore's law to one of them. Twice the power for half the price, and so on. Well, the guy just couldn't understand it. He said, 'Nothing could follow that kind of law!' " Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 8590-8596
, clipped on Sunday, May 28, 2017 12:06:36 PM
Looking to the future, the committee had unanimously recommended that the company pursue office automation as aggressively as possible, by building on the enormous head start achieved by PARC. The members had gone in to present their results to McColough and McCardell, expecting great things to come of it. And they had watched as the two leaders, distracted by the government's latest antitrust threats against the company, barely paid attention long enough to say, Thank you. We'll read over the report and consider it very carefully Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 8823-8827
, clipped on Monday, May 29, 2017 12:11:27 AM
"The future," he wrote, "is not to be won by making a lot of minor technological advances and moving them immediately into the Services." Lord knows he'd tried to make the new director understand that: "The problem is that the frame of reference with which he enters the discussions is basically quite different from the frames of reference that are natural, familiar, and comfortable to most of us in IPTO—and I think, to most of you. In my frame . . . it is a fundamental axiom that computers and communications are crucially important, that getting computers to understand natural language and to respond to speech will have profound consequences for the military, that the Arpanet and satellite packet communications and ground and air radio networks are major steps forward into a new era of command and control, that AI techniques will make it possible to interpret satellite photographs automatically, and that 1010-bit nanosecond memories, 1012-bit microsecond memories and 1015-bit millisecond memories are more desirable than gold. In George's frame . . . none of those things is axiomatic—and the basic question is, who in DoD needs it and is willing to put up some money on it now? We are trying hard to decrease the dissonance between the frames, but we are not making good progress. As one of my colleagues put it Friday, Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 8922-8931
, clipped on Monday, May 29, 2017 12:32:03 AM
The pessimistic scenario, in contrast, would require nothing more than laissez faire: "[It] can merely evolve under the pressure of economic competition and the criterion of local gain." He did not underestimate the private sector's ability to innovate, Lick insisted; rather, he questioned its ability to cooperate, especially for the sake of some ill-defined "electronic commons" whose payoff was nebulous, iffy, and still ten to twenty years away. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 9170-9173
, clipped on Monday, May 29, 2017 1:58:36 AM
Altair BASIC took a number of key features from DEC's BASIC for the PDP-11. (The language also owed its existence to the Harvard PDP-10, interestingly enough. Since Gates and Allen didn't have access to an Intel 8080 at the time, they used Gates's student account on the big machine to create a simulation of the microprocessor—in the process burning up some forty thousand dollars' worth of computer time that was not supposed to be used for commercial purposes. But no matter: once the language was ready, Allen quit his job, Gates dropped out of school, they both moved to Albuquerque to be near MITS, and together they formed a little company called Micro Soft to market it.) Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 9536-9541
, clipped on Monday, May 29, 2017 8:15:03 AM
Illinois and Nobel laureate Kenneth Wilson of Cornell, Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 10136-10136
, clipped on Tuesday, May 30, 2017 6:51:02 PM
retrospect, of course, Berners-Lee's combination of hypertext and browsing would prove to be one of those brilliantly simple ideas that change everything. By giving users something to see, it set off a subtle but powerful shift in the psychology of the Internet. No longer would it be just an abstract communication channel, like the telephone or the TV; instead, it would become a place, an almost tangible reality that you could enter into, explore, and even share with the other people you found there. It would become the agora, the electronic commons, the information infrastructure, cyberspace. Because of Berners-Lee's hypertext browsing, users would finally begin to get it about the Internet. And they would want more. Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 10283-10288
, clipped on Tuesday, May 30, 2017 6:59:23 PM
Technology isn't destiny, no matter how inexorable its evolution may seem; the way its capabilities are used is as much a matter of cultural choice and historical accident as politics is, or fashion. And in the early 1960s history still seemed to be on the side of batch processing, centralization, and regimentation. In the commercial world, for example, DEC was still a tiny niche player, a minor exception that proved the rule. Almost every other company in the computer industry was following Big Blue's lead—and IBM had just made an unshakable commitment to batch processing and mainframes, a.k.a. System/360. In the telecommunications world, meanwhile, AT&T was equally committed to telephone-style circuit switching; its engineers would scoff at the idea of packet switching when Paul Baran suggested it a few years later, and they would keep on scoffing well into the 1980s. And in the academic world, no other agency was pushing computer research in the directions Lick would, or funding it at anything like the ARPA levels. Remember, says Fernando Corbató, "this was at a time when the National Science Foundation was handing out money with eye droppers—and then only after excruciating peer review. Compared to that, Lick had a lot of money. Furthermore, he was initially giving umbrella grants, which allowed us to fund the whole program. So there was this tremendous pump priming, which freed us from having to think small. The contrast was so dramatic that most places gravitated to ARPA. So that opening allowed a huge amount of research to get done." Waldrop, M. Mitchell
, The Dream Machine: J. C. R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal.
loc. 10365-10375
, clipped on Tuesday, May 30, 2017 7:05:29 PM
Instead, each one is the end product of all the biological influences that came before it and will influence all the factors that follow it. Thus, it is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all. No buckets. A “neurobiological” or “genetic” or “developmental” explanation for a behavior is just shorthand, an expository convenience for temporarily approaching the whole multifactorial arc from a particular perspective. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 171-175
, clipped on Thursday, June 1, 2017 9:44:25 PM
House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It’s called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women’s Wellesley College. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 219-222
, clipped on Thursday, June 1, 2017 9:48:13 PM
House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It’s called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women’s Wellesley College. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 219-222
, clipped on Thursday, June 1, 2017 9:50:24 PM
Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder. Moreover, eventual decisions are highly utilitarian. vmPFC patients are atypically willing to sacrifice one person, including a family member, to save five strangers.62 They’re more interested in outcomes than in their underlying emotional motives, punishing someone who accidentally kills but not one who tried to kill but failed, because, after all, no one died in the second case. It’s Mr. Spock, running on only the dlPFC. Now for a crucial point. People who dichotomize between thought and emotion often prefer the former, viewing emotion as suspect. It gums up decision making by getting sentimental, sings too loudly, dresses flamboyantly, has unsettling amounts of armpit hair. In this view, get rid of the vmPFC, and we’d be more rational and function better. But that’s not the case, as emphasized eloquently by Damasio. People with vmPFC damage not only have trouble making decisions but also make bad ones.63 They show poor judgment in choosing friends and partners and don’t shift behavior based on negative feedback. For example, consider a gambling task where reward rates for various strategies change without subjects knowing it, and subjects can shift their play strategy. Control subjects shift optimally, even if they can’t verbalize how reward rates have changed. Those with vmPFC damage don’t, even when they can verbalize. Without a vmPFC, you may know the meaning of negative feedback, but you don’t know the feeling of it in your gut and thus don’t shift behavior. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 881-895
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 2:59:21 PM
Briefly, the frontal cortex runs “as if” experiments of gut feelings—“How would I feel if this outcome occurred?”—and makes choices with the answer in mind. Damaging the vmPFC, thus removing limbic input to the PFC, eliminates gut feelings, making decisions harder. Moreover, eventual decisions are highly utilitarian. vmPFC patients are atypically willing to sacrifice one person, including a family member, to save five strangers.62 They’re more interested in outcomes than in their underlying emotional motives, punishing someone who accidentally kills but not one who tried to kill but failed, because, after all, no one died in the second case. It’s Mr. Spock, running on only the dlPFC. Now for a crucial point. People who dichotomize between thought and emotion often prefer the former, viewing emotion as suspect. It gums up decision making by getting sentimental, sings too loudly, dresses flamboyantly, has unsettling amounts of armpit hair. In this view, get rid of the vmPFC, and we’d be more rational and function better. But that’s not the case, as emphasized eloquently by Damasio. People with vmPFC damage not only have trouble making decisions but also make bad ones.63 They show poor judgment in choosing friends and partners and don’t shift behavior based on negative feedback. For example, consider a gambling task where reward rates for various strategies change without subjects knowing it, and subjects can shift their play strategy. Control subjects shift optimally, even if they can’t verbalize how reward rates have changed. Those with vmPFC damage don’t, even when they can verbalize. Without a vmPFC, you may know the meaning of negative feedback, but you don’t know the feeling of it in your gut and thus don’t shift behavior. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 881-895
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 2:59:45 PM
Chapter 6 discusses experiments where a subject plays a game with two other people and is manipulated into feeling that she is being left out. This activates her amygdala, periaqueductal gray (that ancient brain region that helps process physical pain), anterior cingulate, and insula, an anatomical picture of anger, anxiety, pain, disgust, sadness. Soon afterward her PFC activates as rationalizations kick in—“This is just a stupid game; I have friends; my dog loves me.” And the amygdala et al. quiet down. And what if you do the same to someone whose frontal cortex is not fully functional? The amygdala is increasingly activated; the person feels increasingly distressed. What neurological disease is involved? None. This is a typical teenager. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 931-936
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 3:04:28 PM
Antecedent reappraisal is why placebos work.69 Thinking, “My finger is about to be pricked by a pin,” activates the amygdala along with a circuit of pain-responsive brain regions, and the pin hurts. Be told beforehand that the hand cream being slathered on your finger is a powerful analgesic cream, and you think, “My finger is about to be pricked by a pin, but this cream will block the pain.” The PFC activates, blunting activity in the amygdala and pain circuitry, as well as pain perception. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 955-959
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 3:06:47 PM
This is our world of habituation, where nothing is ever as good as that first time. Unfortunately, things have to work this way because of our range of rewards.86 After all, reward coding must accommodate the rewarding properties of both solving a math problem and having an orgasm. Dopaminergic responses to reward, rather than being absolute, are relative to the reward value of alternative outcomes. In order to accommodate the pleasures of both mathematics and orgasms, the system must constantly rescale to accommodate the range of intensity offered by particular stimuli. The response to any reward must habituate with repetition, so that the system can respond over its full range to the next new thing. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1059-1064
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 7:06:40 PM
First, soon we barely notice the fleeting whispers of pleasure caused by leaves in autumn, or by the lingering glance of the right person, or by the promise of reward following a difficult, worthy task. And the other consequence is that we eventually habituate to even those artificial deluges of intensity. If we were designed by engineers, as we consumed more, we’d desire less. But our frequent human tragedy is that the more we consume, the hungrier we get. More and faster and stronger. What was an unexpected pleasure yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1091-1096
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 7:31:03 PM
In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward.91 Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It’s “I know how things work; this is going to be great.” In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1104-1109
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:51:13 PM
In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward.91 Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It’s “I know how things work; this is going to be great.” In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.* This is hugely important. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1104-1109
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:51:19 PM
In other words, once reward contingencies are learned, dopamine is less about reward than about its anticipation. Similarly, work by my Stanford colleague Brian Knutson has shown dopamine pathway activation in people in anticipation of a monetary reward.91 Dopamine is about mastery and expectation and confidence. It’s “I know how things work; this is going to be great.” In other words, the pleasure is in the anticipation of reward, and the reward itself is nearly an afterthought (unless, of course, the reward fails to arrive, in which case it’s the most important thing in the world). If you know your appetite will be sated, pleasure is more about the appetite than about the sating.* This is hugely important. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1104-1109
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:51:44 PM
Can a reliable cue of an impending reward eventually become rewarding itself? This has been shown by Huda Akil of the University of Michigan. A light in the left side of a rat’s cage signals that lever pressing will produce a reward from a food chute on the right side. Remarkably, rats eventually will work for the chance to hang around on the left side of the cage, just because it feels so nice to be there. The signal has gained the dopaminergic power of what is being signaled. Similarly, rats will work to be exposed to a cue that signals that some kind of reward is likely, without knowing what or when. This is what fetishes are, in both the anthropological and sexual sense. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1116-1120
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:54:06 PM
Dopamine is not just about reward anticipation; it fuels the goal-directed behavior needed to gain that reward; dopamine “binds” the value of a reward to the resulting work. It’s about the motivation arising from those dopaminergic projections to the PFC that is needed to do the harder thing (i.e., to work). In other words, dopamine is not about the happiness of reward. It’s about the happiness of pursuit of reward that has a decent chance of occurring. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1157-1160
, clipped on Saturday, June 3, 2017 11:58:59 PM
In the 1880s they independently concocted the same screwy idea. How do your feelings and your body’s automatic (i.e., “autonomic”) function interact? It seems obvious—a lion chases you, you feel terrified, and thus your heart speeds up. James and Lange suggested the opposite: you subliminally note the lion, speeding up your heart; then your conscious brain gets this interoceptive information, concluding, “Wow, my heart is racing; I must be terrified.” In other words, you decide what you feel based on signals from your body. There’s support for the idea—three of my favorites are that (a) forcing depressed people to smile makes them feel better; (b) instructing people to take on a more “dominant” posture makes them feel more so (lowers stress hormone levels); and (c) muscle relaxants decrease anxiety (“Things are still awful, but if my muscles are so relaxed that I’m dribbling out of this chair, things must be improving”). Nonetheless, a strict version of James-Lange doesn’t work, because of the issue of specificity—hearts race for varying reasons, so how does your brain decide if it’s reacting to a lion or an exciting come-hither look? Moreover, many autonomic responses are too slow to precede conscious awareness of an emotion. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1418-1426
, clipped on Sunday, June 4, 2017 9:13:20 AM
Ultimately, the most important point of this chapter is that in the moments just before we decide upon some of our most consequential acts, we are less rational and Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1537-1538
, clipped on Sunday, June 4, 2017 9:25:37 AM
No brain operates in a vacuum, and over the course of seconds to minutes, the wealth of information streaming into the brain influences the likelihood of pro- or antisocial acts. As we’ve seen, pertinent information ranges from something as simple and unidimensional as shirt color to things as complex and subtle as cues about ideology. Moreover, the brain also constantly receives interoceptive information. And most important, much of these varied types of information is subliminal. Ultimately, the most important point of this chapter is that in the moments just before we decide upon some of our most consequential acts, we are less rational and autonomous decision makers than we like to think. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 1533-1538
, clipped on Sunday, June 4, 2017 9:25:49 AM
Stress can disrupt cognition, impulse control, emotional regulation, decision making, empathy, and prosociality. One final point. Recall from chapter 2 how the frontal cortex making you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing is value free—“right thing” is purely instrumental. Same with stress. Its effects on decision making are “adverse” only in a neurobiological sense. During a stressful crisis, an EMT may become perseverative, making her ineffectual at saving lives. A bad thing. During a stressful crisis, a sociopathic warlord may become perseverative, making him ineffectual at ethnically cleansing a village. Not a bad thing. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 2095-2099
, clipped on Sunday, June 4, 2017 6:39:29 PM
Similarly, neuroplasticity makes the functional malleability of the brain tangible, makes it “scientifically demonstrated” that brains change. That people change. In the time span considered in this chapter, people throughout the Arab world went from being voiceless to toppling tyrants; Rosa Parks went from victim to catalyst, Sadat and Begin from enemies to architects of peace, Mandela from prisoner to statesman. And you’d better bet that changes along the lines of those presented in this chapter occurred in the brains of anyone transformed by these transformations. A different world makes for a different worldview, which means a different brain. And the more tangible and real the neurobiology underlying such change seems, the easier it is to imagine that it can happen again. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 2385-2390
, clipped on Monday, June 5, 2017 1:02:48 AM
In contrast, the more individuals can regulate their adverse empathic emotions, the more likely they are to act prosocially. Related to that, if a distressing, empathy-evoking circumstance increases your heart rate, you’re less likely to act prosocially than if it decreases it. Thus, one predictor of who actually acts is the ability to gain some detachment, to ride, rather than be submerged, by the wave of empathy. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 2629-2632
, clipped on Monday, June 5, 2017 6:37:30 PM
This period brought one of history’s strangest one-night stands, namely when the Freudians and the behaviorists hooked up to explain why infants become attached to their mothers. To behaviorists, obviously, it’s because mothers reinforce them, providing calories when they’re hungry. For Freudians, also obviously, infants lack the “ego development” to form a relationship with anything/anyone other than Mom’s breasts. When combined with children-should-be-seen-but-not-heard-ism, this suggested that once you’ve addressed a child’s need for nutrition, proper temperature, plus other odds and ends, they’re set to go. Affection, warmth, physical contact? Superfluous. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 2915-2920
, clipped on Monday, June 5, 2017 7:18:36 PM
Bowlby inspired one of the most iconic experiments in psychology’s history, by Harry Harlow of the University of Wisconsin; it destroyed Freudian and behaviorist dogma about mother-infant bonding.25 Harlow would raise an infant rhesus monkey without a mother but with two “surrogates” instead. Both were made of a chicken-wire tube approximating a torso, with a monkey-ish plastic head on top. One surrogate had a bottle of milk coming from its “torso.” The other had terry cloth wrapped around the torso. In other words, one gave calories, the other a poignant approximation of a mother monkey’s fur. Freud and B. F. Skinner would have wrestled over access to chicken-wire mom. But infant monkeys chose the terry-cloth mom.* “Man cannot live by milk alone. Love is an emotion that does not need to be bottle- or spoon-fed,” wrote Harlow. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 2931-2938
, clipped on Monday, June 5, 2017 7:21:23 PM
Back to each particular gene coding for a particular protein.10 Introns and exons destroy this simplicity. Imagine a gene consisting of exons 1, 2, and 3, separated by introns A and B. In one part of the body a splicing enzyme exists that splices out the introns and also trashes exon 3, producing a protein coded for by exons 1 and 2. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the body, a different splicing enzyme jettisons exon 2 along with the introns, producing a protein derived from exons 1 and 3. In another cell type a protein is made solely from exon 1. . . . Thus “alternative splicing” can generate multiple unique proteins from a single stretch of DNA; so much for “one gene specifies one protein”—this gene specifies seven (A, B, C, A-B, A-C, B-C, and A-B-C). Remarkably, 90 percent of human genes with exons are alternatively spliced. Moreover, when a gene is regulated by multiple TFs, each can direct the transcription of a different combination of exons. Oh, and splicing enzymes are proteins, meaning that each is coded for by a gene. Loops and loops. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3563-3570
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 11:24:36 AM
Time to unmoor another cherished idea, namely that genes inherited from your parents (i.e., what you started with as a fertilized egg) are immutable. This calls up a great chapter of science history. In the 1940s an accomplished plant geneticist named Barbara McClintock observed something impossible. She was studying the inheritance of kernel color in maize (a frequent tool of geneticists) and found patterns of mutations unexplained by any known mechanism. The only possibility, she concluded, was that stretches of DNA had been copied, with the copy then randomly inserted into another stretch of DNA. Yeah, right. Clearly McClintock, with her (derisively named) “jumping genes,” had gone mad, and so she was ignored (not exactly true, but this detracts from the drama). She soldiered on in epic isolation. And finally, with the molecular revolution of the 1970s, she was vindicated about her (now termed) transposable genetic elements, or transposons. She was lionized, canonized, Nobel Prized (and was wonderfully inspirational, as disinterested in acclaim as in her ostracism, working until her nineties). Transpositional events rarely produce great outcomes. Consider a hypothetical stretch of DNA coding for “The fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus.” There has been a transpositional event, where the underlined stretch of message was copied and randomly plunked down elsewhere: “The fertilized eggterus is implanted in the uterus.” Gibberish. But sometimes “The fertilized egg is implanted in the uterus” becomes “The fertilized eggplant is implanted in the uterus.” Now, that’s not an everyday occurrence. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3572-3584
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 6:13:09 PM
Researchers admit there is selective placement but argue over whether it’s consequential. This remains unsettled. Bouchard, with his twins separated at birth, controlled for cultural, material, and technological similarities between the separate homes of twin pairs, concluding that shared similarity of home environments due to selective placement was a negligible factor. A similar conclusion was reached in a larger study carried out by both Kendler and another dean of the field, Robert Plomin of King’s College London. These conclusions have been challenged. The most fire-breathing critic has been Princeton psychologist Leon Kamin, who argues that concluding that selective placement isn’t important is wrong because of misinterpretation of results, use of wimpy analytical tests, and overreliance on questionable retrospective data. He wrote: “We suggest that no scientific purpose is served by the flood of heritability estimates generated by these studies.”26 Here’s where I give up—if super smart people who think about this issue all the time can’t agree, I sure don’t know how seriously selective placement distorts the literature. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3704-3712
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 6:22:10 PM
What’s a heritability score? “What does a gene do?” is at least two questions. How does a gene influence average levels of a trait? How does a gene influence variation among people in levels of that trait? These are crucially different. For example, how much do genes have to do with people’s scores averaging 100 on this thing called an IQ test? Then how much do genes have to do with one person scoring higher than another? Or how much do genes help in explaining why humans usually enjoy ice cream? How much in explaining why people like different flavors? These issues utilize two terms with similar sounds but different meanings. If genes strongly influence average levels of a trait, that trait is strongly inherited. If genes strongly influence the extent of variability around that average level, that trait has high heritability.* It is a population measure, where a heritability score indicates the percentage of total variation attributable to genetics. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3730-3737
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 6:24:50 PM
Okay, that was slick on my part, inventing a plant that grows in both desert and rain forest, just to trash heritability scores. Real plants rarely occur in both of those environments. Instead, in one rain forest the three gene versions might produce plants of heights 1, 2, and 3 inches, while in another they are 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1, producing a heritability score that, while less than 100 percent, is still extremely high. Genes typically still play hefty roles in explaining individual variability, given that any given species lives in a limited range of environments—capybaras stick to the tropics, polar bears to the Arctic. This business about heterogeneous environments driving down heritability scores is important only in considering some hypothetical species that, say, lives in both tundra and desert, in various population densities, in nomadic bands, sedentary farming communities, and urban apartment buildings. Oh, that’s right, humans. Of all species, heritability scores in humans plummet the most when shifting from a controlled experimental setting to considering the species’ full range of habitats. Just consider how much the heritability score for wearing earrings, with its gender split, has declined since 1958. — Now to consider an extremely important complication. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3784-3794
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 11:42:35 PM
Okay, that was slick on my part, inventing a plant that grows in both desert and rain forest, just to trash heritability scores. Real plants rarely occur in both of those environments. Instead, in one rain forest the three gene versions might produce plants of heights 1, 2, and 3 inches, while in another they are 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1, producing a heritability score that, while less than 100 percent, is still extremely high. Genes typically still play hefty roles in explaining individual variability, given that any given species lives in a limited range of environments—capybaras stick to the tropics, polar bears to the Arctic. This business about heterogeneous environments driving down heritability scores is important only in considering some hypothetical species that, say, lives in both tundra and desert, in various population densities, in nomadic bands, sedentary farming communities, and urban apartment buildings. Oh, that’s right, humans. Of all species, heritability scores in humans plummet the most when shifting from a controlled experimental setting to considering the species’ full range of habitats. Just consider how much the heritability score for wearing Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3784-3792
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 11:42:44 PM
Okay, that was slick on my part, inventing a plant that grows in both desert and rain forest, just to trash heritability scores. Real plants rarely occur in both of those environments. Instead, in one rain forest the three gene versions might produce plants of heights 1, 2, and 3 inches, while in another they are 1.1, 2.1, and 3.1, producing a heritability score that, while less than 100 percent, is still extremely high. Genes typically still play hefty roles in explaining individual variability, given that any given species lives in a limited range of environments—capybaras stick to the tropics, polar bears to the Arctic. This business about heterogeneous environments driving down heritability scores is important only in considering some hypothetical species that, say, lives in both tundra and desert, in various population densities, in nomadic bands, sedentary farming communities, and urban apartment buildings. Oh, that’s right, humans. Of all species, heritability scores in humans plummet the most when shifting from a controlled experimental setting to considering the species’ full range of habitats. Just consider how much the heritability score for wearing earrings, with its gender split, has declined since 1958. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3784-3793
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 11:42:49 PM
Citing “gene/environment interactions” is a time-honored genetics cliché.36 My students roll their eyes when I mention them. I roll my eyes when I mention them. Eat your vegetables, floss your teeth, remember to say, “It’s difficult to quantitatively assess the relative contributions of genes and environment to a particular trait when they interact.” This suggests a radical conclusion: it’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, just what it does in a particular environment. This is summarized wonderfully by the neurobiologist Donald Hebb: “It is no more appropriate to say things like characteristic A is more influenced by nature than nurture than . . . to say that the area of a rectangle is more influenced by its length than its width.” It’s appropriate to figure out if lengths or widths explain more of the variability in a population of rectangles. But not in individual ones. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 3838-3845
, clipped on Tuesday, June 6, 2017 11:47:41 PM
Evidence for the reality of evolution includes: Numerous examples where changing selective pressures have changed gene frequencies in populations within generations (e.g., bacteria evolving antibiotic resistance). Moreover, there are also examples (mostly insects, given their short generation times) of a species in the process of splitting into two. Voluminous fossil evidence of intermediate forms in numerous taxonomic lineages. Molecular evidence. We share ~98 percent of our genes with the other apes, ~96 percent with monkeys, ~75 percent with dogs, ~20 percent with fruit flies. This indicates that our last common ancestor with other apes lived more recently than our last common ancestor with monkeys, and so on. Geographic evidence. To use Richard Dawkins’s suggestion for dealing with a fundamentalist insisting that all species emerged in their current forms from Noah’s ark—how come all thirty-seven species of lemurs that made landfall on Mt. Ararat in the Armenian highlands hiked over to Madagascar, none dying and leaving fossils in transit? Unintelligent design—oddities explained only by evolution. Why do whales and dolphins have vestigial leg bones? Because they descend from a four-legged terrestrial mammal. Why should we have arrector pili muscles in our skin that produce thoroughly useless gooseflesh? Because of our recent speciation from other apes whose arrector pili muscles were attached to hair, and whose hair stands up during emotional arousal. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 5027-5039
, clipped on Thursday, June 8, 2017 10:17:00 PM
Instead of causes, biology is repeatedly about propensities, potentials, vulnerabilities, predispositions, proclivities, interactions, modulations, contingencies, if/then clauses, context dependencies, exacerbation or diminution of preexisting tendencies. Circles and loops and spirals and Möbius strips. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 5884-5886
, clipped on Saturday, June 10, 2017 10:58:05 AM
And obviously, if one millisecond before chads reared their hanging heads, you had asked pundits what would be the hanging-chad stances of the party of Reagan and trickle-down economics, and the party Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 6149-6151
, clipped on Saturday, June 10, 2017 11:39:00 AM
I’m a fairly solitary person—after all, I’ve spent a significant amount of my life studying a different species from my own, living alone in a tent in Africa. Yet some of the most exquisitely happy moments of my life have come from feeling like an Us, feeling accepted and not alone, safe and understood, feeling part of something enveloping and larger than myself, filled with a sense of being on the right side and doing both well and good. There are even Us/Thems that I—eggheady, meek, and amorphously pacifistic—would be willing to kill or die for. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 6453-6456
, clipped on Saturday, June 10, 2017 12:34:02 PM
baggage of SES. (a) Subjective SES predicts health at least as accurately as objective SES, meaning that it’s not about being poor. It’s about feeling poor. (b) Independent of absolute levels of income, the more income inequality Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 6717-6719
, clipped on Saturday, June 10, 2017 12:59:35 PM
The gradient seems to be about the psychological baggage of SES. (a) Subjective SES predicts health at least as accurately as objective SES, meaning that it’s not about being poor. It’s about feeling poor. (b) Independent of absolute levels of income, the more income inequality in a community—meaning the more frequently the poor have their noses rubbed in their low status—the steeper the health gradient. (c) Lots of inequality in a community makes for low social capital (trust and a sense of efficacy), and that’s the most direct cause of the poor health. Collectively these studies show that the psychological stress of low SES is what decreases health. Consistent with that, it is diseases that are most sensitive to stress (cardiovascular, gastrointestinal, and psychiatric disorders) that show the steepest SES/health gradients. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 6717-6723
, clipped on Saturday, June 10, 2017 12:59:42 PM
For the sort of person reading this book (i.e., who reads and thinks, things to be justifiably self-congratulatory about), when considering this issue at a calm distance, utilitarianism seems like the place to start—maximizing collective happiness. There is the emphasis on equity—not equal treatment but taking everyone’s well-being into equal consideration. And there is the paramount emphasis on impartiality: if someone thinks the situation being proposed is morally equitable, they should be willing to flip a coin to determine which role they play. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 7713-7716
, clipped on Monday, June 12, 2017 11:33:45 AM
It’s the same thing here: “Why did you never cheat? Is it because of your ability to see the long-term consequences of cheating becoming normalized, or your respect for the Golden Rule, or . . . ?” The answer is “I don’t know [shrug]. I just don’t cheat.” This isn’t a deontological or a consequentialist moment. It’s virtue ethics sneaking in the back door in that moment—“I don’t cheat; that’s not who I am.” Doing the right thing is the easier thing. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 7939-7943
, clipped on Tuesday, June 13, 2017 6:02:30 PM
bowl of candy in the lab; invite test subjects, after they finish Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8154-8155
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:14:19 PM
bowl of candy in the lab; invite test subjects, after they finish Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8154-8155
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:14:22 PM
the cognitive load of repeated exposure to the pain of Thems Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8168-8168
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:14:41 PM
Vilayanur Ramachandran of UC San Diego, one of the most flamboyantly creative people in the business, doing fascinating research on phantom limbs, synesthesia, and out-of-body experiences. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8270-8271
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:34:25 PM
A flagrant example of this is the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran of UC San Diego, one of the most flamboyantly creative people in the business, doing fascinating research on phantom limbs, synesthesia, and out-of-body experiences. He’s brilliant but has gotten a bit giddy with mirror neurons. A sampling: “We know that my mirror neurons can literally feel your pain.” He’s called them “the driving force behind the great leap forward” into human behavioral modernity sixty thousand years ago and famously said, “Mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology.” I’m not trying to harp on Ramachandran, but how can you resist someone brilliant handing out sound bites like calling mirror neurons “Gandhi neurons”? And this wasn’t just in the first heady days of mirror neurons in the early 1990s. Two decades later he stated, “I don’t think [the importance of mirror neurons for empathy is] being exaggerated. I think they’re being played down, actually.” Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8270-8276
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:34:33 PM
It is far from guaranteed that an empathic state leads to a compassionate act. One reason for this is captured superbly by the essayist Leslie Jamison: [Empathy] can also offer a dangerous sense of completion: that something has been done because something has been felt. It is tempting to think that feeling someone’s pain is necessarily virtuous in its own right. The peril of empathy isn’t simply that it can make us feel bad, but that it can make us feel good, which can in turn encourage us to think of empathy as an end in itself rather than part of a process, a catalyst. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8298-8302
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:37:56 PM
Likewise, we should perhaps ease up a bit on the scratching-an-altruist problem. It has always struck me as a bit mean-spirited to conclude that it is a hypocrite who bleeds. Scratch an altruist and, most of the time, the individual with unpure motives who bleeds is merely the product of “altruism” and “reciprocity” being evolutionarily inseparable. Better that our good acts be self-serving and self-aggrandizing than that they don’t occur at all; better that the myths we construct and propagate about ourselves are that we are gentle and giving, rather than that we prefer to be feared than loved, and that we aim to live well as the best revenge. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8433-8438
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 5:52:16 PM
“Symbolic concessions of no apparent material benefit may be key in helping to solve seemingly intractable conflicts,” write the authors. In 1994 the Kingdom of Jordan became the second Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel. It ended war, bringing to an end decades of hostilities. And it created a successful road map for the two nations to coexist, built around addressing material and instrumental issues—water rights (e.g., Israel would give Jordan fifty million cubic meters of water annually), joint efforts to combat terrorism, joint efforts to facilitate tourism between the countries. But it wasn’t until a year later that one saw evidence that something resembling a true peace was forming. It followed the creation of yet another martyr for peace, the assassination of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, one of the architects of the Oslo Peace Accord, by a right-wing Israeli extremist. Extraordinarily, King Hussein came to Rabin’s funeral and eulogized him, addressing his widow in the front row: My sister, Mrs. Leah Rabin, my friends, I had never thought that the moment would come like this when I would grieve the loss of a brother, a colleague and a friend. Hussein’s presence and words were obviously irrelevant to any of the rational stumbling blocks to peace. And were immeasurably important. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 8802-8812
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 6:32:45 PM
Sandusky, the Penn State football coach who was a horrific Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9110-9111
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 6:57:05 PM
It’s cool to see natural ability in action. The great all-around athlete who has never seen pole-vaulting before, watches it once, tries it once, and soars like a pro. Or the singer whose voice has always had a natural timbre that evokes emotions you never knew existed. Or that student in your class who obviously just gets it, two seconds into your explaining something really abstruse. That’s impressive. But then there’s inspiring. When I was a kid, I repeatedly read a book about Wilma Rudolph. She was the fastest female runner in the world in 1960, an Olympian who became a civil rights pioneer. Definitely impressive. But consider that she was born prematurely, underweight, one of twenty-two kids in a poor Tennessee family, and—get this—at age four got polio, resulting in a leg brace and a twisted foot. Polio, she was crippled by polio. And she defied every expert’s expectations, worked and worked and worked through the pain, and became the fastest there was. That’s inspiring. In many domains we can sort of grasp the materialist building blocks of natural ability. Someone has the optimal ratio of slow-twitch to fast-twitch muscle fibers, producing a natural pole-vaulter. Or has vocal cords with the perfect degree of velvety peach fuzz (I’m winging it here) to produce an extraordinary voice. Or the ideal combination of neurotransmitters, receptors, transcription factors, and so on, producing a brain that rapidly intuits abstractions. And we can also perceive the building blocks in someone who is merely okay, or lousy, at any of these. But Rudolph-esque accomplishments seem different. You’re exhausted, demoralized, and it hurts like hell but you push on; you want to take an evening off, see a movie with a friend, but resume studying; there’s that temptation, no one’s looking, everyone else does it, but you know it’s wrong. It seems so hard, so improbable to think of those same neurotransmitters, receptors, or transcription factors when considering feats of willpower. There seems a much easier answer—you’re seeing the Calvinist work ethic of a homunculus sprinkled with the right kind of fairy dust. Here’s a great example of this dualism. Recall Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach who was a horrific serial child molester. After his conviction came an opinion piece on CNN. Writing under the provocative heading of “Do pedophiles deserve sympathy?” James Cantor of the University of Toronto reviewed the neurobiology of pedophilia. For example, it runs in families in ways suggesting genes play a role. Pedophiles have atypically high rates of brain injuries during childhood. There’s evidence of endocrine abnormalities during fetal life. Does this raise the possibility that a neurobiological die is cast, that some people are destined to be this way? Precisely. Cantor concludes, “One cannot choose to not be a pedophile.”21 Brave and correct. And then Cantor does a stunning mitigated-free-will long jump. Does any of that biology lessen the condemnation and punishment that Sandusky deserved? No. “One cannot choose to not be a pedophile, but one can choose to not be a child molester.” Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9095-9117
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 6:57:29 PM
Of all the stances of mitigated free will, the one that assigns aptitude to biology and effort to free will, or impulse to biology and resisting it to free will, is the most permeating and destructive. “You must have worked so hard” is as much a property of the physical universe and the biology that emerged from it as is “You must be so smart.” And yes, being a child molester is as much a product of biology as is being a pedophile. To think otherwise is little more than folk psychology. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9138-9142
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 6:58:19 PM
Thus seizures were a sign of demonic possession, a certain marker of a witch. Malleus Maleficarum arrived in time to take advantage of mass production through the recently invented printing press. In the words of historian Jeffrey Russell, “The swift propagation of the witch hysteria by the press was the first evidence that Gutenberg had not liberated man from original sin.” The book was widely read and went through more than thirty editions over the subsequent century. Estimates are that from 100,000 to a million people were persecuted, tortured, or killed as witches in the aftermath. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9254-9258
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 7:06:41 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9454
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:14:32 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days.* This suggests both Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9454
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:14:41 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days.* This suggests both good and bad news. Compared with the past, we are extraordinarily different in terms of whom we extend rights to and feel empathy for and what global ills we counter. And things are better in terms of fewer people acting violently and societies attempting to contain them. But the bad news is that the reach of the violent few is ever greater. They don’t just rage about events on another continent—they travel there and wreak havoc. The charismatically violent inspire thousands in chat rooms instead of a mob in their village. Like-minded lone wolves more readily meet and metastasize. And the chaos once let loose with a cudgel or machete occurs now with an automatic weapon or bomb, with far more horrific consequences. Things Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9459
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:14:50 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days.* This suggests both good and bad news. Compared with the past, we are extraordinarily different in terms of whom we extend rights to and feel empathy for and what global ills we counter. And things are better in terms of fewer people acting violently and societies attempting to contain them. But the bad news is that the reach of the violent few is ever greater. They don’t just rage about events on another continent—they travel there and wreak havoc. The charismatically violent inspire thousands in chat rooms instead of a mob in their village. Like-minded lone wolves more readily meet and metastasize. And the chaos once let loose with a cudgel or machete occurs now with an automatic weapon or bomb, with far more horrific consequences. Things Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9459
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:15:20 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days.* This suggests both good and bad news. Compared with the past, we are extraordinarily different in terms of whom we extend rights to and feel empathy for and what global ills we counter. And things are better in terms of fewer people acting violently and societies attempting to contain them. But the bad news is that the reach of the violent few is ever greater. They don’t just rage about events on another continent—they travel there and wreak havoc. The charismatically violent inspire thousands in chat rooms instead of a mob in their village. Like-minded lone wolves more readily meet and metastasize. And the chaos once let loose with a cudgel or machete occurs now with an automatic weapon or bomb, with far more horrific consequences. Things Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9459
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:15:28 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days.* This suggests both good and bad news. Compared with the past, we are extraordinarily different in terms of whom we extend rights to and feel empathy for and what global ills we counter. And things are better in terms of fewer people acting violently and societies attempting to contain them. But the bad news is that the reach of the violent few is ever greater. They don’t just rage about events on another continent—they travel there and wreak havoc. The charismatically violent inspire thousands in chat rooms instead of a mob in their village. Like-minded lone wolves more readily meet and metastasize. And the chaos once let loose with a cudgel or machete occurs now with an automatic weapon or bomb, with far more horrific consequences. Things have improved. But that doesn’t mean they’re good. Thus we now consider insights Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9460
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:15:37 PM
But Pinker failed to take things one logical step further—also correcting for differing durations of events. Thus he compares the half dozen years of World War II with, for example, twelve centuries of the Mideast slave trade and four centuries of Native American genocide. When corrected for duration as well as total world population, the top ten now include World War II (number one), World War I (number three), the Russian Civil War (number eight), Mao (number ten), and an event that didn’t even make Pinker’s original list, the Rwandan genocide (number seven), where 700,000 people were killed in a hundred days. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9450-9454
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:15:48 PM
Norenzayan distinguishes between private and communal religiosity in surveying support for suicide bombers among Palestinians.17 In a refutation of “Islam = terrorism” idiocy, people’s personal religiosity (as assessed by how often they prayed) didn’t predict support for terrorism. However, frequently attending services at a mosque did. The author then polled Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox adherents, Israeli Jews, Indonesian Muslims, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics as to whether they’d die for their religion and whether people of other religions caused the world’s troubles. In all cases frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. It’s not religiosity that stokes intergroup hostility; it’s being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm parochial identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds. This is hugely important. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 9554-9561
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 8:27:52 PM
elderly men huddling by a bunker with American soldiers approaching them, preparing to attack. Discussing what happened next, more than twenty years later, he described his Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 10047-10048
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:19:10 PM
intending to aid the infantry fighting Viet Cong. Instead of evidence of a battle, they saw masses of dead civilians. Thompson initially thought that the village was under attack, with Americans protecting Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 10043-10044
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:19:16 PM
Thompson and his crew had flown over the village, intending to aid the infantry fighting Viet Cong. Instead of evidence of a battle, they saw masses of dead civilians. Thompson initially thought that the village was under attack, with Americans protecting villagers, but couldn’t figure out where the attack was coming from. He landed the copter amid the chaos and saw one soldier, Sergeant David Mitchell, firing into a mass of injured, wailing civilians in a ditch and another, Captain Ernest Medina, shoot a woman point-blank; Thompson realized who was doing the attacking. He confronted Calley, who was higher ranking than him and told him to mind his damn business. Thompson saw a group of women, children, and elderly men huddling by a bunker with American soldiers approaching them, preparing to attack. Discussing what happened next, more than twenty years later, he described his feelings about those soldiers: “It’s—they were the enemy at that time, I guess. They were damn sure the enemy to the people on the ground.” He did something of dizzying strength and bravery, something that proves every word in this book about how Us/Them categorizations can change in an instant. Hugh Thompson landed his helicopter between the villagers and the soldiers, trained his machine guns on his fellow Americans, and ordered his crew to mow them down if they attempted to further harm the villagers. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 10042-10052
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:19:24 PM
If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. Acknowledgments The naturalist Edward O. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 10276-10285
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:40:43 PM
If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It’s complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You’ve amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don’t have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you’ve been educated. In other words, you’re one of the lucky humans. So try. Finally, you don’t have to choose between being scientific and being compassionate. Robert M. Sapolsky
, Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst.
loc. 10276-10284
, clipped on Thursday, June 15, 2017 9:40:49 PM
“I knew when I was eighty that I would never, for example, think about why I walked away from my 1994 Wall Street bonus right in the middle of the year at the worst possible time. That kind of thing just isn’t something you worry about when you’re eighty years old. At the same time, I knew that I might sincerely regret not having participated in this thing called the Internet that I thought was going to be a revolutionizing event. When I thought about it that way… it was incredibly easy to make the decision.” Stone, Brad
, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
loc. 347-350
, clipped on Saturday, June 17, 2017 11:20:18 PM
People left and afterward they took a breath and felt disoriented, like they had escaped a cult. Though they didn’t share it openly, many just couldn’t take working for Bezos any longer. He demanded more than they could possibly deliver and was extremely stingy with praise. At the same time, many felt a tremendous loyalty to Bezos and would later marvel at how much they accomplished at Amazon. Kim Rachmeler shared a favorite quote she heard from a colleague around that time. “If you’re not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out. And if you’re good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground.” Stone, Brad
, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
loc. 1944-1948
, clipped on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 6:49:02 AM
will comment on one thing because you touched a nerve, and I think it’s hurtful to the people of NASA. There should be a counterpoint. NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA. The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years Stone, Brad
, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
loc. 2303-2306
, clipped on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 8:04:10 PM
I will comment on one thing because you touched a nerve, and I think it’s hurtful to the people of NASA. There should be a counterpoint. NASA is a national treasure, and it’s total bull that anyone should be frustrated by NASA. The only reason I’m interested in space is because they inspired me when I was five years old. How many government agencies can you think of that inspire five year olds? The work NASA does is technically super-demanding and inherently risky, and they continue to do an outstanding job. The ONLY reason any of these small space companies have a chance of doing ANYTHING is because they get to stand on the shoulders of NASA’s accomplishments and ingenuity. If you want a specific example: consider that all these companies use extremely sophisticated computer codes for analyzing things like structures, heat flows and aerodynamics, which codes were developed (over many years and meticulously tested against physical reality) by NASA! Stone, Brad
, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon.
loc. 2303-2311
, clipped on Tuesday, June 20, 2017 8:04:19 PM
For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous.[3] Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 305-308
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 3:51:59 PM
Beyond the element of giving, the active character of love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 343-345
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 3:57:14 PM
quotes a fellow officer in the Russian civil war, who has just stamped his former master Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 392-393
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 4:14:14 PM
quotes a fellow officer in the Russian civil war, who has just stamped his former master Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 392-393
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 4:33:54 PM
Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who develops his own powers productively, who only wants to have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has acquired humility based on the inner strength which only genuine productive activity can give. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 421-424
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 4:38:23 PM
Infantile love follows the principle: “I love because I am loved.” Mature love follows the principle: “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.” Closely related to Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 523-525
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 8:55:30 PM
Infantile love follows the principle: “I love because I am loved.” Mature love follows the principle: “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says: “I love you because Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 523-524
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 8:55:35 PM
Infantile love follows the principle: “I love because I am loved.” Mature love follows the principle: “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you.” Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 523-525
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 8:55:40 PM
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 587-589
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 9:08:56 PM
Only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 616-617
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 9:12:23 PM
First of all, it is often confused with the explosive experience of “falling” in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers which existed until that moment between two strangers. But, as was pointed out before, this experience of sudden intimacy is by its very nature short-lived. After the stranger has become an intimately known person there are no more barriers to be overcome, there is no more sudden closeness to be achieved. The “loved” person becomes as well known as oneself. Or, perhaps I should better say as little known. If there were more depth in the experience of the other person, if one could experience the infiniteness of his personality, the other person would never be so familiar—and the miracle of overcoming the barriers might occur every day anew. But for most people their own person, as well as others, is soon explored and soon exhausted. For them intimacy is established primarily through sexual contact. Since they experience the separateness of the other person primarily as physical separateness, Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 672-679
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 9:17:26 PM
First of all, it is often confused with the explosive experience of “falling” in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers which existed until that moment between two strangers. But, as was pointed out before, this experience of sudden intimacy is by its very nature short-lived. After the stranger has become an intimately known person there are no more barriers to be overcome, there is no more sudden closeness to be achieved. The “loved” person becomes as well known as oneself. Or, perhaps I should better say as little known. If there were more depth in the experience of the other person, if one could experience the infiniteness of his personality, the other person would never be so familiar—and the miracle of overcoming the barriers might occur every day anew. But for most people their own person, as well as others, is soon explored and soon exhausted. For them intimacy is established primarily through sexual contact. Since they experience the separateness of the other person primarily as physical separateness, physical union means overcoming separateness. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 672-680
, clipped on Friday, June 23, 2017 9:17:32 PM
Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this “central experience” is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love, experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together; even whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 1273-1279
, clipped on Saturday, June 24, 2017 7:10:34 AM
I should add here that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive; of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking. However, it is not always possible to avoid the company of such people, nor even necessary. If one does not react in the expected way—that is, in clichés and trivialities—but directly and humanly, one will often find that such people change their behavior, often helped by the surprise effected by the shock of the unexpected. To be concentrated in relation to others means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others, or even give advice, without really listening. They do not take the other person’s talk seriously, they do not take their own Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 1391-1399
, clipped on Saturday, June 24, 2017 8:24:03 AM
I should add here that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; one should avoid their company because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead, although their body is alive; of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial; who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking. However, it is not always possible to avoid the company of such people, nor even necessary. If one does not react in the expected way—that is, in clichés and trivialities—but directly and humanly, one will often find that such people change their behavior, often helped by the surprise effected by the shock of the unexpected. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 1391-1397
, clipped on Saturday, June 24, 2017 8:24:10 AM
Then one will also recognize that while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real, though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love. Fromm, Erich
, The Art of Loving.
loc. 1563-1566
, clipped on Saturday, June 24, 2017 8:45:01 AM
As Malaparte saw it, Naples was a pagan city with an ancient sense of time. Christianity taught those who were converted to it to think of history as the unfolding of a single plot – a moral drama of sin and redemption. In the ancient world there was no such plot – only a multitude of stories that were forever being repeated. Inhabiting that ancient world, the Neapolitans did not expect any fundamental alteration in human affairs. Not having accepted the Christian story of redemption, they had not been seduced by the myth of progress. Never having believed civilization to be permanent, they were not surprised when it foundered. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 244-249
, clipped on Monday, June 26, 2017 11:03:31 PM
Aiming to realize human freedom by obeying universal laws, the crystal palace would destroy the ability to act in defiance of these laws – the most fundamental freedom of all. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 543-544
, clipped on Monday, July 3, 2017 12:46:07 AM
Contrary to generations of western progressives, it was not Russian backwardness or mistakes in applying Marxian theory that produced the society that Lyons observed. Similar regimes came into being wherever the communist project was attempted. Lenin’s Russia, Mao’s China, Ceausescu’s Romania and many more were variants of a single dictatorial model. From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia. If 1984 is such a powerful myth, one reason is that it captures this truth. Yet there is a flaw in Orwell’s story, which emerges in his picture of the all-powerful interrogator. The dystopia of perpetual power is a fantasy, and so is O’Brien. Soviet torturers were sweating functionaries living in constant fear. Like their victims, they knew that they were resources that would be used up in the service of power. There was no inner-party elite safe from the contingencies of history. Reality was not constructed in the former Soviet Union, only for a while denied. Beneath the slogans was an actually existing world in which the soil and lakes were poisoned from over-rapid industrialization, vast and useless projects were built at enormous human cost and everyday life was a predatory struggle for survival. Millions died needlessly and tens of millions suffered broken lives, most leaving barely a trace they had ever existed. But under the surface powerful currents were flowing, which in time would wash away the pseudo-reality that enchanted western pilgrims. The Soviet dystopia ended by becoming just another piece of rubbish in the debris of history. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 549-561
, clipped on Monday, July 3, 2017 12:48:15 AM
Humanists today, who claim to take a wholly secular view of things, scoff at mysticism and religion. But the unique status of humans is hard to defend, and even to understand, when it is cut off from any idea of transcendence. In a strictly naturalistic view – one in which the world is taken on its own terms, without reference to a creator or any spiritual realm – there is no hierarchy of value with humans at the top. There are simply multifarious animals, each with their own needs. Human uniqueness is a myth inherited from religion, which humanists have recycled into science. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 797-801
, clipped on Saturday, July 8, 2017 8:59:32 PM
Modern myths are myths of salvation stated in secular terms. What both kinds of myths have in common is that they answer to a need for meaning that cannot be denied. In order to survive, humans have invented science. Pursued consistently, scientific inquiry acts to undermine myth. But life without myth is impossible, so science has become a channel for myths – chief among them, a myth of salvation through science. When truth is at odds with meaning, it is meaning that wins. Why this should be so is a delicate question. Why is meaning so important? Why do humans need a reason to live? Is it because they could not endure life if they did not believe it contained hidden significance? Or does the demand for meaning come from attaching too much sense to language – from thinking that our lives are books we have not yet learnt to read? Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 846-851
, clipped on Saturday, July 8, 2017 9:04:42 PM
Psychoanalysis has been seen as promoting personal autonomy, when the opposite is more nearly true. Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 886-888
, clipped on Saturday, July 8, 2017 10:57:32 PM
Psychoanalysis has been seen as promoting personal autonomy, when the opposite is more nearly true. Echoing the Christian faith in free will, humanists hold that human beings are – or may someday become – free to choose their lives. They forget that the self that does the choosing has not itself been chosen. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 886-888
, clipped on Saturday, July 8, 2017 11:00:10 PM
rather be an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development … The goal of all life is death…’ Citing this passage, Santayana recognized that Freud was giving voice to a new myth. The idea that organisms live in order to die is not a claim that science can prove or disprove. The method of modern science is to understand the natural world without ever invoking goals or purposes. And yet, Santayana goes on, the suggestion conveyed by Freud’s speculations is true. In what sense can myths be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms employed in psychoanalysis have always been metaphorical: ‘unconscious wishes’, ‘the pleasure-principle’, ‘the Oedipus complex’, ‘Narcissism’, ‘the censor’; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 969-978
, clipped on Monday, July 10, 2017 12:21:48 AM
rather be an ancient starting point, which the living being left long ago, and to which it harks back again by all the circuitous paths of development … The goal of all life is death…’ Citing this passage, Santayana recognized that Freud was giving voice to a new myth. The idea that organisms live in order to die is not a claim that science can prove or disprove. The method of modern science is to understand the natural world without ever invoking goals or purposes. And yet, Santayana goes on, the suggestion conveyed by Freud’s speculations is true. In what sense can myths be true or false? In the sense that, in terms drawn from moral predicaments or from literary psychology, they may report the general movement and the pertinent issue of material facts, and may inspire us with a wise sentiment in their presence. In this sense I should say that Greek mythology was true and Calvinist theology was false. The chief terms employed in psychoanalysis have always been metaphorical: ‘unconscious wishes’, ‘the pleasure-principle’, ‘the Oedipus complex’, ‘Narcissism’, ‘the censor’; nevertheless, interesting and profound vistas may Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 969-978
, clipped on Monday, July 10, 2017 10:11:44 PM
Admitting that our lives are shaped by fictions may give a kind of freedom – possibly the only kind that human beings can attain. Accepting that the world is without meaning, we are liberated from confinement in the meaning we have made. Knowing there is nothing of substance in our world may seem to rob that world of value. But this nothingness may be our most precious possession, since it opens to us the world that exists beyond ourselves. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1106-1109
, clipped on Tuesday, July 11, 2017 11:42:18 PM
Learning to know yourself means telling the story of your life in a way that is more imaginative than before. As you come to see your life in the light of this new story, you will yourself change. Your life will then be shaped, you could say, by a new fiction. Framing these fictions was what Freud meant by the work of ego-building. The ego is itself a fiction, one that is never fixed or finished. ‘In the realm of fiction,’ Freud wrote, ‘we find the plurality of lives which we need.’ Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1146-1150
, clipped on Wednesday, July 12, 2017 7:37:42 AM
Tlön cannot avoid reproducing the frailty of reason. Not only are the hidden workings of the mind ignorant of logic, as Freud pointed out. Logic itself is a fictional construction: any system of ideas that aims to be clear and self-consistent breaks down in ambiguities and contradictions. Tlön is not chaotic by chance. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1327-1329
, clipped on Wednesday, July 12, 2017 11:15:09 PM
Tlön cannot avoid reproducing the frailty of reason. Not only are the hidden workings of the mind ignorant of logic, as Freud pointed out. Logic itself is a fictional construction: any system of ideas that aims to be clear and self-consistent breaks down in ambiguities and contradictions. Tlön is not chaotic by chance. The chaos of Tlön is, in fact, the chaos of the human mind. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1327-1330
, clipped on Wednesday, July 12, 2017 11:15:16 PM
we feel with terrible resignation that reason is not a superhuman gift bestowed on humanity, that it is not an unchanging and eternal deity, that reason evolved in humanity and evolved into what it is, but that it also, however, could have evolved differently … what we hold to be the eternal and unalterably fixed laws of our intellectual being [are] merely a game played by the coincidence that is the world; when we recognise that our reason (which, after all, is language) can only be a coincidental reason, then we will only smile when we consider the argumentative passion with which anthropologists have laboured over questions of custom, belief and collective psychological ‘facts’. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1442-1447
, clipped on Friday, July 14, 2017 8:13:45 AM
Whatever is destroyed, the act of destruction does not vary very much. Beauty is vapour from the pit of death.’ Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1588-1589
, clipped on Sunday, July 16, 2017 8:25:34 AM
The freedom that nature-mystics look for beyond the human scene is like the spiritual realm of the religious, a human thought-construction. Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1715-1716
, clipped on Sunday, July 16, 2017 8:38:12 AM
one may see on the sky a brooding and sinister glow. That is Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1728-1728
, clipped on Monday, July 17, 2017 7:23:48 AM
It does not much matter who or what Socrates may have been, since the power he has over the mind is the power of myth. The Socratic inheritance is a number of articles of faith, which in one form or another have shaped humanist thinking. The idea that human evil is a type of error, which will fade away as knowledge advances; that the good life must be an examined life; that the practice of reason can enable human beings to shape their own fates – these questionable claims have been repeated as unchallengeable axioms ever since Socrates acquired the status of a humanist saint. Nietzsche, who attacked Socrates fiercely without ever ceasing to admire and revere him, wrote: ‘One is obliged to see in Socrates the single point Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1983-1988
, clipped on Sunday, July 23, 2017 12:57:07 AM
It does not much matter who or what Socrates may have been, since the power he has over the mind is the power of myth. The Socratic inheritance is a number of articles of faith, which in one form or another have shaped humanist thinking. The idea that human evil is a type of error, which will fade away as knowledge advances; that the good life must be an examined life; that the practice of reason can enable human beings to shape their own fates – these questionable claims have been repeated as unchallengeable axioms ever since Socrates acquired the status of a humanist saint. Nietzsche, who attacked Socrates fiercely without ever ceasing to admire and revere him, wrote: ‘One is obliged to see in Socrates the single point around which so-called world history turns and twists.’ Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 1983-1989
, clipped on Sunday, July 23, 2017 12:57:13 AM
If there has been no spiritual change of kind Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man And none is looked for while the millennia cool, Yet each of us has known mutations in the mind When the world jumped and what had been a plan Dissolved and rivers gushed from what seemed a pool For every static world that you or I impose Upon the real one must crack at times and new Patterns from new disorders open like a rose And old assumptions yield to new sensations. The Stranger in the wings is waiting for his cue Gray, John
, The Silence of Animals.
loc. 2139-2146
, clipped on Monday, July 24, 2017 10:17:36 PM
The exact manner in which people in Ruth Byrne’s experiment are being reasonable is a matter for further research, but that they are being reasonable is reasonably obvious. That people fail to solve rudimentary logical problems does not show that they are unable to reason well when doing so is relevant to solving real-life problems. The relationship between logic on the one hand and reasoning on the other is far from being simple and straightforward. Dan Sperber
, The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding.
loc. 575-578
, clipped on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 12:38:50 AM
the first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 133-135
, clipped on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:45:55 AM
first principle: Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.7 Moral intuitions arise automatically and almost instantaneously, long before moral reasoning has a chance to get started, and those first intuitions tend to drive our later reasoning. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 133-136
, clipped on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:46:05 AM
Melissa smiled as if ‘tall’ was a euphemism for something, but not necessarily something flattering. Sally Rooney
, Conversations with Friends.
loc. 73-73
, clipped on Wednesday, July 26, 2017 7:54:40 PM
They took her radical politics as a kind of bourgeois self-deprecation, nothing very serious, and talked to her about restaurants or where to stay in Rome. I felt out of place in these situations, ignorant and bitter, but also fearful of being discovered as a moderately poor person and a communist. Equally, I struggled to make conversation with people of my own parents’ background, afraid that my vowels sounded pretentious or my large flea-market coat made me look rich. Philip also suffered from looking rich, though in his case because he really was. We two often fell silent while Bobbi chatted effortlessly with taxi drivers about current affairs. Sally Rooney
, Conversations with Friends.
loc. 1042-1047
, clipped on Friday, July 28, 2017 9:08:08 PM
We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct the actual reasons why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 933-935
, clipped on Sunday, July 30, 2017 9:54:26 AM
Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1042-1044
, clipped on Sunday, July 30, 2017 10:06:03 AM
Zajonc said that thinking could work independently of feeling in theory, but in practice affective reactions are so fast and compelling that they act like blinders on a horse: they “reduce the universe of alternatives” available to later thinking.11 The rider is an attentive servant, always trying to anticipate the elephant’s next move. If the elephant leans even slightly to the left, as though preparing to take a step, the rider looks to the left and starts preparing to assist the elephant on its imminent leftward journey. The rider loses interest in everything off to the right. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1139-1144
, clipped on Tuesday, August 1, 2017 8:51:45 AM
We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1359-1365
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 4:20:14 PM
We are terrible at seeking evidence that challenges our own beliefs, but other people do us this favor, just as we are quite good at finding errors in other people’s beliefs. When discussions are hostile, the odds of change are slight. The elephant leans away from the opponent, and the rider works frantically to rebut the opponent’s charges. But if there is affection, admiration, or a desire to please the other person, then the elephant leans toward that person and the rider tries to find the truth in the other person’s arguments. The elephant may not often change its direction in response to objections from its own rider, but it is easily steered by the mere presence of friendly elephants (that’s the social persuasion link in the social intuitionist model) or by good arguments given to it by the riders of those friendly elephants (that’s the reasoned persuasion link). Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1359-1366
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 4:20:21 PM
second. In support of this principle, I reviewed six areas of Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1394-1394
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 4:22:00 PM
second. In support of this principle, I reviewed six areas of Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1394-1394
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 4:22:03 PM
That might be good news for rationalists—maybe we can think carefully whenever we believe it matters? Not quite. Tetlock found two very different kinds of careful reasoning. Exploratory thought is an “evenhanded consideration of alternative points of view.” Confirmatory thought is “a one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point of view.”13 Accountability increases exploratory thought only when three conditions apply: (1) decision makers learn before forming any opinion that they will be accountable to an audience, (2) the audience’s views are unknown, and (3) they believe the audience is well informed and interested in accuracy. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1493-1498
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 8:34:58 PM
For a hundred years, psychologists have written about the need to think well of oneself. But Mark Leary, a leading researcher on self-consciousness, thought that it made no evolutionary sense for there to be a deep need for self-esteem.15 For millions of years, our ancestors’ survival depended upon their ability to get small groups to include them and trust them, so if there is any innate drive here, it should be a drive to get others to think well of us. Based on his review of the research, Leary suggested that self-esteem is more like an internal gauge, a “sociometer” that continuously measures your value as a relationship partner. Whenever the sociometer needle drops, it triggers an alarm and changes our behavior. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1514-1520
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 8:37:52 PM
We thought (most of us anyway) that the domestication of plants and animals led directly to sedentism and fixed-field agriculture. It turns out that sedentism long preceded evidence of plant and animal domestication and that both sedentism and domestication were in place at least four millennia before anything like agricultural villages appeared. Sedentism and the first appearance of towns were typically seen to be the effect of irrigation and of states. It turns out that both are, instead, usually the product of wetland abundance. We thought that sedentism and cultivation led directly to state formation, yet states pop up only long after fixed-field agriculture appears. Agriculture, it was assumed, was a great step forward in human well-being, nutrition, and leisure. Something like the opposite was initially the case. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 69-75
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 9:42:00 PM
History at its best, in my view, is the most subversive discipline, inasmuch as it can tell us how things that we are likely to take for granted came to be. The allure of deep history is that by revealing the many contingencies that came together to shape, say, the Industrial Revolution, the Last Glacial Maximum, or the Qin Dynasty, it responds to the call by an earlier generation of French historians of the Annales School for a history of long-run processes (la longue durée) in place of a chronicle of public events. But the contemporary call for “deep history” goes the Annales School one better by calling for what often amounts to a species history. This is the zeitgeist in which I find myself, a zeitgeist surely illustrative of the maxim that “The Owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.” Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 203-209
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:06:47 PM
Historical humankind has been mesmerized by the narrative of progress and civilization as codified by the first great agrarian kingdoms. As new and powerful societies, they were determined to distinguish themselves as sharply as possible from the populations from which they sprang and that still beckoned and threatened at their fringes. In its essentials, it was an “ascent of man” story. Agriculture, it held, replaced the savage, wild, primitive, lawless, and violent world of hunter-gatherers and nomads. Fixed-field crops, on the other hand, were the origin and guarantor of the settled life, of formal religion, of society, and of government by laws. Those who refused to take up agriculture did so out of ignorance or a refusal to adapt. In virtually all early agricultural settings the superiority of farming was underwritten by an elaborate mythology recounting how a powerful god or goddess entrusted the sacred grain to a chosen people. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 225-232
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:22:47 PM
The shift from hunting and foraging to agriculture—a shift that was slow, halting, reversible, and sometimes incomplete—carried at least as many costs as benefits. Thus while the planting of crops has seemed, in the standard narrative, a crucial step toward a utopian present, it cannot have looked that way to those who first experienced it: a fact some scholars see reflected in the biblical story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 262-265
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:27:18 PM
Inconveniently for the narrative, sedentism is actually quite common in ecologically rich and varied, preagricultural settings—especially wetlands bordering the seasonal migration routes of fish, birds, and larger game. There, in ancient southern Mesopotamia (Greek for “between the rivers”), one encounters sedentary populations, even towns, of up to five thousand inhabitants with little or no agriculture. The opposite anomaly is also encountered: crop planting associated with mobility and dispersal except for a brief harvest period. This last paradox alerts us again to the fact that the implicit assumption of the standard narrative—namely that people couldn’t wait to abandon mobility altogether and “settle down”—may also be mistaken. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 267-273
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:31:15 PM
Guillermo Algaze puts the matter even more boldly: “Early Near Eastern villages domesticated plants and animals. Uruk urban institutions, in turn, domesticated humans.” Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 295-297
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:35:31 PM
It is surely striking that virtually all classical states were based on grain, including millets. History records no cassava states, no sago, yam, taro, plantain, breadfruit, or sweet potato states. (“Banana republics” don’t qualify!) My guess is that only grains are best suited to concentrated production, tax assessment, appropriation, cadastral surveys, storage, and rationing. On suitable soil wheat provides the agro-ecology for dense concentrations of human subjects. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 410-413
, clipped on Saturday, August 5, 2017 11:56:10 PM
More insidious are two ecological effects of urbanism and intensive irrigated agriculture. The former resulted in steady deforestation of the upstream watershed of riverine states and subsequent siltation and floods. The latter resulted in well-documented salinization of the soil, lower yields, and eventual abandonment of arable land. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 501-503
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 7:36:20 AM
Two aspects of this trade, however, were both melancholy and fateful. Perhaps the main commodity traded to the early states was the slave—typically from among the barbarians. The ancient states replenished their population by wars of capture and by buying slaves on a large scale from barbarians who specialized in the trade. In addition, it was a rare early state that did not engage barbarian mercenaries for its defense. Selling both their fellow barbarians and their martial service to the early states, the barbarians contributed mightily to the decline of their brief golden age. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 552-556
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 7:43:07 AM
Hominids’ use of fire is historically deep and pervasive. Evidence for human fires is at least 400,000 years old, long before our species appeared on the scene. Thanks to hominids, much of the world’s flora and fauna consist of fire-adapted species (pyrophytes) that have been encouraged by burning. The effects of anthropogenic fire are so massive that they might be judged, in an evenhanded account of the human impact on the natural world, to overwhelm crop and livestock domestications. Why human fire as landscape architect doesn’t register as it ought to in our historical accounts is perhaps that its effects were spread over hundreds of millennia and were accomplished by “precivilized” peoples also known as “savages.” In our age of dynamite and bulldozers, it was a very slow-motion sort of environmental landscaping. But its aggregate effects were momentous. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 570-576
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 8:15:00 AM
Irrigation works made for a dense agro-pastoral economy that, they assumed, fostered state formation as a condition of its existence. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 676-678
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 8:38:15 AM
to agriculturalists—a rhythm that farmers often read as indolence. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 746-747
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 8:47:54 AM
The importance of charcoal, though it is massively wasteful of wood, is exclusively due to its superior transportability; its heat value per unit weight and volume is far superior to “raw” firewood. In the premodern era, no bulk goods—timber, metallic ores, salt, grain, reeds, pottery—could Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 763-765
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 9:11:52 AM
To take the example of firewood, a variety of sources (before railroads and all-weather roads) advise that a cartload of firewood cannot be sold profitably at distance beyond roughly fifteen kilometers—in rugged terrain, even less. The importance of charcoal, though it is massively wasteful of wood, is exclusively due to its superior transportability; its heat value per unit weight and volume is far superior to “raw” firewood. In the premodern era, no bulk goods—timber, metallic ores, salt, grain, reeds, pottery—could be shipped over appreciable distances except by water. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 761-765
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 9:12:00 AM
flood clears a “field” by scouring and drowning back all competing vegetation and, in the process, deposits a layer of soft, easily worked, nutritious silt as it recedes. The result, under good conditions, is often a nearly perfectly harrowed and fertilized field ready for sowing at no cost in labor. Just as our ancestors noticed how a fire cleared the land for a new natural succession of quickly colonizing (the so-called r plants) species, so they must have noticed much the same succession with floods.29 And since the early cereals are grasses (r plants), they would have thrived and gotten a head start on competing weeds if broadcast on this silt. Nor is it much of a stretch, as observed earlier, to imagine making a small breach in a natural levee to provoke a small flood and the recession agriculture that it would make possible. Voila! a form of agriculture that an intelligent, work-shy hunter-gatherer might take Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 928-935
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 9:34:19 AM
Despite its apparent economic logic, the backs-to-the-wall thesis, at least in Mesopotamia and the Fertile Crescent, fails to match the available evidence. One would expect cultivation to be adopted first in those areas where hard-pressed foragers had reached the carrying capacity of their immediate environment. Instead, it seems to have arisen in areas characterized more by abundance than by scarcity. If, as noted earlier, they were practicing flood-retreat agriculture, then the central premise of the Boserupian argument of cultivation requiring great toil may well be invalid. Finally, there appears to be no firm evidence associating early cultivation with the disappearance of either game animals or forage. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 988-993
, clipped on Sunday, August 6, 2017 11:38:48 AM
Not just in Mesopotamia but virtually everywhere, it seems, early state battens itself onto this new source of sustenance. The dense concentration of grain and manpower on the only soils capable of sustaining them in such numbers—alluvial or loess soils—maximized the possibilities of appropriation, stratification, and inequality. The state form colonizes this nucleus as its productive base, scales it up, intensifies it, and occasionally adds infrastructure—such as canals for transport and irrigation—in the interest of fattening and protecting the goose that lays the golden eggs. In terms used earlier, one can think of these forms of intensification as elite niche-construction: modifying the landscape and ecology so as to enrich the productivity of its habitat. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1643-1648
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 9:43:51 PM
Specifying the conditions of elementary state making helps us appreciate the obverse: the conditions under which state formation is unlikely or indeed impossible. As the concentration of population facilitates state making, dispersal thwarts it. Because it is the rich, well-watered alluvium that allows for such concentration, it follows that nonalluvium ecologies are unlikely to be sites of early states. Arid deserts and mountainous zones (barring fertile intermontane basins) virtually require dispersed subsistence strategies and can hardly serve as the nucleus of a state. These “nonstate spaces,” owing to their different subsistence patterns and social organization—pastoralism, foraging, and slash-and-burn cultivation—are often stigmatized and coded “barbarian” by state discourses. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1704-1710
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 9:51:49 PM
The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and “rationable.” Other crops—legumes, tubers, and starch plants—have some of these desirable state-adapted qualities, but none has all of these advantages. To appreciate the unique advantages of the cereal grains, it helps to place yourself in the sandals of an ancient tax-collection official interested, above all, in the ease and efficiency of appropriation. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1748-1753
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 9:55:38 PM
Compare this situation with, say, that of farmers whose staple crops are tubers such as potatoes or cassava/manioc. Such crops ripen in a year but may be safely left in the ground for an additional year or two. They can be dug up as needed and the remainder stored where they grew, underground. If an army or tax collectors want your tubers, they will have to dig them up tuber by tuber, as the farmer does, and then they will have a cartload of potatoes which is far less valuable (either calorically or at the market) than a cartload of wheat, and is also more likely to spoil quickly.23 Frederick the Great of Prussia, when he ordered his subjects to plant potatoes, understood that, as planters of tubers, they could not be so easily dispersed by opposing armies. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1758-1765
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 9:58:09 PM
But why is there not a chickpea or lentil state? After all, these are nutritious crops that can be grown intensively, and their harvest consists of small seeds that can be dried, keep well, and can as easily be divided and measured out in small quantities as rations as the cereal grains. Here the decisive advantage of the cereal grains is their determinate growth and hence virtually simultaneous ripening. The problem with most of the legumes, from a tax collector’s perspective, is that they produce fruit continuously over an extended period. They can be, and are, picked right along as they ripen—like beans or peas. If the tax collector arrives early, much of the crop will not yet have ripened, and if he arrives late, the taxpayer will probably have eaten, hidden, or sold much of the yield. One-stop shopping on the part of the tax collector works best for determinate-ripening crops. The cereal crops of the Old World were, in this sense, preadapted for state making. The New World—save for the mixed case of maize, which can be picked right along or left to mature and dry in the field—has few if any determinate, whole-field, simultaneously ripening crops, hence none of the harvest festival tradition that so dominates the Old World agricultural calendar. It leaves one to speculate whether determinate ripening was selected for by early Neolithic cultivators and if so, why, say, determinate ripening of chickpeas and lentils could not have been similarly selected for. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1783-1793
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 10:00:17 PM
As Owen Lattimore and others have observed for the Great Wall(s) of China: they were built quite as much to keep Chinese taxpaying cultivators inside as to keep the barbarians (nomads) outside. City walls were thus intended to keep the essentials of state preservation inside. The so-called anti-Amorite walls between the Tigris and Euphrates may also have been designed more to keep cultivators in the state “zone” than to keep out the Amorites (who were, in any case, already settled in substantial numbers in the alluvium). The walls were, in the view of one scholar, a result of the vastly increased centralization of Ur III and were erected either to contain mobile populations fleeing state control or to defend against those who had been forcibly expelled. It was, in any event, “intended to define the limits of political control.”30 The control and confinement of populations as the reason and function of city walls depends in large part on demonstrating that the flight of subjects was a real preoccupation of the early state—the subject of Chapter Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1859-1868
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 10:08:03 PM
As Owen Lattimore and others have observed for the Great Wall(s) of China: they were built quite as much to keep Chinese taxpaying cultivators inside as to keep the barbarians (nomads) outside. City walls were thus intended to keep the essentials of state preservation inside. The so-called anti-Amorite walls between the Tigris and Euphrates may also have been designed more to keep cultivators in the state “zone” than to keep out the Amorites (who were, in any case, already settled in substantial numbers in the alluvium). The walls were, in the view of one scholar, a result of the vastly increased centralization of Ur III and were erected either to contain mobile populations fleeing state control or to defend against those who had been forcibly expelled. It was, in any event, “intended to define the limits of political control.”30 The control and confinement of populations as the reason and function of city walls depends in large part on demonstrating that the flight of subjects was a real preoccupation of the early state—the subject of Chapter Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1859-1868
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 10:08:27 PM
A powerful case for linking state administration and writing is that it seems to have been used in Mesopotamia essentially for bookkeeping purposes for more than half a millennium before it even began to reflect the civilizational glories we associate with writing: literature, mythology, praise hymns, kings lists and genealogies, chronicles, and religious texts.33 The magnificent Epic of Gilgamesh, for example, dates from Ur’s Third Dynasty (circa 2,100 BCE), a full millennium after cuneiform had been first used for state and commercial purposes. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1897-1901
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 10:11:16 PM
[Why did] every distinctive community on the periphery reject the use of writing with so many archaeological cultures exposed to the complexity of southern Mesopotamia? One could argue that this rejection of complexity was a conscious act. What is the reason for it? . . . Perhaps, far from being less intellectually qualified to deal with complexity, the peripheral peoples were smart enough to avoid its oppressive command structures for at least another 500 years, when it was imposed upon them by military conquest. . . . In every instance the periphery initially rejected the adoption of complexity even after direct exposure to it . . . and, in doing so, avoided the cage of the state for another half millennium. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 1989-1995
, clipped on Monday, August 7, 2017 10:19:16 PM
THE excess of epigraphs above is meant to signal the degree to which concern over the acquisition and control of population was at the very center of early statecraft. Control over a fertile and well-watered patch of alluvium meant nothing unless it was made productive by a population of cultivators who would work it. To see the early states as “population machines” is not far off the mark, so long as we appreciate that the “machine” was in bad repair and often broke down, and not only because of failures in statecraft. The state remained as focused on the number and productivity of its “domesticated” subjects as a shepherd might husband his flock or a farmer tend his crops. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2006-2011
, clipped on Tuesday, August 8, 2017 12:15:14 AM
A curious confirmation of the conditions of slave and enslaved debtors in Ur III comes from reading a utopian hymn “against the grain.” Prior to the construction of a major temple (Eninnu) there was a ritual suspension of “ordinary” social relations in favor of a radical egalitarian moment. A poetic text describes what does not happen in this ritual of exception: The slave woman was an equal of her mistress The slave walked at his master’s side The orphan was not delivered to the rich one The widow was not delivered to the powerful one The creditor did not enter one’s house He [the ruler] undid the tongue of the whip and the goad The master did not strike the slave on the head The mistress did not slap the face of the slave women He canceled the debts24 The depiction of a utopian space, by negating the ordinary woes of the poor, weak, and enslaved, provides a handy portrait of quotidian conditions. Figure 13. The grinding room in early–second millennium palace at Ebla. Reprinted from Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History EGYPT AND CHINA Whether slavery existed at all in ancient Egypt—at least in the Old Kingdom (2,686–2,181 BCE)—is hotly debated. I am in no position to settle the matter, which, in any case, Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2171-2187
, clipped on Wednesday, August 9, 2017 1:19:32 AM
A curious confirmation of the conditions of slave and enslaved debtors in Ur III comes from reading a utopian hymn “against the grain.” Prior to the construction of a major temple (Eninnu) there was a ritual suspension of “ordinary” social relations in favor of a radical egalitarian moment. A poetic text describes what does not happen in this ritual of exception: The slave woman was an equal of her mistress The slave walked at his master’s side The orphan was not delivered to the rich one The widow was not delivered to the powerful one The creditor did not enter one’s house He [the ruler] undid the tongue of the whip and the goad The master did not strike the slave on the head The mistress did not slap the face of the slave women He canceled the debts24 The depiction of a utopian space, by negating the ordinary woes of the poor, weak, and enslaved, provides a handy portrait of quotidian conditions. Figure 13. The grinding room in early–second millennium palace at Ebla. Reprinted from Postgate, Early Mesopotamia: Society and Economy at the Dawn of History EGYPT AND CHINA Whether slavery existed at all in ancient Egypt—at least in the Old Kingdom (2,686–2,181 BCE)—is hotly debated. I am in no position to settle the matter, which, in any case, Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2171-2187
, clipped on Wednesday, August 9, 2017 1:19:35 AM
A curious confirmation of the conditions of slave and enslaved debtors in Ur III comes from reading a utopian hymn “against the grain.” Prior to the construction of a major temple (Eninnu) there was a ritual suspension of “ordinary” social relations in favor of a radical egalitarian moment. A poetic text describes what does not happen in this ritual of exception: The slave woman was an equal of her mistress The slave walked at his master’s side The orphan was not delivered to the rich one The widow was not delivered to the powerful one The creditor did not enter one’s house He [the ruler] undid the tongue of the whip and the goad The master did not strike the slave on the head The mistress did not slap the face of the slave women He canceled the debts24 Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2171-2182
, clipped on Wednesday, August 9, 2017 1:19:44 AM
Finally, war helped to a great discovery—that men as well as animals can be domesticated. Instead of killing a defeated enemy, he might be enslaved; in return for his life he might be made to work. This discovery has been compared in importance to that of the taming of animals. . . . By early historic times slavery was a foundation of ancient industry and a potent instrument in the accumulation of capital. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2221-2224
, clipped on Thursday, August 10, 2017 12:08:55 AM
Two aspects of this sector of slave labor deserve emphasis. First, mining, quarrying, and felling timber were absolutely central to the military and monumental needs of the state elites. These needs in the smaller Mesopotamian city-states were more modest but no less vital. Second, the luxury of having a disposable and replaceable proletariat is that it spared one’s own subjects from the most degrading drudgery and thus forestalled the insurrectionary pressures that such labor well might provoke, while satisfying important military and monumental ambitions. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2266-2270
, clipped on Thursday, August 10, 2017 12:13:34 AM
Who built the Thebes of the seven Gates? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rocks? And Babylon many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times? Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2275-2278
, clipped on Thursday, August 10, 2017 12:14:06 AM
very center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2410-2410
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 8:29:48 AM
center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2410-2410
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 8:30:11 AM
center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2410-2410
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 8:30:44 AM
Alexis de Tocqueville reached for this analogy when he considered Europe’s growing world hegemony: “We should almost say that the European is to the other races what man himself is to the lower animals; he makes them subservient to his use, and when he cannot subdue, he destroys.” Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2403-2405
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 10:19:58 AM
Pushed even farther, I believe the analogy has an illuminating power. Take the question of reproduction. At the very center of domestication is the assertion of human control over the plant’s or animal’s reproduction, which entails confinement and a concern for selective breeding and rates of reproduction. In wars for captives, the strong preference for women of reproductive age reflects an interest at least as much in their reproductive services as in their labor. It would be instructive, but alas impossible, to know, in the light of the epidemiological challenges of early state centers, the importance of slave women’s reproduction to the demographic stability and growth of the state. The domestication of nonslave women in the early grain state may also be seen in the same light. A combination of property in land, the patriarchal family, the division of labor within the domus, and the state’s overriding interest in maximizing its population has the effect of domesticating women’s reproduction in general. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2409-2416
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 10:20:24 AM
Finally, through the schoolbooks and the museums, the prevailing standard images of these early states have become icons: the pyramids and mummies of Egypt, the Athenian Parthenon, Angkor Wat, the warrior tombs at Xian. So when these archaeological superstars evaporated, it seemed as if it were the end of an entire world. What in fact was lost were the beloved objects of classical archaeology: the concentrated ruins of the relatively rare centralized kingdoms, along with their written record and luxuries. To revert briefly to the human pyramid metaphor, it was as if the apex of the assemblage, the part on which all attention was riveted, had suddenly vanished. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2471-2476
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 10:35:59 AM
Quite apart from a climatological deus ex machina such as the Younger Dryas, the two-to-four-century cold snap beginning 6,200 BCE, or the Little Ice Age—events that massively constrain what is ecologically possible—it is essential to acknowledge the fundamental structural vulnerability of the grain complex on which all early states rested. Sedentism arose in very special and circumscribed ecological niches, particularly in alluvial or loess soils. Later—much later—the first centralized states arose in even more circumscribed ecological settings where there was a large core of rich, well-watered soils and navigable waterways, capable of sustaining a good number of cereal-growing subjects. Outside these rare and favorable sites for state creation, foraging, hunting, and pastoral people continued to flourish. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2499-2505
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 10:38:53 AM
First, unlike more contingent events like an invasion, they have a systematic character that may be linked directly to state processes. As such, they afford us a unique window on the structural contradictions of the ancient state. Second, such causes are likely to be slighted by most historical analyses, as they appear to have no direct, proximate human agent behind them and often leave no obvious archaeological signature behind to identify themselves. Evidence for their role in state mortality is speculative as well as circumstantial, but there is reason to believe their importance has been greatly underestimated. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2523-2528
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 10:40:54 AM
One last and more speculative consequence of deforestation and siltation is its role in the propagation of malaria. It has been suggested that malaria is a “disease of civilization,” in the sense that it arose with land clearance for agriculture. J. R. McNeill intriguingly suggests that this may be related to deforestation and river morphology. A silt-bearing river crossing a low-gradient coastal plain will, as it slows, deposit more silt. As the silt accumulates, it creates its own levee or barrier, blocking its passage to the sea and causing it to back up and spread out laterally, creating malarial wetlands that are both anthropogenic and perhaps uninhabitable.18 Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2639-2644
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 10:52:59 AM
The constant warfare and jockeying for manpower further contributed to the fragility of the early states. First, and most obvious, it diverted manpower resources to wall building, defensive works, and offensive operations that might otherwise have been employed in producing food for a population not much above the subsistence level. Second, it forced the founders and builders of a city-state to choose a site and layout where military defense considerations might prevail over material abundance. This may well have resulted in states that, while more easily defended, were economically more precarious. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2684-2688
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:37:00 PM
It was this core zone that was the key to state power and cohesion. It was also the state’s Achilles’ heel, as it was this zone that was likely to be squeezed first and hardest in any crisis.24 Precisely because this zone was closest at hand, most valuable, and dense with resources, it would, in a pinch, yield the most manpower and grain. An audacious ruler, one with military or monumental ambitions, one threatened by invasion or by internal enemies, would be tempted, as the line of least resistance, to draw resources from this core. Two facts made this a very dangerous gamble—one that could bring down states. First, for an agrarian kingdom always liable to the vagaries of rainfall, weather, pests, and human and crop diseases, the annual yield, even in this most reliable of agrarian ecologies, was extremely variable. In ordinary circumstances the “yield” elites might extract from this zone would vary widely. If elites insisted on a steady, let alone expanding, take from this zone in terms of grain and labor—on insulating itself from the normal fluctuations in output—then the core agrarian population would bear the potentially ruinous brunt of harvest fluctuations despite its own tenuous subsistence. As in all agrarian economies, the key issue in class relations is which class absorbs the inevitable shocks of a bad year—or, in other words, which class ensures its economic security at the expense of whom. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2716-2727
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:41:19 PM
an emergency, when maximizing tax revenue was a matter of survival, pressing on the core region was well-nigh irresistible, even though it might risk provoking flight and/or rebellion. Outlying areas were not a realistic alternative. They Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2734-2736
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:43:44 PM
In an emergency, when maximizing tax revenue was a matter of survival, pressing on the core region was well-nigh irresistible, even though it might risk provoking flight and/or rebellion. Outlying areas were not a realistic alternative. They were likely to be more marginal agriculturally, with lower and more variable yields; the revenues that could be appropriated from them were partly nullified by transportation costs; and the knowledge of these resources and control over the administrative apparatus that might appropriate them diminished radically with distance from the center. An elite, believing itself in mortal danger or seized with celestial ambitions, would have had little compunction in adopting survival strategies that risked killing the goose that laid the golden egg: the grain core. What is read retrospectively as “collapse” may often, I speculate, have been triggered by resistance and flight by desperate subjects in the core in situations like this. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2734-2741
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:43:52 PM
One simple and not entirely superficial reason why collapse is deplored is that it deprives all those scholars and professionals whose mission it has been to document ancient civilizations of the raw materials they require. There are fewer important digs for archaeologists, fewer records and texts for historians, and fewer trinkets—large and small—to fill museum exhibits. There are splendid and instructive documentaries on archaic Greece, Old Kingdom Egypt, and mid–third millennium Uruk, but one will search in vain for a portrayal of the obscure periods that followed them: the “Dark Age” of Greece, the “First Intermediate Period” of Egypt, and the decline of Uruk under the Akkadian Empire. Yet there is a strong case to be made that such “vacant” periods represented a bolt for freedom by many state subjects and an improvement in human welfare. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2765-2771
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:46:40 PM
What I wish to challenge here is a rarely examined prejudice that sees population aggregation at the apex of state centers as triumphs of civilization on the one hand, and decentralization into smaller political units on the other, as a breakdown or failure of political order. We should, I believe, aim to “normalize” collapse and see it rather as often inaugurating a periodic and possibly even salutary reformulation of political order. In the case of more centralized command-and-rationing economies such as Ur III, Crete, and Qin China, the problems were further compounded, and cycles of centralization, decentralization, and reaggregation seem to have been common. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2771-2776
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:47:18 PM
What is lost culturally when a large state center is abandoned or destroyed is thus an empirical question. Surely it is likely to have an effect on the division of labor, and scale of trade, and on monumental architecture. On the other hand, it is just as likely that the culture will survive—and be developed—in multiple smaller centers no longer in thrall to the center. One must never confound culture with state centers or the apex of a court culture with its broader foundations. Above all, the well-being of a population must never be confounded with the power of a court or state center. It is not uncommon for the subjects of early states to leave both agriculture and urban centers to evade taxes, conscription, epidemics, and oppression. From one perspective they may be seen to have regressed to more rudimentary forms of subsistence, such as foraging or pastoralism. But from another, and I believe broader, perspective, they may well have avoided labor and grain taxes, escaped an epidemic, traded an oppressive serfdom for greater freedom and physical mobility, and perhaps avoided death in combat. The abandonment of the state may, in such cases, be experienced as an emancipation. This is emphatically not to deny that life outside the state may often be characterized by predation and violence of other kinds, but rather to assert that we have no warrant for assuming that the abandonment of an urban center is, ipso facto, a descent into brutality and violence. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2786-2796
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:49:06 PM
What would seem to many to be a retrogression and civilizational heresy may on closer examination be nothing more than a prudent and long-practiced adaptation to environmental variability. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2807-2808
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:50:08 PM
The problem for the historian or archaeologist who seeks to illuminate a dark age is that our knowledge is so limited—that, after all, is why it’s called a “dark age.” At least two obstacles obscure our view. The first is that the self-reporting, and self-inflating, apex of an urban political formation has been removed. If we want to know what’s going on, we will have to scout on the periphery, in the smaller towns, villages, and pastoral camps. Second, the trove of written records and bas reliefs has dwindled if not disappeared, and we are left if not exactly “in the dark,” at best in the realm of oral culture that is hard to trace and date. The self-documenting court center that offered convenient one-stop shopping for historians and archaeologists is replaced by a fragmented, dispersed, and largely undocumented “dark age.” Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2827-2834
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:53:22 PM
Just as the meaning of collapse merits close and critical inspection, so the term “dark age” needs to be queried: “dark” for whom and in what respects? Dark ages are just as ubiquitous as storied dynastic highpoints of consolidation. The term is often a form of propaganda by which a centralizing dynasty contrasts its achievement with what it casts as the disunity and decentralization that preceded it. At a minimum, it seems unwarranted for the mere depopulation of a state center and the absence of monumental building and court records to be called a dark age and understood as the equivalent of the civilizational lights being extinguished. To be sure, there are in fact periods when invasions, epidemics, droughts, and floods do kill thousands and scatter (or enslave) the survivors. In such cases the term “dark age” seems appropriate as a point of departure. The “darkness” of the age, in any event, is a matter of empirical inquiry, not a label that can be taken for granted. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2821-2827
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:53:45 PM
Many of the palatial centers were abandoned and often physically destroyed and burned; trade was vastly diminished, and writing in the Linear B script disappeared. The causes suggested are multiple and unverified: a Dorian invasion, invasion by mysterious “sea peoples” of the Mediterranean, drought, and perhaps disease. In terms of the culture it is seen as a dark age before the subsequent glories of Greece’s Classical Age. But the oral epics of the Odyssey and the Iliad, as we have noted, date from precisely this dark age of Greece and were only later transcribed in the form in which we have come to know them. One might well argue, in fact, that such oral epics that survive by repeated performance and memorization constitute a far more democratic form of culture than texts that depend less on performance than on a small class of literate elites who can read them. While Greece’s dark age represented a long and thorough eclipse of the earlier city-states, we know next to nothing about life in the smaller, fragmented, autonomous centers that survived, nor the role they may have played in laying the foundation for the subsequent flourishing of Classical Greece. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2861-2870
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 12:57:34 PM
Weeds, varmints, vermin, and barbarians—the “undomesticated”—threaten civilization in the grain state. They must either be mastered and domesticated or, failing that, Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2915-2916
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 1:03:41 PM
Weeds, varmints, vermin, and barbarians—the “undomesticated”—threaten civilization in the grain state. They must either be mastered and domesticated or, failing that, exterminated or rigorously excluded from the domus. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2915-2917
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 1:03:46 PM
If we think of the carrying capacity of barbarian ecology, my argument is that it was enhanced by the existence of petty states in much the same way that it would have been enhanced by a propitious stand of wild cereals or a migration of game. It would be hard to tell whether the microparasites of sedentary communities or the outbreaks of macroparasitic raiders contributed more to the limits on the growth of states and their populations. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 2946-2949
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 1:08:05 PM
The process of secondary primitivism, or what might be called “going over to the barbarians,” is far more common than any of the standard civilizational narratives allow for. It is particularly pronounced at times of state breakdown or interregna marked by war, epidemics, and environmental deterioration. In such circumstances, far from being seen as regrettable backsliding and privation, it may well have been experienced as a marked improvement in safety, nutrition, and social order. Becoming a barbarian was often a bid to improve one’s lot. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3065-3069
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:32:30 PM
For China’s Mongol frontier, Owen Lattimore, as noted earlier, has made the case most forcefully that the purpose of the Great Wall(s) was as much to keep the Chinese taxpayers inside as to block barbarian incursions and that, nonetheless, a great many taxpaying Han cultivators had “distanced themselves” from state space—especially during times of political and economic disorder—and “attached themselves quite readily to barbarian rulers.” Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3074-3078
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:32:57 PM
A great many barbarians, then, were not primitives who had stayed or been left behind but rather political and economic refugees who had fled to the periphery to escape state-induced poverty, taxes, bondage, and war. As states proliferated and grew over time, they ground out ever greater numbers who voted with their feet. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3090-3092
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:34:19 PM
Pastoralists in particular have remarkably flexible kinship structures, allowing them to incorporate and shed group members depending on such things as available pasture, number of livestock, and the tasks at hand—including military tasks. Like states, they too are typically manpower hungry and therefore quickly work refugees or captives into the lineage kinship structure. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3112-3115
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:40:07 PM
In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3124-3126
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:40:17 PM
In Caesar’s evolutionary scheme, described earlier, tribes preceded states. Given what we now know, it would be more accurate to say that states preceded tribes and, in fact, largely invented them as an instrument of rule. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3124-3126
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:40:44 PM
Barbarian raiders were, for their part, relatively safe from retaliation by the state. Being mobile and dispersed, they could usually simply melt away, often into the hills, swamps, and trackless grasslands, where state armies followed at their peril. State armies might be effective against fixed objectives and sedentary communities but were largely helpless campaigning against acephalous bands with no central authority with whom to negotiate or to defeat in battle. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3151-3154
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:44:05 PM
There is a deep and fundamental contradiction to raiding that, once grasped, suggests why it is a radically unstable mode of subsistence, one that is likely under most circumstances to evolve into something quite different. Carried to its logical conclusion, raiding is self-liquidating. If, say, raiders attack a sedentary community, carrying off its livestock, grain, people, and valuables, the settlement is destroyed. Knowing its fate, others will be reluctant to settle there. If raiders were to make a practice of such attacks, they would, if successful, have killed all the “game” in the vicinity or, better put, “killed the goose that lays the golden egg.” Much the same is true for raiders or pirates who attack caravans or shipping lanes. If they take everything, either the trade is extinguished or, more likely, it finds another, safer route. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3175-3181
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:46:18 PM
Knowing this, raiders are most likely to adjust their strategy to something that looks more like a “protection racket.” In return for a portion of the trade goods, harvest, livestock, and other valuables, the raiders “protect” the traders and communities against other raiders and, of course, against themselves. The relationship is analogous to endemism in diseases in which the pathogen makes a steady living from the host rather than killing it off. As there are likely to be a plurality of raiding groups, each group is likely to have particular communities it “taxes” and guards. Raiding, often quite devastating, still occurs, but it is most likely to be an attack by raiders on a community protected by another raiding community. Such attacks represented a form of indirect warfare between rival raiding groups. Protection rackets that are routine and that persist are a longer-run strategy than one-time sacking and therefore depend on a reasonably stable political and military environment. In extracting a sustainable surplus from sedentary communities and fending off external attacks to protect its base, a stable protection racket like this is hard to distinguish from the archaic state itself. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3181-3190
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:47:29 PM
One imagines that such protection rackets were more common than the documents allow, inasmuch as they were likely to be secrets of state which, if fully revealed, would risk contradicting the public facade of an all-powerful state. Herodotus notes that the Persian kings paid annual tribute to the Cissians (residents of Susa in the foothills of the Zagros Mountains at the edge of the Mesopotamian alluvium) lest they raid the Persian heartland and endanger its overland caravan trade. The Romans, after several defeats in the fourth century BCE, paid the Celts one thousand pounds of gold to prevent raiding, a practice they would repeat with the Huns and Goths. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3206-3210
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:49:17 PM
If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module. It is this module that both is the basis for state formation and is equally essential for barbarian accumulation. It is the prize. One-time plunder raiding is likely to kill the host altogether, while a stable protection racket mimics the process of state appropriation and is compatible with the long-run productivity of the grain core. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3210-3214
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:50:26 PM
If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module. It is this module that both is the basis for state formation and is equally essential for barbarian accumulation. It is the prize. One-time plunder raiding is likely to kill the host altogether, while a stable protection racket mimics the process of state appropriation and is compatible with the long-run productivity of the grain core. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3210-3214
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:50:35 PM
If we step back and widen the lens, barbarian-state relations can be seen as a contest between the two parties for the right to appropriate the surplus from the sedentary grain-and-manpower module. It is this module that both is the basis for state formation and is equally essential for barbarian accumulation. It is the prize. One-time plunder raiding is likely to kill the host altogether, while a stable protection racket mimics the process of state appropriation and is compatible with the long-run productivity of the grain core. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3210-3214
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:50:40 PM
The emphasis on raiding in most histories is understandable in view of the terror it evoked among elites of the threatened states who, after all, provide us with the written sources. This perspective overlooks the centrality of trade and the degree to which raiding was often a means rather than an end in itself. Christopher Beckwith’s emphasis on trade routes is illuminating: Chinese, Greek and Arab historical sources agree that the steppe peoples were above all interested in trade. The careful manner in which Central Eurasians generally undertook their conquests is revealing. They attempted to avoid conflict and tried to get cities to submit peacefully. Only when they resisted, or rebelled, was retribution necessary. . . . The Central Eurasians’ conquests were designed to acquire trade routes or trading cities. But the reason for the acquisition was to secure occupied territory that could be taxed in order to pay for the rulers’ socio-political infrastructure. If all this sounds exactly like what sedentary peripheral states were doing, that is because it was indeed the same thing. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3228-3237
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 6:52:43 PM
The barbarians, broadly understood, were perhaps uniquely positioned to take advantage—and in many cases direct charge—of the explosion in trade. They were, after all, by virtue of their mobility and dispersion across several ecological zones, the connective tissue between the various sedentary cereal-intensive states. As trade grew, mobile nonstate peoples were able to dominate the arteries and capillaries of that trade and exact tribute for doing so. Mobility was, if anything, even more critical with respect to seaborne trade across the Mediterranean. These nomads of the sea were, one archaeologist explains, in all probability seamen who originally hired out their services to the established agrarian kingdoms in “official trade.” As the scale of trade and its opportunities grew, they became an increasingly independent force capable of imposing themselves as coastal polities, raiding, trading, and exacting tribute on the model of their landward counterparts. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3284-3292
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 11:12:34 PM
Not only the frontier between civilization and barbarism, but barbarian societies themselves, were in large measure created by the growth and geographical spread of the great ancient civilizations. It is proper to speak of the barbarians as “primitive” only in that remote time when no civilization yet existed and when the forbearers of the civilized peoples were also primitive. From the moment civilization began to evolve . . . it recruited into civilization some of the people who had land and displaced others and the effect on those who were displaced [was] that . . . they modified their own economic practices and experimented with new kinds of specialization and they also evolved new forms of social cohesion and political organization, and new ways of fighting. Civilization itself created its own barbarian plague. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3298-3304
, clipped on Saturday, August 12, 2017 11:15:12 PM
It is all too characteristic, though no less deplorable, that so much ink is devoted to the barbarian states and the empires they bedeviled. Like a capital city that dominates the news, they dominate the historical coverage. A more evenhanded history would chronicle the relationship of hundreds of smaller states with thousands of nearby nonstate peoples, not to mention the relation of predation and alliance between those nonstate peoples. Scott, James C.
, Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States.
loc. 3345-3348
, clipped on Sunday, August 13, 2017 2:30:39 AM
The critique of “privatism,” though it helps to keep alive the need for community, has become more and more misleading as the possibility of genuine privacy recedes. The contemporary American may have failed, like his predecessors, to establish any sort of common life, but the integrating tendencies of modern industrial society have at the same time undermined his “isolation.” Having surrendered most of his technical skills to the corporation, he can no longer provide for his material needs. As the family loses not only its productive functions but many of its reproductive functions as well, men and women no longer manage even to raise their children without the help of certified experts. The atrophy of older traditions of self-help has eroded everyday competence, in one area after another, and has made the individual dependent on the state, the corporation, and other bureaucracies. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 358-364
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 12:28:56 AM
Narcissism represents the psychological dimension of this dependence. Notwithstanding his occasional illusions of omnipotence, the narcissist depends on others to validate his self-esteem. He cannot live without an admiring audience. His apparent freedom from family ties and institutional constraints does not free him to stand alone or to glory in his individuality. On the contrary, it contributes to his insecurity, which he can overcome only by seeing his “grandiose self” reflected in the attentions of others, or by attaching himself to those who radiate celebrity, power, and charisma. For the narcissist, the world is a mirror, whereas the rugged individualist saw it as an empty wilderness to be shaped to his own design. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 365-369
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 12:29:35 AM
Therapy constitutes an antireligion, not always to be sure because it adhreres to rational explanation or scientific methods of healing, as its practitioners would have us believe, but because modern society “has no future” and therefore gives no thought to anything beyond its immediate needs. Even when therapists speak of the need for “meaning” and “love,” they define love and meaning simply as the fulfillment of the patient’s emotional requirements. It hardly occurs to them—nor is there any reason why it should, given the nature of the therapeutic enterprise—to encourage the subject to subordinate his needs and interests to those of others, to someone or some cause or tradition outside himself. “Love” as self-sacrifice or self-abasement, “meaning” as submission to a higher loyalty—these sublimations strike the therapeutic sensibility as intolerably oppressive, offensive to common sense and injurious to personal health and well-being. To liberate humanity from such outmoded ideas of love and duty has become the mission of the post-Freudian therapies and particularly of their converts and popularizes, for whom mental health means the overthrow of inhibitions and the immediate gratification of every impulse. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 410-418
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 12:36:46 AM
By undermining the illusion of culture as a separate and autonomous development uninfluenced by the distribution of wealth and power, the political upheaval of the sixties also tended to undermine the distinction between high culture and popular culture and to make popular culture an object of serious discussion. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 468-470
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 12:41:58 AM
Rather, what I’m saying is that we must be wary of any individual’s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to “decide” whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1761-1765
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 10:19:35 PM
Rather, what I’m saying is that we must be wary of any individual’s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to “decide” whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1761-1765
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 10:19:45 PM
Rather, what I’m saying is that we must be wary of any individual’s ability to reason. We should see each individual as being limited, like a neuron. A neuron is really good at one thing: summing up the stimulation coming into its dendrites to “decide” whether to fire a pulse along its axon. A neuron by itself isn’t very smart. But if you put neurons together in the right way you get a brain; you get an emergent system that is much smarter and more flexible than a single neuron. In the same way, each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right way, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. This is why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth (such as an intelligence agency or a community of scientists) or to produce good public policy (such as a legislature or advisory board). Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1761-1771
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 10:20:00 PM
Theoretical precision about narcissism is important not only because the idea is so readily susceptible to moralistic inflation but because the practice of equating narcissism with everything selfish and disagreeable militates against historical specificity. Men have always been selfish, groups have always been ethnocentric; nothing is gained by giving these qualities a psychiatric label. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 731-733
, clipped on Monday, August 14, 2017 11:17:31 PM
Although he may resort to therapies that promise to give meaning to life and to overcome his sense of emptiness, in his professional career the narcissist often enjoys considerable success. The management of personal impressions comes naturally to him, and his mastery of its intricacies serves him well in political and business organizations where performance now counts for less than “visibility,” “momentum,” and a winning record. As the “organization man” gives way to the bureaucratic “gamesman”—the “loyalty era” of American business to the age of the “executive success game”—the narcissist comes into his own. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 914-918
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 8:26:25 AM
is not only the gamesman who “fears feeling trapped.” Seymour B. Sarason finds this feeling prevalent among professionals Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5309-5310
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 8:28:45 AM
It is not only the gamesman who “fears feeling trapped.” Seymour B. Sarason finds this feeling prevalent among professionals and students training for professional careers. He too suggests a connection between the fear of entrapment and the cultural value set on career mobility and its psychic equivalent, “personal growth.” “‘Stay loose,’ ‘keep your options open,’ ‘play it cool’—these cautions emerge from the feeling that society sets all kinds of booby traps that rob you of the freedom without which growth is impossible.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5309-5313
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 8:28:54 AM
Jennings treats the substance of executive life as if it were just as arbitrary and irrelevant to success as the task of kicking a ball through a net or of moving pieces over a chessboard. He never mentions the social and economic repercussions of managerial decisions or the power that managers exercise over society as a whole. For the corporate manager on the make, power consists not of money and influence but of “momentum,” a “winning image,” a reputation as a winner. Power lies in the eye of the beholder and thus has no objective reference Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 954-958
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:51:58 PM
Jennings treats the substance of executive life as if it were just as arbitrary and irrelevant to success as the task of kicking a ball through a net or of moving pieces over a chessboard. He never mentions the social and economic repercussions of managerial decisions or the power that managers exercise over society as a whole. For the corporate manager on the make, power consists not of money and influence but of “momentum,” a “winning image,” a reputation as a winner. Power lies in the eye of the beholder and thus has no objective reference Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 954-958
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:52:06 PM
Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions—and our own—were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time. “Smile, you’re on candid camera!” The intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defenses down. We need no reminder to smile. A smile is permanently graven on our features, and we already know from which of several angles it photographs to best advantage. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 968-971
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 5:53:52 PM
Virtue pays, in the eighteenth-century version of the work ethic; but what it pays cannot be measured simply in money. The real reward of virtue is to have little to apologize for or to repent of at the end of your life. Wealth is to be valued, but chiefly because it serves as one of the necessary preconditions of moral and intellectual cultivation. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1097-1099
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 6:15:45 PM
The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1139-1141
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 6:20:58 PM
The management of interpersonal relations came to be seen as the essence of self-advancement. The captain of industry gave way to the confidence man, the master of impressions. Young men were told that they had to sell themselves in order to succeed. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1139-1141
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 6:21:03 PM
The latest success manuals differ from earlier ones—even surpassing the cynicism of Dale Carnegie and Peale—in their frank acceptance of the need to exploit and intimidate others, in their lack of interest in the substance of success, and in the candor with which they insist that appearances—“winning images”—count for more than performance, ascription for more than achievement. One author seems to imply that the self consists of little more than its “image” reflected in others’ eyes. “Although I’m not being original when I say it, I’m sure you’ll agree that the way you see yourself will reflect the image you portray to others.” Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1151-1155
, clipped on Wednesday, August 16, 2017 6:26:43 PM
Worldly success has always carried with it a certain poignancy, an awareness that “you can’t take it with you”; but in our time, when success is so largely a function of youth, glamour, and novelty, glory is more fleeting than ever, and those who win the attention of the public worry incessantly about losing Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1166-1169
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 12:43:51 AM
Worldly success has always carried with it a certain poignancy, an awareness that “you can’t take it with you”; but in our time, when success is so largely a function of youth, glamour, and novelty, glory is more fleeting than ever, and those who win the attention of the public worry incessantly about losing Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1166-1169
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 12:43:57 AM
The argument that bureaucratic organizations devote more energy to the maintenance of hierarchical relations than to industrial efficiency gains strength from the consideration that modern capitalist production arose in the first place not because it was necessarily more efficient than other methods of organizing work but because it provided capitalists with greater profits and power. The case for the factory system, according to Stephen Marglin, rested not on its technological superiority over handicraft production but on the more effective control of the labor force it allowed the employer. In the words of Andrew Ure, the philosopher of manufactures, introduction of the factory system enabled the capitalist to “subdue the refractory tempers of work people.” As the hierarchical organization of work invades the managerial function itself, the office takes on the characteristics of the factory, and the enforcement of clearly demarcated lines of dominance and subordination within management takes on as much importance as the subordination of labor to management as a whole. In the “era of corporate mobility,” however, the lines of superiority and subordination constantly fluctuate, and the successful bureaucrat survives not by appealing to the authority of his office but by establishing a pattern of upward movement, cultivating upwardly mobile superiors, and administering “homeopathic doses of humiliation” to those he leaves behind in his ascent to the top. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1209-1218
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 12:51:55 AM
In the fifties, affluence, leisure, and the “quality of life” loomed as major issues. The welfare state had allegedly eradicated poverty, gross economic inequalities, and the conflicts to which they formerly gave rise. The seeming triumphs of American capitalism left social critics little to worry about except the decline of individualism and the menace of conformity. Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman, the salesman who wants no more out of life than to be “well liked,” symbolized the issues that troubled the postwar period. In the seventies, a harsher time, it appears that the prostitute, not the salesman, best exemplifies the qualities indispensable to success in American society. She too sells herself for a living, but her seductiveness hardly signifies a wish to be well liked. She craves admiration but scorns those who provide it and thus derives little gratification from her social successes. She attempts to move others while remaining unmoved herself. The fact that she lives in a milieu of interpersonal relations does not make her a conformist or an “other-directed” type. She remains a loner, dependent on others only as a hawk depends on chickens. She exploits the ethic of pleasure that has replaced the ethic of achievement, but her career more than any other reminds us that contemporary hedonism, of which she is the supreme symbol, originates not in the pursuit of pleasure but in a war of all against all, in which even the most intimate encounters become a form of mutual exploitation. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1239-1249
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 7:57:27 AM
Indeed the attraction of black culture for disaffected whites suggests that black culture now speaks to a general condition, the most important feature of which is a widespread loss of confidence in the future. The poor have always had to live for the present, but now a desperate concern for personal survival, sometimes disguised as hedonism, engulfs the middle class as well. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1289-1292
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 8:07:47 AM
discontinuity—the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1301-1302
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 8:09:00 AM
discontinuity—the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1301-1302
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 8:09:05 AM
the absence of continuity in the coverage of events, as today’s crisis yields to a new and unrelated crisis tomorrow, adds to the sense of historical discontinuity—the sense of living in a world in which the past holds out no guidance to the present and the future has become completely unpredictable. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1300-1302
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 8:09:12 AM
First, it upholds consumption as an alternative to protest or rebellion. Paul Nystrom, an early student of modern marketing, once noted that industrial civilization gives rise to a “philosophy of futility,” a pervasive fatigue, a “disappointment with achievements” that finds an outlet in changing the “more superficial things in which fashion reigns.” The tired worker, instead of attempting to change the conditions of his work, seeks renewal in brightening his immediate surroundings with new goods and services. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1368-1372
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 9:46:48 AM
The role of the mass media in the manipulation of public opinion has received a great deal of anguished but misguided attention. Much of this commentary assumes that the problem is to prevent the circulation of obvious untruths; whereas it is evident, as the more penetrating critics of mass culture have pointed out, that the rise of mass media makes the categories of truth and falsehood irrelevant to an evaluation of their influence. Truth has given way to credibility, facts to statements that sound authoritative without conveying any authoritative information. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1392-1396
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 9:54:28 AM
President Nixon’s press secretary, Ron Ziegler, once demonstrated the political use of these techniques when he admitted that his previous statements on Watergate had become “inoperative.” Many commentators assumed that Ziegler was groping for a euphemistic way of saying that he had lied. What he meant, however, was that his earlier statements were no longer believable. Not their falsity but their inability to command assent rendered them “inoperative.” The question of whether they were true or not was beside the point. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1399-1403
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 9:55:37 AM
In the sixties, the new left attempted to overcome this insubstantiality of the establishment by resorting to politics of confrontation. By deliberately provoking violent repression, it hoped to forestall the co-optation of dissent. The attempt to dramatize official repression, however, imprisoned the left in a politics of theater, of dramatic gestures, of style without substance—a mirror-image of the politics of unreality which it should have been the purpose of the left to unmask. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1509-1513
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 10:07:46 AM
The delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerrilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media stars of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards. One exponent of “guerrilla theater,” after exhorting his followers to live by their wits, quickly explained that “to live by your wits is not to imitate the hustler who is a low-class capitalist, but rather the Latin American guerrilla who is a low-class socialist.” Such talk served not only to reassure the faithful but to play up to the “relevant audience” of black and third-world militants, to which the white left had become unduly sensitive and which it desperately wanted to impress with its revolutionary machismo. The rhetoric of black power corrupted the white left and the black left alike, substituting a politics of the media for the civil rights struggles earlier waged in deadly earnest in the Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1523-1530
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 10:48:15 AM
The delusion that street theater represented the newest form of guerrilla warfare helped to ward off an uneasy realization that it represented no more than a form of self-promotion, by means of which the media stars of the left brought themselves to national attention with its concomitant rewards. One exponent of “guerrilla theater,” after exhorting his followers to live by their wits, quickly explained that “to live by your wits is not to imitate the hustler who is a low-class capitalist, but rather the Latin American guerrilla who is a low-class socialist.” Such talk served not only to reassure the faithful but to play up to the “relevant audience” of black and third-world militants, to which the white left had become unduly sensitive and which it desperately wanted to impress with its revolutionary machismo. The rhetoric of black power corrupted the white left and the black left alike, substituting a politics of the media for the civil rights struggles earlier waged in deadly earnest in the South. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1523-1530
, clipped on Thursday, August 17, 2017 10:48:20 AM
The narcissist cannot identify with someone else without seeing the other as an extension of himself, without obliterating the other’s identity. Incapable of identification, in the first instance with parents and other authority figures, he is therefore incapable of hero worship or of the suspension of disbelief that makes it possible to enter imaginatively into the lives of others while acknowledging their independent existence. A narcissistic society worships celebrity rather than fame and substitutes spectacle for the older forms of theater, which encouraged identification and emulation precisely because they carefully preserved a certain distance between the audience and the actors, the hero worshipper and the hero. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1579-1584
, clipped on Friday, August 18, 2017 2:17:52 AM
“Instead of the neurotic character with well-structured conflicts centering around forbidden sex, authority, or dependence and independence within a family setting, we see characters filled with uncertainty about what is real.” This uncertainty now invades every form of art and crystallizes in an imagery of the absurd that reenters daily life and encourages a theatrical approach to existence, a kind of absurdist theater of the self. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1645-1648
, clipped on Friday, August 18, 2017 2:22:01 AM
manual work but from white-collar jobs as well has created conditions in which labor power takes the form of personality rather Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1676-1677
, clipped on Friday, August 18, 2017 2:24:08 AM
But the mastery of these new social skills, while increasing esthetic satisfaction, has created new forms of uneasiness and anxiety. Imprisoned in his self-awareness, modern man longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance, Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1691-1694
, clipped on Friday, August 18, 2017 2:25:04 AM
But the mastery of these new social skills, while increasing esthetic satisfaction, has created new forms of uneasiness and anxiety. Imprisoned in his self-awareness, modern man longs for the lost innocence of spontaneous feeling. Unable to express emotion without calculating its effects on others, he doubts the authenticity of its expression in others and therefore derives little comfort from audience reactions to his own performance, even when the audience claims to be deeply moved. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1691-1694
, clipped on Friday, August 18, 2017 2:25:16 AM
Escape through irony and critical self-awareness is in any case itself an illusion; at best it provides only momentary relief. Distancing soon becomes a routine in its own right. Awareness commenting on awareness creates an escalating cycle of self-consciousness that inhibits spontaneity. It intensifies the feeling of inauthenticity that rises in the first place out of resentment against the meaningless roles prescribed by modern industry. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1740-1743
, clipped on Friday, August 18, 2017 2:32:38 AM
Fortunately, people of all nations intuitively tend to resist such exhortations. They know that games remain gloriously pointless and that watching an exciting athletic contest, moreover, can be emotionally almost as exhausting as participation itself—hardly the “passive” experience it is made out to be by the guardians of public health and virtue. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1823-1825
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:00:03 AM
Huizinga himself, who anticipated some of these arguments but stated them far more persuasively, argued that modern games and sports had been ruined by a “fatal shift toward over-seriousness.” At the same time, he maintained that play had lost its element of ritual, had become “profane,” and consquently had ceased to have any “organic connection whatever with the structure of society.” The masses now crave “trivial recreation and crude sensationalism” and throw themselves into these pursuits with an intensity far beyond their intrinsic merit. Instead of playing with the freedom and intensity of children, they play with the “blend of adolescence and barbarity” that Huizinga calls puerilism, investing games with patriotic and martial fervor while treating serious pursuits like games. “A far-reaching contamination of play and serious activity has taken place,” according to Huizinga. “The two spheres are getting mixed. In the activities of an outwardly serious nature hides an element of play. Recognized play, on the other hand, is no longer able to maintain its true play-character as a result of being taken too seriously and being technically over-organised. The indispensable qualities of detachment, artlessness, and gladness are thus lost.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1852-1860
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:05:43 AM
Take the common complaint that modern sports are “spectator-oriented rather than participant-oriented.” Spectators, in this view, are irrelevant to the success of the game. What a naïve theory of human motivation this implies! The attainment of certain skills unavoidably gives rise to an urge to show them off. At a higher level of mastery, the performer no longer wishes merely to display his virtuosity—for the true connoisseur can easily distinguish between the performer who plays to the crowd and the superior artist who matches himself against the full rigor of his art itself—but to ratify a supremely difficult accomplishment; to give pleasure; to forge a bond between himself and his audience, which consists in their shared appreciation of a ritual executed flawlessly, with deep feeling and a sense of style and proportion. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1875-1880
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:08:09 AM
Take the common complaint that modern sports are “spectator-oriented rather than participant-oriented.” Spectators, in this view, are irrelevant to the success of the game. What a naïve theory of human motivation this implies! The attainment of certain skills unavoidably gives rise to an urge to show them off. At a higher level of mastery, the performer no longer wishes merely to display his virtuosity—for the true connoisseur can easily distinguish between the performer who plays to the crowd and the superior artist who matches himself against the full rigor of his art itself—but to ratify a supremely difficult accomplishment; to give pleasure; to forge a bond between himself and his audience, which consists in their shared appreciation of a ritual executed flawlessly, with deep feeling and a sense of style and proportion. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1875-1880
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:08:12 AM
Indeed one of the virtues of contemporary sports lies in their resistance to the erosion of standards and their capacity to appeal to a knowledgeable audience. Norman Podhoretz has argued that the sports public remains more discriminating than the public for the arts and that “excellence is relatively uncontroversial as a judgment of performance.” More important, everyone agrees on the standards against which excellence should be measured. The public for sports still consists largely of men who took part in sports during boyhood and thus acquired a sense of the game and Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1884-1888
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:12:55 AM
Indeed one of the virtues of contemporary sports lies in their resistance to the erosion of standards and their capacity to appeal to a knowledgeable audience. Norman Podhoretz has argued that the sports public remains more discriminating than the public for the arts and that “excellence is relatively uncontroversial as a judgment of performance.” More important, everyone agrees on the standards against which excellence should be measured. The public for sports still consists largely of men who took part in sports during boyhood and thus acquired a sense of the game and a capacity to distinguish among many levels of excellence. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1884-1889
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 1:13:00 AM
No one denies the desirability of participation in sports—not because it builds strong bodies but because it brings joy and delight. It is by watching those who have mastered a sport, however, that we derive standards against which to measure ourselves. By entering imaginatively into their world, we experience in heightened form the pain of defeat and the triumph of persistence in the face of adversity. An athletic performance, like other performances, calls up a rich train of associations and fantasies, shaping unconscious perceptions of life. Spectatorship is no more “passive” than daydreaming, provided the performance is of such quality that it elicits an emotional response. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1913-1918
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:14:55 AM
In its eagerness to remove from athletics the element that has always underlain their imaginative appeal, the staged rivalry of superior ability, this “radicalism” proposes merely to complete the degradation already begun by the very society the cultural radicals profess to criticize and subvert. Vaguely uneasy about the emotional response evoked by competitive sports, the critics of “passive” spectatorship wish to enlist sport in the service of healthy physical exercise, subduing or eliminating the element of fantasy, make-believe, and playacting that has always been associated with games. The demand for greater participation, like the distrust of competition, seems to originate in a fear that unconscious impulses and fantasies will overwhelm us if we allow them expression. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1925-1930
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:17:21 AM
Huizinga himself, when he is writing about the theory of play rather than the collapse of “genuine play” in our own time, understands very well that play at its best is always serious; indeed that the essence of play lies in taking seriously activities that have no purpose, serve no utilitarian ends. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1936-1938
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:18:29 AM
The degradation of sport, then, consists not in its being taken too seriously but in its trivialization. Games derive their power from the investment of seemingly trivial activity with serious intent. By submitting without reservation to the rules and conventions of the game, the players (and the spectators too) cooperate in creating an illusion of reality. In this way the game becomes a representation of life, and play takes on the character of playacting as well. In our time, games—sports in particular—are rapidly losing the quality of illusion. Uneasy in the presence of fantasy and illusion, our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of the harmless substitute Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1940-1945
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:20:24 AM
existence. The degradation of sport, then, consists not in its being taken too seriously but in its trivialization. Games derive their power from the investment of seemingly trivial activity with serious intent. By submitting without reservation to the rules and conventions of the game, the players (and the spectators too) cooperate in creating an illusion of reality. In this way the game becomes a representation of life, and play takes on the character of playacting as well. In our time, games—sports in particular—are rapidly losing the quality of illusion. Uneasy in the presence of fantasy and illusion, our age seems to have resolved on the destruction of the harmless substitute gratifications that formerly provided charm and consolation. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 1940-1945
, clipped on Saturday, August 19, 2017 9:20:30 AM
People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of their country’s history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary written Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2235-2236
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:09:43 AM
Modern society has achieved unprecedented rates of formal literacy, but at the same time it has produced new forms of illiteracy. People increasingly find themselves unable to use language with ease and precision, to recall the basic facts of their country’s history, to make logical deductions, to understand any but the most rudimentary written texts, or even to grasp their constitutional rights. The conversion of popular traditions of self-reliance into esoteric knowledge administered by experts encourages a belief that ordinary competence in almost any field, even the art of self-government, lies beyond reach of the layman. Standards of teaching decline, the victims of poor teaching come to share the experts’ low opinion of their capacities, and the teaching profession complains of unteachable students. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2234-2239
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:09:49 AM
If an educated electorate is the best defense against arbitrary government, the survival of political freedom appears uncertain at best. Large numbers of Americans now believe that the Constitution sanctions arbitrary executive power, and recent political history, with its steady growth of presidential power, can only have reinforced such an assumption. What has become of the early republican dream? Universal public education, instead of creating a community of self-governing citizens, has contributed to the spread of intellectual torpor and political passivity. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2266-2270
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:12:57 AM
Under favorable conditions, the school’s emphasis on “Americanism” and its promotion of universal norms had a liberating effect, helping individuals to make a fruitful break with parochial ethnic traditions. Recent criticism of the school, which sometimes equates mass education with a rigid form of indoctrination and totalitarian conditioning, partakes of the prevailing sentimentality about ethnicity. It deplores the distintegration of folk culture and pays no attention to the degree to which disintegration was often the price paid for intellectual emancipation. When Randolph Bourne (a favorite of radical historians, who believe his critique of education anticipates their own) extolled cultural pluralism, he had in mind as a model not the intact immigrant cultures of the ghettos but the culture of the twice-uprooted immigrant intellectuals he met at Columbia. One of those immigrant intellectuals, Mary Antin, wrote an account of her schooling that shows how Americanization could lead, in some cases, to a new sense of dignity. Learning about George Washington taught her, she says, “that I was more nobly related than I had ever supposed. I had relatives and friends who were notable people by the old standards,—I had never been ashamed of my family,—but this George Washington, who died long before I was born, was like a king in greatness, and he and I were Fellow Citizens.” More recently, Norman Podhoretz has described his introduction to literary culture, in the 1940s, at the hands of a teacher who exemplified all the limitations of the genteel sensibility yet conveyed to her student an indispensable sense of the world beyond his experience. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2357-2369
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:31:43 AM
spend in school by making the experience as painless as possible. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2439-2440
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 8:54:32 AM
What precipitated the crisis of the sixties was not simply the pressure of unprecedented numbers of students (many of whom would gladly have spent their youth elsewhere) but a fatal conjuncture of historical changes: the emergence of a new social conscience among students activated by the moral rhetoric of the New Frontier and by the civil rights movement, and the simultaneous collapse of the university’s claims to moral and intellectual legitimacy. Instead of offering a rounded program of humane learning, the university now frankly served as a cafeteria from which students had to select so many “credits.” Instead of diffusing peace and enlightenment, it allied itself with the war machine. Eventually, even its claim to provide better jobs became suspect. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2551-2556
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:27:20 PM
Snow White’s instructors assume that higher learning ideally includes everything, assimilates all of life. And it is true that no aspect of contemporary thought has proved immune to educa-tionalization. The university has boiled all experience down into “courses” of study—a culinary image appropriate to the underlying ideal of enlightened consumption. In its eagerness to embrace experience, the university comes to serve as a substitute for it. In doing so, however, it merely compounds its intellectual failures—notwithstanding its claim to prepare students for “life.” Not only does higher education destroy the students’ minds; it incapacitates them emotionally as well, rendering them incapable of confronting experience without benefit of textbooks, grades, and predigested points of view. Far from preparing students to live “authentically,” the higher learning in America leaves them unable to perform the simplest task—to prepare a meal or go to a party or get into bed with a member of the opposite sex—without elaborate academic instruction. The only thing it leaves to chance is higher learning. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2629-2637
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:33:01 PM
Almost everyone agreed that the family promoted a narrow, parochial, selfish, and individualistic mentality and thus impeded the development of sociability and cooperation. This reasoning led inexorably to the conclusion that outside agencies had to replace the family, especially the working-class family, which so many reformers nevertheless wished to preserve and strengthen. If the school was reluctantly “taking the place of the home,” according to Ellen Richards, this was because “the personal point of view, inculcated now by modern conditions of strife for money, just as surely as it must have been by barbarian struggle in precivilized days, must be supplanted by the broader view of majority welfare.” The iron laws of social evolution dictated the subordination of the individual to “the destiny of the race.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2673-2679
, clipped on Sunday, August 20, 2017 1:35:41 PM
Almost everyone agreed that the family promoted a narrow, parochial, selfish, and individualistic mentality and thus impeded the development of sociability and cooperation. This reasoning led inexorably to the conclusion that outside agencies had to replace the family, especially the working-class family, which so many reformers nevertheless wished to preserve and strengthen. If the school was reluctantly “taking the place of the home,” according to Ellen Richards, this was because “the personal point of view, inculcated now by modern conditions of strife for money, just as surely as it must have been by barbarian struggle in precivilized days, must be supplanted by the broader view of majority welfare.” The iron laws of social evolution dictated the subordination of the individual to “the destiny of the race.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2673-2679
, clipped on Monday, August 21, 2017 1:27:45 AM
Florence Kelley, a noted socialist, complained that a typical Italian girl, even when exposed to years of schooling, forgot everything she learned as soon as she married and proceeded to bring up “in the most unreasonable manner the large family which continues to the second generation in the Italian colonies. She will feed her infants bananas, bologna, beer and coffee; and many of these potential native citizens will perish during their first year, poisoned by the hopeless ignorance of their school-bred mother.” Such reformers, despairing of the school, hoped to make the family itself one of the chief agencies of enlightenment—but only by overhauling it according to the latest principles of marital interaction and child care. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2749-2754
, clipped on Tuesday, August 22, 2017 12:19:39 AM
Dr. Bruch went even further. She grasped the social and cultural transformation that has made science the handmaiden of industry—in this case, psychiatry the handmaiden of advertising, which enlists psychiatry in the attempt to exploit “parents’ desires to do right by their children.” By keeping parents in a state of chronic anxiety, psychiatry thus frustrates desires that advertising can then claim to satisfy. It lays the emotional foundation for the insistence of the advertising industry that the health and safety of the young, the satisfaction of their daily nutritional requirements, their emotional and intellectual development, and their ability to compete with their peers for popularity and success all depend on consumption of vitamins, band-aids, cavity-preventing toothpaste, cereals, mouthwashes, and laxatives. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2794-2800
, clipped on Wednesday, August 23, 2017 1:37:22 AM
John R. Seeley noted in 1959, the transfer of parental knowledge to other agencies parallels the expropriation of the worker’s technical knowledge by modern management—“the taking over from the worker of the sad necessity of providing himself with the means of production.” By “helpfully” relieving the worker from “such onerous responsibilities” as the provision of his own and his children’s needs, society has freed him, as Seeley wrote, “to become a soldier in the army of production and a cipher in the process of decision.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 2830-2834
, clipped on Wednesday, August 23, 2017 11:09:04 PM
multitude of depressing details the psychodynamics of family life today, the father believes, with good reason, that his rebellious adolescent daughter wants him to punish her; and like so many American parents, he refuses to give her this satisfaction or even to recognize its legitimacy. Refusing to be maneuvered into administering punishment, he wins psychological victories over his daughter, on the contrary, by giving in to her wishes and thereby avoiding the quarrels she seeks to provoke. Yet both his children, notwithstanding his desire, in his son’s case at least, to adopt the part of the “best friend,” unconsciously regard him as a tyrant. He muses in bewilderment: “I don’t know why [my son] feels so often that I am going to hit him when I never do; I never have; I don’t know why both he and my daughter believe I used to beat them a great deal when they were smaller, when I don’t believe I ever struck either one of them at all.” The parent’s abdication of authority intensifies rather than softens the child’s fear of punishment, while identifying thoughts of punishment more firmly than ever with the exercise of arbitrary, overwhelming violence. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3016-3024
, clipped on Wednesday, August 23, 2017 11:43:12 PM
The growing acceptance of that view, at all levels of American society, makes it possible to preserve hierarchical forms of organization in the guise of “participation.” It provides a society dominated by corporate elites with an antielitist ideology. The popularization of therapeutic modes of thought discredits authority, especially in the home and the classroom, while leaving domination uncriticized. Therapeutic forms of social control, by softening or eliminating the adversary relation between subordinates and superiors, make it more and more difficult for citizens to defend themselves against the state or for workers to resist the demands of the corporation. As the ideas of guilt and innocence lose their moral and even legal meaning, those in power no longer enforce their rules by means of the authoritative edicts of judges, magistrates, teachers, and preachers. Society no longer expects authorities to articulate a clearly reasoned, elaborately justified code of law and morality; nor does it expect the young to internalize the moral standards of the community. It demands only conformity to the conventions of everyday intercourse, sanctioned by psychiatric definitions of normal behavior. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3084-3092
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:20:44 AM
It has been clear for some time that “chivalry is dead.” The tradition of gallantry formerly masked and to some degree mitigated the organized oppression of women. While males monopolized political and economic power, they made their domination of women more palatable by surrounding it with an elaborate ritual of deference and politesse. They set themselves up as protectors of the weaker sex, and this cloying but useful fiction set limits to their capacity to exploit women through sheer physical force. The counterconvention of droit de seigneur, which justified the predatory exploits of the privileged classes against women socially inferior to themselves, nevertheless showed that the male sex at no time ceased to regard most women as fair game. The long history of rape and seduction, moreover, served as a reminder that animal strength remained the basis of masculine ascendancy, manifested here in its most direct and brutal form. Yet polite conventions, even when they were no more than a façade, provided women with ideological leverage in their struggle to domesticate the wildness and savagery of men. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3153-3161
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:28:11 AM
If “many of us,” as Ingrid Bengis observes of women and as others have observed of men as well, “have had to anesthetize ourselves to [our] needs,” it is the very character of those needs (and of the defenses erected against them) which gives rise to the belief that they cannot be satisfied in heterosexual relations—perhaps should not be satisfied in any form—and which therefore prompts people to withdraw from intense emotional encounters. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3340-3343
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:56:33 AM
your doctor may some day hope to do something about.” Falsely attributing to modern medicine an increase in life expectancy that actually derives from a higher standard of living, it assumes that medicine has the power to lengthen life still further and to abolish the horrors of old Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3438-3440
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:02:07 PM
Falsely attributing to modern medicine an increase in life expectancy that actually derives from a higher standard of living, it assumes that medicine has the power to lengthen life still further and to abolish the horrors of old age. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3439-3440
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:02:13 PM
Thus “our attitudes toward aging,” as a recent critic observes, “are not accidental.” They derive from long-term social changes that have redefined work, created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages, and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute. Because the declining power and status of the aged has deeply rooted social causes, merely propagandizing on their behalf or formulating more humane policies will not be enough to alleviate their lot. Those who argue that old age is a social rather than a medical issue have yet to grasp how deeply social it is and how resistant, therefore, to palliative solutions. Nothing short of a complete reordering of work, education, the family—of every important institution—will make old age more bearable. Even then, biology sets limits to the degree to which old age can be made genuinely pleasant, as opposed to less painful—another stubborn fact which the social theorists of aging and death (as optimistic in their reformist meliorism as are the “prolongevity” theorists in their Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3455-3462
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:06:47 PM
Thus “our attitudes toward aging,” as a recent critic observes, “are not accidental.” They derive from long-term social changes that have redefined work, created a scarcity of jobs, devalued the wisdom of the ages, and brought all forms of authority (including the authority of experience) into disrepute. Because the declining power and status of the aged has deeply rooted social causes, merely propagandizing on their behalf or formulating more humane policies will not be enough to alleviate their lot. Those who argue that old age is a social rather than a medical issue have yet to grasp how deeply social it is and how resistant, therefore, to palliative solutions. Nothing short of a complete reordering of work, education, the family—of every important institution—will make old age more bearable. Even then, biology sets limits to the degree to which old age can be made genuinely pleasant, as opposed to less painful—another stubborn fact which the social theorists of aging and death (as optimistic in their reformist meliorism as are the “prolongevity” theorists in their faith in medical miracles) steadfastly refuse to confront. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3455-3463
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:06:58 PM
Love and work unite in a concern for posterity, and specifically in an attempt to equip the younger generation to carry on the tasks of the older. The thought that we live on vicariously in our children (more broadly, in future generations) reconciles us to our own supersession—the central sorrow of old age, more harrowing even than frailty and loneliness. When the generational link begins to fray, such consolations no longer obtain. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3476-3479
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:10:40 PM
Narcissism emerges as the typical form of character structure in a society that has lost interest in the future. Psychiatrists who tell parents not to live through their offspring; married couples who postpone or reject parenthood, often for good practical reasons; social reformers who urge zero population growth, all testify to a pervasive uneasiness about reproduction—to widespread doubts, indeed, about whether our society should reproduce itself at all. Under these conditions, the thought of our eventual supersession and death becomes utterly insupportable and gives rise to attempts to abolish old age and to extend life indefinitely. When men find themselves incapable of taking an interest in earthly life after their own death, they wish for eternal youth, for the same reason they no longer care to reproduce themselves. When the prospect of being superseded becomes intolerable, parenthood itself, which guarantees that it will happen, appears almost as a form of self-destruction. In Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks, a young man explains that he doesn’t want to have children. “I always saw the world as a stage…. And any child of mine would be a ballsy young actor wanting to run me off stage altogether, watching and waiting to bury me, so that he could assume center stage.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3480-3489
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:14:43 PM
The psychology of growth, development, and “self-actualization” presents survival as spiritual progress, resignation as renewal. In a society in which most people find it difficult to store up experience and knowledge (let alone money) against old age, or to pass on accumulated experience to their descendants, the growth experts compound the problem by urging people past forty to cut their ties to the past, embark on new careers and new marriages (“creative divorce”), take up new hobbies, travel light, and keep moving. This is a recipe not for growth but for planned obsolescence. It is no wonder that American industry has embraced “sensitivity training” as an essential part of personnel management. The new therapy provides for personnel what the annual model change provides for its products; rapid retirement from active use. Corporate planners have much to learn from the study of the life cycle carried out by humanistic psychology, which provides techniques by means of which people can prematurely phase themselves out of active life, painlessly and without “panic.” Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3530-3537
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:23:32 PM
The denial of age in America culminates in the prolongevity movement, which hopes to abolish old age altogether. But the dread of age originates not in a “cult of youth” but in a cult of the self. Not only in its narcissistic indifference to future generations but in its grandiose vision of a technological utopia without old age, the prolongevity movement exemplifies the fantasy of “absolute, sadistic power” which, according to Kohut, so deeply colors the narcissistic outlook. Pathological in its psychological origins and inspiration, superstitious in its faith in medical deliverance, the prolongevity movement expresses in characteristic form the anxieties of a culture that believes it has no future. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3581-3585
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 12:28:34 PM
American progressivism, which has successfully countered agrarian radicalism, the labor movement, and the feminist movement by enacting selective parts of their program, has now lost almost all trace of its origin in nineteenth-century liberalism. It has rejected the liberal conception of man, which assumed the primacy of rational self-interest, and has installed in its place a therapeutic conception which acknowledges irrational drives and seeks to divert them into socially constructive channels. It has rejected the stereotype of economic man and has attempted to bring the “whole man” under social control. Instead of regulating the conditions of work alone, it now regulates private life as well, organizing leisure time on scientific principles of social and personal hygiene. It has exposed the innermost secrets of the psyche to medical scrutiny and has thus encouraged habits of anxious self-scrutiny, superficially reminiscent of religious introspection but rooted in anxiety rather than a guilty conscience—in a narcissistic rather than a compulsive or hysterical type of personality. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 3685-3693
, clipped on Thursday, August 24, 2017 9:21:14 PM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the social and political context in which it has grown up. * Reprinted from The World and I, Feb. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5596
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:40:49 AM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the social and political context in which it has grown up. * Reprinted from The World and I, Feb. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5596
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:40:57 AM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the social and political context in which it has grown Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5594
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:41:03 AM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the social and political context in which it has grown Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5594
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:41:09 AM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5594
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:41:21 AM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the social and political context Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5594
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:41:28 AM
Since the author of these words, Thomas L. Haskell, has tried to equate criticism of the professions with a blind and willful opposition to the pursuit of truth, I should make it clear that my argument must not be misunderstood as an unqualified condemnation of professionalism. Obviously professions uphold important values. In particular, they uphold standards of accuracy, honesty, verification, and service that might otherwise disappear altogether. But it is not true, as Paul Goodman argued in his otherwise compelling defense of professionalism (“The New Reformation,” cited by Haskell and others as the last word on the subject), that “professionals are autonomous individuals beholden to the nature of things and the judgment of their peers, and bound by an explicit or implicit oath to benefit their clients and the community.” The way in which professionals construe and discharge these responsibilities naturally reflects the social surroundings in which they operate. American professionalism has been corrupted by the managerial capitalism with which it is so closely allied, just as professionalism in the Soviet Union has been much more completely corrupted by the dictatorship of the party. Haskell writes: “Membership in a truly professional community [cannot] be based on charm, social standing, personal connection, good character, or perhaps even decency, but on demonstrated intellectual merit alone.” Haskell does not appreciate how easily “intellectual merit” can be confused with the mere acquisition of professional credentials or, worse, with loyalty to an unspoken ideological consensus—how easily the indispensable ideal of professional disinterestedness can be warped and distorted by the social and political context in which it has grown up. Christopher Lasch
, The Culture of Narcissism.
loc. 5582-5594
, clipped on Friday, August 25, 2017 12:41:32 AM
So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural. Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 214-216
, clipped on Monday, August 28, 2017 11:17:39 PM
It is a political law of nature that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 243-244
, clipped on Tuesday, August 29, 2017 9:14:51 PM
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 252-254
, clipped on Tuesday, August 29, 2017 9:16:18 PM
All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others. Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 256-258
, clipped on Tuesday, August 29, 2017 9:17:09 PM
The old theory was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and not adopted until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department) prevails universally in the most advanced countries, almost universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement. It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all persons to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 297-306
, clipped on Tuesday, August 29, 2017 9:26:10 PM
that it is wrong to object to them. It would, however, be a great Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 795-795
, clipped on Wednesday, August 30, 2017 11:26:14 PM
Men who have been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to expect. This is seldom the case with women of any ability. Their capacity of “intuition” preserves them from it. With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this sensibility to the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice, as distinguished from theory, depends. Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 1007-1012
, clipped on Saturday, September 2, 2017 8:17:15 AM
The habitual direction of her mind to dealing with things as individuals rather than in groups, and (what is closely connected with it) her more lively interest in the present feelings of persons, which makes her consider first of all, in anything which claims to be applied to practice, in what manner persons will be affected by it—these two things make her extremely unlikely to put faith in any speculation which loses sight of individuals, and deals with things as if they existed for the benefit of some imaginary entity, some mere creation of the mind, not resolvable into the feelings of living beings. Women's thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men, as men's thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if even now, women, compared with men, are at any disadvantage. Mill, John Stuart
, The Subjection of Women.
loc. 1030-1036
, clipped on Saturday, September 2, 2017 8:21:05 AM
the degree to which cooperation among the American political elites has unraveled during the past decade is eerily similar to what Peter Turchin
, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.
loc. 211-212
, clipped on Wednesday, September 6, 2017 2:06:54 AM
the degree to which cooperation among the American political elites has unraveled during the past decade is eerily similar to what happened in the 1850s, the decade preceding the Civil War. Peter Turchin
, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.
loc. 211-212
, clipped on Wednesday, September 6, 2017 2:06:59 AM
The principle of elite overproduction is also a consequence of the law of supply and demand. The elites (in both agrarian and capitalist societies) are consumers of commoner labor. Low labor costs lead not only to declining living standards for a large segment of the population (employees, especially unskilled ones), but also to a favorable economic conjuncture for the elites (more specifically, for the economic segment of the elites—employers). Peter Turchin
, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.
loc. 387-390
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 9:55:06 AM
Elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition and conflict is, thus, one of the chief causes of political instability. Two other causes are popular discontent resulting Peter Turchin
, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.
loc. 413-414
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 9:57:04 AM
Elite overproduction leading to intraelite competition and conflict is, thus, one of the chief causes of political instability. Two other causes are popular discontent resulting from falling living standards, and fiscal crisis. Peter Turchin
, Ages of Discord: A Structural-Demographic Analysis of American History.
loc. 413-414
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 9:57:09 AM
These subjects were right to wonder about me because I really was weird. I came from a strange and different moral world—the University of Pennsylvania. Penn students were the most unusual of all twelve groups in my study. They were unique in their unwavering devotion to the “harm principle,” which John Stuart Mill had put forth in 1859: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”1 As one Penn student said: “It’s his chicken, he’s eating it, nobody is getting hurt.” Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1828-1832
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:20:55 PM
Related to this difference in perception is a difference in thinking style. Most people think holistically (seeing the whole context and the relationships among parts), but WEIRD people think more analytically (detaching the focal object from its context, assigning it to a category, and then assuming that what’s true about the category is true about the object).5 Putting this all together, it makes sense that WEIRD philosophers since Kant and Mill have mostly generated moral systems that are individualistic, rule-based, and universalist. That’s the morality you need to govern a society of autonomous individuals. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1856-1861
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:24:04 PM
The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1911-1918
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:31:43 PM
The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts.13 I first read Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1911-1919
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:31:49 PM
The ethic of divinity is based on the idea that people are, first and foremost, temporary vessels within which a divine soul has been implanted.12 People are not just animals with an extra serving of consciousness; they are children of God and should behave accordingly. The body is a temple, not a playground. Even if it does no harm and violates nobody’s rights when a man has sex with a chicken carcass, he still shouldn’t do it because it degrades him, dishonors his creator, and violates the sacred order of the universe. Many societies therefore develop moral concepts such as sanctity and sin, purity and pollution, elevation and degradation. In such societies, the personal liberty of secular Western nations looks like libertinism, hedonism, and a celebration of humanity’s baser instincts. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1911-1918
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:31:53 PM
short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine. It only took a few weeks for my dissonance to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. Wherever I went, people were kind to Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1942-1946
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:34:22 PM
In short, I was immersed in a sex-segregated, hierarchically stratified, devoutly religious society, and I was committed to understanding it on its own terms, not on mine. It only took a few weeks for my dissonance to disappear, not because I was a natural anthropologist but because the normal human capacity for empathy kicked in. I liked these people who were hosting me, helping me, and teaching me. Wherever I went, people were kind to Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 1942-1946
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:34:27 PM
could see the dark side of this ethic too: once you allow visceral feelings of disgust to guide your conception of what God wants, then minorities who trigger even a hint of disgust in the majority (such as homosexuals or obese people) can be ostracized and treated cruelly. The ethic of divinity is sometimes incompatible with compassion, egalitarianism, and basic human rights. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2015-2018
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:41:05 PM
Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers’ rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism. We supported liberal policies because we saw the world clearly and wanted to help people, but they supported conservative policies out of pure self-interest (lower my taxes!) or thinly veiled racism (stop funding welfare programs for minorities!). We never considered the possibility that there were alternative moral worlds in which reducing harm (by helping victims) and increasing fairness (by pursuing group-based equality) were not the main goals.27 And if we could not imagine other moralities, then we could not believe that conservatives were as sincere in their moral beliefs as we were in ours. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2051-2059
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:46:32 PM
Yet the conceptions held by others are available to us, in the sense that when we truly understand their conception of things we come to recognize possibilities latent within our own rationality … and those ways of conceiving of things become salient for us for the first time, or once again. In other words, there is no homogeneous “backcloth” to our world. We are multiple from the start. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2076-2079
, clipped on Sunday, September 10, 2017 12:48:43 PM
In his philosophy as in his personal behavior, Bentham offended many of his contemporaries by his inability to perceive variety and subtlety in human motives. John Stuart Mill—a decidedly non-autistic utilitarian—came to despise Bentham. He wrote that Bentham’s personality disqualified him as a philosopher because of the “incompleteness” of his mind: In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2222-2227
, clipped on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 5:54:05 PM
In his philosophy as in his personal behavior, Bentham offended many of his contemporaries by his inability to perceive variety and subtlety in human motives. John Stuart Mill—a decidedly non-autistic utilitarian—came to despise Bentham. He wrote that Bentham’s personality disqualified him as a philosopher because of the “incompleteness” of his mind: In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2222-2227
, clipped on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 5:54:11 PM
In his philosophy as in his personal behavior, Bentham offended many of his contemporaries by his inability to perceive variety and subtlety in human motives. John Stuart Mill—a decidedly non-autistic utilitarian—came to despise Bentham. He wrote that Bentham’s personality disqualified him as a philosopher because of the “incompleteness” of his mind: In many of the most natural and strongest feelings of human nature he had no sympathy; from many of its graver experiences he was altogether cut off; and the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind, was denied him by his deficiency of Imagination. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2222-2227
, clipped on Wednesday, September 13, 2017 5:54:14 PM
As you watch the surgery, you notice two nurses assisting in the operation—one older, one younger. Both are fully attentive to the procedure, but the older nurse occasionally strokes your son’s head, as though trying to comfort him. The younger nurse is all business. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that there was conclusive proof that patients under deep anesthetic don’t hear or feel anything. If that were the case, then what should be your reaction to the two nurses? If you are a utilitarian, you should have no preference. The older nurse’s actions did nothing to reduce suffering or improve the surgical outcome. If you are a Kantian, you’d also give the older nurse no extra credit. She seems to have acted absentmindedly, or (even worse, for Kant) she acted on her feelings. She did not act out of commitment to a universalizable principle. But if you are a Humean, then it is perfectly proper for you to like and praise the older nurse. She has so fully acquired the virtue of caring that she does it automatically and effortlessly, even when it has no effect. She is a virtuoso of caring, which is a fine and beautiful thing in a nurse. It tastes good. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2360-2368
, clipped on Thursday, September 14, 2017 7:53:57 PM
In Authority Ranking, people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are military hierarchies … ancestor worship ([including] offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), [and] monotheistic religious moralities … Authority Ranking relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2620-2624
, clipped on Friday, September 15, 2017 11:35:58 PM
When I began graduate school I subscribed to the common liberal belief that hierarchy = power = exploitation = evil. But when I began to work with Alan Fiske, I discovered that I was wrong. Fiske’s theory of the four basic kinds of social relationships includes one called “Authority Ranking.” Drawing on his own fieldwork in Africa, Fiske showed that people who relate to each other in this way have mutual expectations that are more like those of a parent and child than those of a dictator Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 2616-2619
, clipped on Friday, September 15, 2017 11:36:12 PM
people, when the community, in a rare move of unanimity, ambushed and fatally wounded him in full daylight. As he lay dying, all of the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until, in the words of one informant, “he looked like a porcupine.” Then, Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3078-3080
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 4:21:34 AM
people, when the community, in a rare move of unanimity, ambushed and fatally wounded him in full daylight. As he lay dying, all of the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until, in the words of one informant, “he looked like a porcupine.” Then, Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3078-3080
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 4:21:36 AM
A man named Twi had killed three other people, when the community, in a rare move of unanimity, ambushed and fatally wounded him in full daylight. As he lay dying, all of the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until, in the words of one informant, “he looked like a porcupine.” Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3078-3081
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 4:21:42 AM
A man named Twi had killed three other people, when the community, in a rare move of unanimity, ambushed and fatally wounded him in full daylight. As he lay dying, all of the men fired at him with poisoned arrows until, in the words of one informant, “he looked like a porcupine.” Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3078-3081
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 4:21:55 AM
data, concerns about political equality were related to a dislike of oppression and a concern for victims, not a desire Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3225-3226
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 4:34:53 AM
data, concerns about political equality were related to a dislike of oppression and a concern for victims, not a desire Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3225-3226
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 4:34:56 AM
But the most important “stimulus to the development of the social virtues” was the fact that people are passionately concerned with “the praise and blame of our fellow-men.”16 Darwin, writing in Victorian England, shared Glaucon’s view (from aristocratic Athens) that people are obsessed with their reputations. Darwin believed that the emotions that drive this obsession were acquired by natural selection acting at the individual level: those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely to attract friends and mates. Darwin also added a final step: the capacity to treat duties and principles as sacred, which he saw as part of our religious nature. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 3439-3444
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 5:37:52 AM
Corporations and corporate law helped England pull out ahead of the rest of the world in the early days of the industrial revolution. As with the transition to beehives and city-states, it took a while for the new superorganisms to work out the kinks, perfect the form, and develop effective defenses against external attacks and internal subversion. But once those problems were addressed, there was explosive growth. During the twentieth century, small businesses got pushed to the margins or to extinction as corporations dominated the most lucrative markets. Corporations are now so powerful that only national governments can restrain the largest of them (and even then it’s only some governments, and some of the time). Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4209-4214
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 6:44:05 AM
up to 150 that were relatively egalitarian and wary of alpha males (as Chris Boehm said).46 But we also evolved the ability to rally around leaders when our group is under threat or is competing with other groups. Remember how the Rattlers and the Eagles instantly became more tribal and hierarchical the instant they discovered the presence of the other group?47 Research also shows that strangers Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4231-4235
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 6:48:13 AM
These scholars note that people evolved to live in groups of up to 150 that were relatively egalitarian and wary of alpha males (as Chris Boehm said).46 But we also evolved the ability to rally around leaders when our group is under threat or is competing with other groups. Remember how the Rattlers and the Eagles instantly became more tribal and hierarchical the instant they discovered the presence of the other group?47 Research also shows that strangers will spontaneously organize themselves into leaders and followers when natural disasters strike.48 People are happy to follow when they see that their group needs to get something done, and when the person who emerges as the leader doesn’t activate their hypersensitive oppression detectors. A leader must construct a moral matrix based in some way on the Authority foundation (to legitimize the authority of the leader), the Liberty foundation (to make sure that subordinates don’t feel oppressed, and don’t want to band together to oppose a bullying alpha male), and above all, the Loyalty foundation (which I defined in chapter 7 as a response to the challenge of forming cohesive coalitions). Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4231-4241
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 6:48:28 AM
Exploit synchrony. People who move together are saying, “We are one, we are a team; just look how perfectly we are able to do that Tomasello shared-intention thing.” Japanese corporations such as Toyota begin their days with synchronous companywide exercises. Groups prepare for battle—in war and sports—with group chants and ritualized movements. (If you want to see an impressive one in rugby, Google “All Blacks Haka.”) If you ask people to sing a song together, or to march in step, or just to tap out some beats together on a table, it makes them trust each other more and be more willing to help each other out, in part because it makes people feel more similar to each other.52 If it’s too creepy to ask your employees or fellow group members to do synchronized calisthenics, perhaps you can just try to have more parties with dancing or karaoke. Synchrony builds trust. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4253-4260
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 6:49:59 AM
When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You’ll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4336-4339
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 6:58:13 AM
When I began writing The Happiness Hypothesis, I believed that happiness came from within, as Buddha and the Stoic philosophers said thousands of years ago. You’ll never make the world conform to your wishes, so focus on changing yourself and your desires. But by the time I finished writing, I had changed my mind: Happiness comes from between. It comes from getting the right relationships between yourself and others, yourself and your work, and yourself and something larger than yourself. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4336-4339
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 6:58:23 AM
college football game is a superb analogy for religion.2 From a naive perspective, focusing only on what is most visible (i.e., the game being played on the field), college football is an extravagant, costly, wasteful institution that impairs people’s ability to think rationally while leaving a long trail of victims (including the players themselves, plus the many fans who suffer alcohol-related injuries). But from a sociologically informed perspective, it is a religious rite that does just what it is supposed to do: it pulls people up from Durkheim’s lower level (the profane) to his higher level (the sacred). It flips the hive switch and makes people feel, for a few hours, that they are “simply a part of a whole.” It augments the school spirit for which UVA is renowned, which in turn attracts better students and more alumni donations, which in turn improves the experience for the entire community, including professors like me who have no interest in sports. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4385-4392
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:02:37 AM
The memorable nymphs and fairies and goblins and demons that crowd the mythologies of every people are the imaginative offspring of a hyperactive habit of finding agency wherever anything puzzles or frightens us. This mindlessly generates a vast overpopulation of agent-ideas, most of which are too stupid to hold our attention for an instant; only a well-designed few make it through the rehearsal tournament, mutating and improving as they go. The ones that get shared and remembered are the souped-up winners of billions of competitions for rehearsal time in the brains of our ancestors. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4504-4508
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:13:13 AM
Suppose you observe a young woman with flowers in her hair, dancing in a clockwise circle while holding one end of a ribbon. The other end is attached to the top of a tall pole. She circles the pole repeatedly, but not in a neat circle. Rather, she bobs and weaves a few steps closer to or further from the pole as she circles. Viewed in isolation, her behavior seems pointless, reminiscent of mad Ophelia on her way to suicide. But now add in five other young women doing exactly what she is doing, and add in six young men doing the same thing in a counterclockwise direction, and you’ve got a maypole dance. As the men and women pass each other and swerve in and out, their ribbons weave a kind of tubular cloth around the pole. The dance symbolically enacts the central miracle of social life: e pluribus unum. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4638-4643
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:26:34 AM
Suppose you observe a young woman with flowers in her hair, dancing in a clockwise circle while holding one end of a ribbon. The other end is attached to the top of a tall pole. She circles the pole repeatedly, but not in a neat circle. Rather, she bobs and weaves a few steps closer to or further from the pole as she circles. Viewed in isolation, her behavior seems pointless, reminiscent of mad Ophelia on her way to suicide. But now add in five other young women doing exactly what she is doing, and add in six young men doing the same thing in a counterclockwise direction, and you’ve got a maypole dance. As the men and women pass each other and swerve in and out, their ribbons weave a kind of tubular cloth around the pole. The dance symbolically enacts the central miracle of social life: e pluribus unum. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4638-4643
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:26:45 AM
What are we to make of the hundreds of gods and temples woven into this system? Are they just by-products of mental systems that were designed for other purposes? Are they examples of what Dawkins called the “time-consuming, wealth-consuming … counterproductive fantasies of religion?” No. I think the best way to understand these gods is as maypoles. Suppose you observe a young woman with flowers in her hair, dancing in a clockwise circle while holding one end of a ribbon. The other end is attached to the top of a tall pole. She circles the pole repeatedly, but not in a neat circle. Rather, she bobs and weaves a few steps closer to or further from the pole as she circles. Viewed in isolation, her behavior seems pointless, reminiscent of mad Ophelia on her way to suicide. But now add in five other young women doing exactly what she is doing, and add in six young men doing the same thing in a counterclockwise direction, and you’ve got a maypole dance. As the men and women pass each other and swerve in and out, their ribbons weave a kind of tubular cloth around the pole. The dance symbolically enacts the central miracle of social life: e pluribus unum. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4635-4643
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:26:53 AM
Asking people to give up all forms of sacralized belonging and live in a world of purely “rational” beliefs might be like asking people to give up the Earth and live in colonies orbiting the moon. It can be done, but it would take a great deal of careful engineering, and even after ten generations, the descendants of those colonists might find themselves with inchoate longings for gravity and greenery. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4695-4697
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:33:12 AM
Moral systems are interlocking sets of values, virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions, technologies, and evolved psychological mechanisms that work together to suppress or regulate self-interest and make cooperative societies possible. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4809-4810
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:44:20 AM
My definition of morality was designed to be a descriptive definition; it cannot stand alone as a normative definition. (As a normative definition, it would give high marks to fascist and communist societies as well as to cults, so long as they achieved high levels of cooperation by creating a shared moral order.) But I think my definition works well as an adjunct to other normative theories, particularly those that have often had difficulty seeing groups and social facts. Utilitarians since Jeremy Bentham have focused intently on individuals. They try to improve the welfare of society by giving individuals what they want. But a Durkheimian version of utilitarianism would recognize that human flourishing requires social order and embeddedness. It would begin with the premise that social order is extraordinarily precious and difficult to achieve. A Durkheimian utilitarianism would be open to the possibility that the binding foundations—Loyalty, Authority, and Sanctity—have a crucial role to play in a good society. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 4834-4841
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 7:46:52 AM
What makes social and political arguments conservative as opposed to orthodox is that the critique of liberal or progressive arguments takes place on the enlightened grounds of the search for human happiness based on the use of reason.35 Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 5146-5148
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:21:30 AM
Being small, isolated, or morally homogeneous are examples of environmental conditions that increase the moral capital of a community. That doesn’t mean that small islands and small towns are better places to live overall—the diversity and crowding of big cities makes them more creative and interesting places for many people—but that’s the trade-off. (Whether you’d trade away some moral capital to gain some diversity and creativity will depend in part on your brain’s settings on traits such as openness to experience and threat sensitivity, and this is part of the reason why cities are usually so much more liberal than the countryside.) Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 5203-5207
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:27:16 AM
Nonetheless, if you are trying to change an organization or a society and you do not consider the effects of your changes on moral capital, you’re asking for trouble. This, I believe, is the fundamental blind spot of the left. It explains why liberal reforms so often backfire,43 and why communist revolutions usually end up in despotism. It is the reason I believe that liberalism—which has done so much to bring about freedom and equal opportunity—is not sufficient as a governing philosophy. It tends to overreach, change too many things too quickly, and reduce the stock of moral capital inadvertently. Conversely, while conservatives do a better job of preserving moral capital, they often fail to notice certain classes of victims, fail to limit the predations of certain powerful interests, and fail to see the need to change or update institutions as times change. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 5231-5238
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 8:29:06 AM
The most poignant moment of the conference came when Jim Leach, a former Republican congressman from Iowa, described the changes that began in 1995. Newt Gingrich, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, encouraged the large group of incoming Republican congressmen to leave their families in their home districts rather than moving their spouses and children to Washington. Before 1995, congressmen from both parties attended many of the same social events on weekends; their spouses became friends; their children played on the same sports teams. But nowadays most congressmen fly to Washington on Monday night, huddle with their teammates and do battle for three days, and then fly home on Thursday night. Cross-party friendships are disappearing; Manichaeism and scorched Earth politics are increasing. Jonathan Haidt
, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion.
loc. 5526-5532
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 10:23:47 AM
If thou workest at that which is before thee, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly, without allowing anything else to distract thee, but keeping thy divine part pure, as if thou shouldst be bound to give it back immediately; if thou holdest to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with thy present activity according to nature, and with heroic truth in every word and sound which thou utterest, thou wilt live happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this. Aurelius, Marcus
, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (Wisehouse Classics Edition).
loc. 334-338
, clipped on Saturday, September 16, 2017 11:23:57 AM
them and by the little robot woman. Everyone on the row Albert Camus
, The Stranger.
loc. 926-926
, clipped on Monday, September 18, 2017 5:23:18 AM
The phrase “I live for my kids,” for example, is tantamount to admitting that one will be dead shortly and that one’s life, for all practical purposes, is already over. “I’m gradually dying for my kids” would be more accurate. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 44-45
, clipped on Monday, September 18, 2017 9:01:04 PM
our latest physicals, our methylation and homocysteine levels, Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 891-891
, clipped on Thursday, September 21, 2017 6:51:52 AM
We all grew up with a fairly tense idea of male friendship, for which the permissive times now allowed us to compensate, and often I wished that our crude words and endless posturing were code for affection and understanding. In some male societies, slang and ritualistic embraces form the entire culture, along with the occasional call to take up the spear. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 1292-1295
, clipped on Saturday, September 23, 2017 6:30:12 AM
Every returning New Yorker asks the question: Is this still my city? I have a ready answer, cloaked in obstinate despair: It is. And if it’s not, I will love it all the more. I will love it to the point where it becomes mine again. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 1500-1502
, clipped on Saturday, September 23, 2017 7:04:09 AM
Anyway, what kind of freaked me out was that I saw Len reading a book. (No, it didn’t SMELL. He uses Pine-Sol on them.) And I don’t mean scanning a text like we did in Euro Classics with that Chatterhouse of Parma I mean seriously READING. He had this ruler out and he was moving it down the page very slowly and just like whispering little things to himself, like trying to understand every little part of it. I was going to teen my sister but I was so embarrassed I just stood there and watched him read which lasted for like HALF AN HOUR, and finally he put the book down and I pretended like nothing happened. And then I snuck a peek and it was that Russian guy Tolsoy he was reading (I guess it figures, cause Lenny’s parents are from Russia). I thought Ben was really brain-smart because I saw him streaming Chronicles of Narnia in that cafe in Rome, but this Tolsoy was a thousand pages long BOOK, not a stream, and Lenny was almost finished. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2220-2227
, clipped on Sunday, September 24, 2017 3:40:54 PM
lay in my bed alone; Eunice again in the living room with her äppärät, with her teening and shopping, as the night turned black around us, as I realized, with a quiet gnawing pain, that when you took away my Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2546-2547
, clipped on Sunday, September 24, 2017 4:38:04 PM
lay in my bed alone; Eunice again in the living room with her äppärät, with her teening and shopping, as the night turned black around us, as I realized, with a quiet gnawing pain, that when you took away my Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2546-2547
, clipped on Sunday, September 24, 2017 4:38:11 PM
I lay in my bed alone; Eunice again in the living room with her äppärät, with her teening and shopping, as the night turned black around us, as I realized, with a quiet gnawing pain, that when you took away my 239,000 yuan-pegged dollars, when you took away the complicated love of my parents and the mercurial comforts of my friends, when you took away my smelly books, I had nothing but the woman in the next room. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2546-2549
, clipped on Sunday, September 24, 2017 4:38:17 PM
Unlike others of her generation, she was not completely steeped in pornography, and so the instinct for sex came from somewhere else inside her; it spoke of the need for warmth instead of debasement. She lifted up her head, enveloping me with her own heat, and bit the soft protuberance of my lower lip. “Don’t leave me, Lenny,” she whispered into my ear. “Don’t please ever leave me.” Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2612-2615
, clipped on Sunday, September 24, 2017 4:45:54 PM
No matter what social arrangement we’re in, we’re always an army. You’re an army and your father’s an army, and you love each other, but you have to go to war in order to be something like a father and daughter. OBJECT LESSON: My dad died Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2764-2765
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:13:14 AM
No matter what social arrangement we’re in, we’re always an army. You’re an army and your father’s an army, and you love each other, but you have to go to war in order to be something like a father and daughter. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2764-2765
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:13:20 AM
He turned to me briefly as if I were his co-conspirator. I smiled at him, finding it impossible to ignore any gestures from this man, even if it meant siding with him against the innocent women at the table. That’s what tyrants can do, I guess. They make you covet their attention; they make you confuse attention for mercy. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 2996-2998
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:48:52 AM
Korean, and the deeply insulting term michi-nneyun, which made Eunice exhale in such a sad, hurt, elongated, final way, it made me wonder if she would ever be capable of replacing that breath. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3014-3016
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:50:19 AM
which made Eunice exhale in such a sad, hurt, elongated, final way, it made me wonder if she would ever be capable of replacing that breath. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3015-3016
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:50:30 AM
But that’s what I wanted for Eunice, for the synapses dedicated to responding to her father to wither and be reborn, to be rededicated to someone who loved her unconditionally. Something was drawing me Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3023-3024
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:52:00 AM
But that’s what I wanted for Eunice, for the synapses dedicated to responding to her father to wither and be reborn, to be rededicated to someone who loved her unconditionally. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3023-3024
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 7:52:06 AM
And then, like a perfect Media drama queen, Noah told me he expected to be dead by the next year. Something about the Restoration Authority, the Bipartisans, the price of biofuel, the decline of the tides—who can keep up anymore? That kind of ruined the effect of what he was saying about the light hitting the avenues just so. I wanted to tell him that he didn’t have to strain for me, that I liked him exactly as he was: perfectly above average, angry but decent, just smart enough. I thought of Sammy the Elephant in the Bronx Zoo, his calmly depressive countenance, the way he approached extinction with both equanimity and unobtrusive despair. Maybe this was what Noah was jabbering about when he followed the light across the city. The fading light is us, and we are, for a moment so brief it can’t even register on our äppärät screens, beautiful. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3183-3189
, clipped on Monday, September 25, 2017 11:30:36 PM
“You don’t understand, Leonard.” The phrase I hate the most in the world. I do understand. Not everything, but a lot. And what I don’t understand, I certainly want to learn more about. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3218-3220
, clipped on Tuesday, September 26, 2017 10:53:25 PM
“The only peeps sure of themselves enough so that, come what may, the child will be loved and cared for and sheltered. Because they’re good people. I know folks say that a lot—‘They’re good peeps, yo’—but there’s the kind of plastic good, the kind of easy ‘good’ any of us can generate, and then there’s this other, deep thing that is so hard for us to find anymore. Consistency. Day-to-day. Moving on. Taking stock. Never exploding. Channeling it all, that anger, that huge anger about what’s happened to us as a people, channeling it into whatever-the-fuck. Keeping it away from the children, that’s all I’m going to say.” Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3692-3696
, clipped on Saturday, September 30, 2017 8:47:11 AM
They were together for the obvious and timeless reason: It was slightly less painful than being alone. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 3804-3805
, clipped on Saturday, September 30, 2017 9:11:07 AM
Instead, with each armful of books tumbling into their cardboard graves, I found myself focusing on a new target. I felt the weakness of these books, their immateriality, how they had failed to change the world, and I didn’t want to sully myself with their weakness anymore. I wanted to invest my energies in something more fruitful and conducive to a life that mattered. Gary Shteyngart
, Super Sad True Love Story.
loc. 4827-4830
, clipped on Monday, October 2, 2017 2:11:59 AM
Benji Nakamook thought we should waterboard each other, me and him and Vincie Portite. We wouldn’t count the seconds to see who was bravest or whose lungs were deepest—this wasn’t for a contest. We’d each be held under til the moment the possibility of death became real to us, and in that moment, according to Benji, we’d have to draw one of the following conclusions: “My best friends are about to accidentally drown me!” or “My best friends are actually trying to drown me!” The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed. Adam Levin
, The Instructions.
loc. 52-56
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 12:01:04 AM
Benji Nakamook thought we should waterboard each other, me and him and Vincie Portite. We wouldn’t count the seconds to see who was bravest or whose lungs were deepest—this wasn’t for a contest. We’d each be held under til the moment the possibility of death became real to us, and in that moment, according to Benji, we’d have to draw one of the following conclusions: “My best friends are about to accidentally drown me!” or “My best friends are actually trying to drown me!” The point was to learn what it was Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 74-79
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 12:05:21 AM
Benji Nakamook thought we should waterboard each other, me and him and Vincie Portite. We wouldn’t count the seconds to see who was bravest or whose lungs were deepest—this wasn’t for a contest. We’d each be held under til the moment the possibility of death became real to us, and in that moment, according to Benji, we’d have to draw one of the following conclusions: “My best friends are about to accidentally drown me!” or “My best friends are actually trying to drown me!” The point was to learn what it was we feared more: being misunderstood or being betrayed. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 74-79
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 12:05:27 AM
gooze that was still on his foot, eyeing a t-shirt laying on the Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 233-233
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 8:43:35 AM
My chemicals, after fights, often fired weird; during a fight, they were always reliable, tunneling my thinking so I could be simple, but after a fight the opposite happened and sometimes the tunnel would loop til it knotted and wouldn’t untangle until I noticed. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 237-238
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 8:44:34 AM
Desormie, ahead of me, hummed out a melody with lipfart percussion and aggressively dance-walked and thought it was strutting. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 275-276
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:31:18 PM
Desormie, ahead of me, hummed out a melody with lipfart percussion and aggressively dance-walked and thought it was strutting. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 275-276
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:31:47 PM
Desormie, ahead of me, hummed out a melody with lipfart percussion and aggressively dance-walked and thought it was strutting. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 275-276
, clipped on Wednesday, October 4, 2017 10:31:51 PM
it was the good kind of argument—the kind where the arguers don’t argue to prove they are dominant, but rather to find out what is right. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 874-875
, clipped on Thursday, October 5, 2017 8:04:35 AM
You’re scared of anything you don’t understand so you worship Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 897-898
, clipped on Thursday, October 5, 2017 8:06:41 AM
You’re scared of anything you don’t understand so you worship Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 897-898
, clipped on Thursday, October 5, 2017 8:06:46 AM
You’re scared of anything you don’t understand so you worship it. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 897-898
, clipped on Thursday, October 5, 2017 8:06:51 AM
Both of them had a condition my mom taught me to recognize as the pogromface = their faces expressed whatever emotion the most conspicuously powerful guy in the room was expressing, and this expression would remain on their faces until another conspicuously powerful guy entered the room feeling a different emotion than the first. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 1122-1124
, clipped on Thursday, October 5, 2017 11:01:50 PM
When it faded, I tried to get another but couldn’t. I’d worn out the memory, at least for the moment. If I thought too much about anything good, it would get less good, and everything good would begin to seem temporary. I did that the most with good songs. They’d stick in my head and go dull. And even when I’d hear one in my ears again, there were no surprises. I’d anticipate all the notes and the beats and the song would be ruined. So while it wasn’t any big deal that I wore out the memory Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 1310-1314
, clipped on Saturday, October 7, 2017 9:24:21 AM
I’d worn out the memory, at least for the moment. If I thought too much about anything good, it would get less good, and everything good would begin to seem temporary. I did that the most with good songs. They’d stick in my head and go dull. And even when I’d hear one in my ears again, there were no surprises. I’d anticipate all the notes and the beats and the song would be ruined. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 1311-1314
, clipped on Saturday, October 7, 2017 9:24:29 AM
The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button. No faith is potent unless it is also faith in the future; unless it has a millennial component. So, too, an effective doctrine: as well as being a source of power, it must also claim to be a key to the book of the future. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 170-175
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:50:22 AM
There is a fundamental difference between the appeal of a mass movement and the appeal of a practical organization. The practical organization offers opportunities for self-advancement, and its appeal is mainly to self-interest. On the other hand, a mass movement, particularly in its active, revivalist phase, appeals not to those intent on bolstering and advancing a cherished self, but to those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 209-214
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:56:23 AM
When a mass movement begins to attract people who are interested in their individual careers, it is a sign that it has passed its vigorous stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in possessing and preserving the present. It ceases then to be a movement and becomes an enterprise. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 227-229
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:58:52 AM
Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 234-234
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 6:59:28 AM
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business. This minding of other people’s business expresses itself in gossip, snooping and meddling, and also in feverish interest in communal, national and racial affairs. In running away from ourselves we either fall on our neighbor’s shoulder or fly at his throat. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 237-240
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 7:00:47 AM
The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 235-236
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 7:00:57 AM
The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 241-244
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 7:02:02 AM
In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling. The despair brought by unemployment comes not only from the threat of destitution, but from the sudden view of a vast nothingness ahead. The unemployed are more likely to follow the peddlers of hope than the handers-out of relief. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 249-251
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 7:03:20 AM
When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need of something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives. Hence the embracing of a substitute will necessarily be passionate and extreme. We can have qualified confidence in ourselves, but the faith we have in our nation, religion, race or holy cause has to be extravagant and uncompromising. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 255-258
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 7:05:28 AM
A substitute embraced in moderation cannot supplant and efface the self we want to forget. We cannot be sure that we have something worth living for unless we are ready to die for it. This readiness to die is evidence to ourselves and others that what we had to take as a substitute for an irrevocably missed or spoiled first choice is indeed the best there ever was. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 258-261
, clipped on Friday, October 13, 2017 7:05:42 AM
Since all mass movements draw their adherents from the same types of humanity and appeal to the same types of mind, it follows: (a) all mass movements are competitive, and the gain of one in adherents is the loss of all the others; (b) all mass movements are interchangeable. One mass movement readily transforms itself into another. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 276-279
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 7:47:39 AM
It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 339-340
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:05:39 AM
The discarded and rejected are often the raw material of a nation’s future. The stone the builders reject becomes the cornerstone of a new world. A nation without dregs and malcontents is orderly, decent, peaceful and pleasant, but perhaps without the seed of things to come. It was not the irony of history that the undesired in the countries of Europe should have crossed an ocean to build a new world on this continent. Only they could do it. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 337-340
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:05:45 AM
It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the “new poor,” who throb with the ferment of frustration. The memory of better things is as fire in their veins. They are the disinherited and dispossessed who respond to every rising mass movement. It Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 351-352
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:07:05 AM
The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. Every meal is a fulfillment; to go to sleep on a full stomach is a triumph; and every windfall a miracle. What need could they have for “an inspiring super-individual goal which would give meaning and dignity to their lives?” They are immune to the appeal of a mass movement. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 368-371
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 8:08:13 AM
Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 395-396
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:08:53 AM
There is a hope that acts as an explosive, and a hope that disciplines and infuses patience. The difference is between the immediate hope and the distant hope. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 398-399
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:10:35 AM
Unless a man has the talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”9 It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility? Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 416-420
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:14:44 AM
Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 446-447
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:26:33 AM
They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually their innermost desire is for an end to the “free for all.” They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 442-445
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:26:59 AM
Poverty when coupled with creativeness is usually free of frustration. This is true of the poor artisan skilled in his trade and of the poor writer, artist and scientist in the full possession of creative powers. Nothing so bolsters our self-confidence and reconciles us with ourselves as the continuous ability to create; to see things grow and develop under our hand, day in, day out. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 449-452
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:27:41 AM
eliminate or stifle the spirit of rebellion against the ruling power. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 524-525
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 10:37:40 AM
The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 641-643
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 11:43:22 AM
The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 641-643
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 11:44:57 AM
The inordinately selfish are particularly susceptible to frustration. The more selfish a person, the more poignant his disappointments. It is the inordinately selfish, therefore, who are likely to be the most persuasive champions of selflessness. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 641-643
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 11:45:02 AM
There is perhaps no more reliable indicator of a society’s ripeness for a mass movement than the prevalence of unrelieved boredom. In almost all the descriptions of the periods preceding the rise of mass movements there is reference to vast ennui; and in their earliest stages mass movements are more likely to find sympathizers and support among the bored than among the exploited and oppressed. To a deliberate fomenter of mass upheavals, the report that people are bored stiff should be at least as encouraging as that they are suffering from intolerable economic or political abuses. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 672-675
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:04:26 PM
The important point is that in the poignantly frustrated the propensities for united action and self-sacrifice arise spontaneously. It should be possible, therefore, to gain some clues concerning the nature of these propensities, and the technique to be employed for their deliberate inculcation, by tracing their spontaneous emergence in the frustrated mind. What ails the frustrated? It is the consciousness of an irremediably blemished self. Their chief desire is to escape that self—and it is this desire which manifests itself in a propensity for united action and self-sacrifice. The revulsion from an unwanted self, and the impulse to forget it, mask it, slough it off and lose it, produce both a readiness to sacrifice the self and a willingness to dissolve it by losing one’s individual distinctness in a compact collective whole. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 731-737
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:20:37 PM
shell which keeps him apart from others and is thus made assimilable. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 755-755
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:23:59 PM
The unavoidable conclusion seems to be that when the individual faces torture or annihilation, he cannot rely on the resources of his own individuality. His only source of strength is in not being himself but part of something mighty, glorious and indestructible. Faith here is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal. Faith in humanity, in posterity, in the destiny of one’s religion, nation, race, party or family—what is it but the visualization of that eternal something Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 792-795
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:30:36 PM
The unavoidable conclusion seems to be that when the individual faces torture or annihilation, he cannot rely on the resources of his own individuality. His only source of strength is in not being himself but part of something mighty, glorious and indestructible. Faith here is primarily a process of identification; the process by which the individual ceases to be himself and becomes part of something eternal. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 792-794
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:30:48 PM
Not only does a mass movement depict the present as mean and miserable—it deliberately makes it so. It fashions a pattern of individual existence that is dour, hard, repressive and dull. It decries pleasures and comforts and extols the rigorous life. It views ordinary enjoyment as trivial or even discreditable, and represents the pursuit of personal happiness as immoral. To enjoy oneself is to have truck with the enemy—the present. The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most movements is to breed contempt for the present. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 859-863
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:38:49 PM
All three then cherish the present, and, as one would expect, they do not take willingly to the idea of self-sacrifice. Their attitude toward self-sacrifice is best expressed by the skeptic: “for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing … neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 924-927
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:45:04 PM
All three then cherish the present, and, as one would expect, they do not take willingly to the idea of self-sacrifice. Their attitude toward self-sacrifice is best expressed by the skeptic: “for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing … neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.”8 The radical Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 924-928
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:45:10 PM
All three then cherish the present, and, as one would expect, they do not take willingly to the idea of self-sacrifice. Their attitude toward self-sacrifice is best expressed by the skeptic: “for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing … neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.” Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 924-927
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:45:14 PM
One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have “something worth fighting for,” they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause.9 Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 958-962
, clipped on Saturday, October 14, 2017 12:48:51 PM
I said to them, We are on the same side. I said, We are all on the side of damage. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2172-2173
, clipped on Monday, October 16, 2017 1:43:29 AM
smoke and study and smoke, and only after ten o’clock at night would he ever relax a little…We’d go Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2303-2304
, clipped on Monday, October 16, 2017 2:02:23 AM
smoke and study and smoke, and only after ten o’clock at night would he ever relax a little…We’d go Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2303-2304
, clipped on Monday, October 16, 2017 2:02:28 AM
It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self. The fact that they understand Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1014-1017
, clipped on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 1:18:24 AM
It is obvious, therefore, that in order to be effective a doctrine must not be understood, but has rather to be believed in. We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength. Once we understand a thing, it is as if it had originated in us. And, clearly, those who are asked to renounce the self and sacrifice it cannot see eternal certitude in anything which originates in that self. The fact that they understand a thing fully impairs its validity and certitude in their eyes. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1014-1017
, clipped on Tuesday, October 17, 2017 1:18:35 AM
Every difficulty and failure within the movement is the work of the devil, and every success is a triumph over his evil plotting. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1177-1178
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 9:21:11 PM
We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1185-1186
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 9:21:52 PM
Self-contempt produces in man “the most unjust and criminal passions imaginable, for he conceives a mortal hatred against that truth which blames him and convinces him of his faults.” Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1201-1202
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 10:47:22 PM
There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1209-1209
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 10:48:14 PM
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1210-1211
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 10:48:28 PM
To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1210-1211
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 10:48:33 PM
It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American’s hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1218-1223
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 10:49:51 PM
It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American’s hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1218-1223
, clipped on Wednesday, October 18, 2017 10:49:56 PM
The less satisfaction we derive from being ourselves, the greater is our desire to be like others. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1292-1293
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 8:18:23 AM
The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1295-1295
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 8:18:54 AM
The desire to belong is partly a desire to lose oneself. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1295-1295
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 8:19:00 AM
The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1339-1340
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 8:27:11 AM
It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1377-1377
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 8:30:45 AM
free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1423-1423
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:36:45 PM
their position was untenable in a modern world. If free Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1422-1423
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:36:50 PM
If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1423-1423
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:36:56 PM
If free enterprise becomes a proselytizing holy cause, it will be a sign that its workability and advantages have ceased to be self-evident. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1423-1424
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:37:05 PM
There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement. Accidents and the activities of other men have to set the stage for them before they can enter and start their performance. “The commanding man in a momentous day seems only to be the last accident Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1441-1443
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:38:38 PM
There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement. Accidents and the activities of other men have to set the stage for them before they can enter and start their performance. “The commanding man in a momentous day seems only to be the last accident in a Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1441-1443
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:38:45 PM
There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement. Accidents and the activities of other men have to set the stage for them before they can enter and start their performance. “The commanding man in a momentous day seems only to be the last accident in a series.” Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1441-1443
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:38:50 PM
There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement. Accidents and the activities of other men have to set the stage for them before they can enter and start their performance. “The commanding man in a momentous day seems only to be the last accident in a series.” Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1441-1443
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:38:55 PM
The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. Charlatanism of some degree is indispensable to effective Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1489-1490
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:45:06 PM
The quality of ideas seems to play a minor role in mass movement leadership. What counts is the arrogant gesture, the complete disregard of the opinion of others, the singlehanded defiance of the world. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1489-1490
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 6:45:13 PM
The frustrated follow a leader less because of their faith that he is leading them to a promised land than because of their immediate feeling that he is leading them away from their unwanted selves. Surrender to a leader is not a means to an end but a fulfillment. Whither they are led is of secondary importance. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1524-1527
, clipped on Thursday, October 19, 2017 11:29:44 PM
German intellectuals were the originators of German nationalism, just as Jewish intellectuals were the originators of Zionism. It is the deep-seated craving of the man of words for an exalted status which makes him oversensitive to any humiliation imposed on the class or community (racial, lingual or religious) to which he belongs however loosely. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1768-1770
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:09:25 PM
To a degree the nationalist movement which forced the British rulers out of India had its inception in the humiliation of a scrawny and bespectacled Indian man of words in South Africa. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1774-1775
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:10:00 PM
The fanatics and the faith-hungry masses, however, are likely to invest such speculations with the certitude of holy writ, and make them the fountainhead of a new faith. Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1793-1794
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:12:43 PM
To sum up, the militant man of words prepares the ground for the rise of a mass movement: 1) by discrediting prevailing creeds and institutions and detaching from them the allegiance of the people; 2) by indirectly creating a hunger for faith in the hearts of those who cannot live without it, so that when the new faith is preached it finds an eager response among the disillusioned masses; 3) by furnishing the doctrine and the slogans of the new faith; 4) by undermining the convictions of the “better people"— those who can get along without faith—so that when the new fanaticism makes its appearance they are without the capacity to resist it. They see no sense in dying for convietions and principles, and yield to the new order without a fight.16 Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1794-1800
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:13:08 PM
The reason for the tragic fate which almost always overtakes the intellectual midwives of a mass movement is that, no matter how much they preach and glorify the united effort, they remain essentially individualists. They believe in the possibility of individual happiness and the validity of individual opinion and initiative. But once a movement gets rolling, power falls into the hands of those who have neither faith in, nor respect for, the individual. And the reason they prevail is not so much that their disregard of the individual gives them a capacity for ruthlessness, but that their attitude is in full accord with the ruling passion of the masses. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1821-1825
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:42:22 PM
The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from and blended with their faith in humanity, for they know that no one can be honorable unless he honors mankind. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1901-1902
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:51:31 PM
Thus at the end of its vigorous span the movement is an instrument of power for the successful and an opiate for the frustrated. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 1949-1950
, clipped on Friday, October 20, 2017 11:57:22 PM
In the eyes of the true believer, people who have no holy cause are without backbone and character—a pushover for men of faith. On the other hand, the true believers of various hues, though they view each other with mortal hatred and are ready to fly at each other’s throats, recognize and respect each other’s strength. Eric Hoffer
, The True Believer.
loc. 2083-2085
, clipped on Saturday, October 21, 2017 9:33:16 AM
The Harambe meme soon became the perfect parody of the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics Angela Nagle
, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.
loc. 105-106
, clipped on Monday, October 23, 2017 12:12:20 AM
The Harambe meme soon became the perfect parody of the sentimentality and absurd priorities of Western liberal performative politics and the online mass hysteria that often characterized it. Angela Nagle
, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.
loc. 105-106
, clipped on Monday, October 23, 2017 12:12:29 AM
far-right intellectuals. The alt-right is, to varying degrees, preoccupied Angela Nagle
, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.
loc. 206-206
, clipped on Monday, October 23, 2017 8:12:59 AM
far-right intellectuals. The alt-right is, to varying degrees, preoccupied Angela Nagle
, Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right.
loc. 206-206
, clipped on Monday, October 23, 2017 8:13:10 AM
“Easy as a child breathes a wish at a dandelion, my love, is exactly how hard it would be for me to tear your limbs from their sockets.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2359-2359
, clipped on Thursday, October 26, 2017 12:22:36 AM
holes wrapped around to the front and continued to grow. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2382-2382
, clipped on Friday, October 27, 2017 6:12:50 AM
What nails represent (Hashem’s protection against death, the existence of choice, etc.) becomes confused with what nails actually do (protect the toe- and finger-tips, allow for clawing, etc). To insist that fingernails are choices or actual protection against death, would be like insisting that when the stars and stripes go up in flames, America does Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2402-2405
, clipped on Saturday, October 28, 2017 11:02:16 PM
What nails represent (Hashem’s protection against death, the existence of choice, etc.) becomes confused with what nails actually do (protect the toe- and finger-tips, allow for clawing, etc). To insist that fingernails are choices or actual protection against death, would be like insisting that when the stars and stripes go up in flames, America does too. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2402-2405
, clipped on Saturday, October 28, 2017 11:02:25 PM
Now, I know that you know these things, Judah, I’ve dreamed of you, and I know there are a number of things you know, probably too many things you know—too many, I say, not because any kind of knowledge has the capacity to be bad in itself, but rather because certain kinds of knowledge, particularly those kinds we often describe as arcane, can, by way of their very arcanity, serve to obscure the knowledge-bearer’s understanding of the mundane. And we need to talk about the mundane, you and I, but you’re receiving me as a particle physicist would a man who asks him for help building a bridge. The physicist, he thinks, ‘Who cares about a bridge? We know all there is to know about bridges. Ask me about quarks and the pathways of neutrinos, or ask me nothing.’ The difference between you and the physicist is that he does know how to build a bridge—he doesn’t make the mistake of believing that what he once learned about building bridges somehow became false after he learned about subatomic particles—whereas you, Judah, ever since you began plumbing the arcane, you have, in increments, forgotten, if not dismissed, what you knew before. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2712-2720
, clipped on Sunday, October 29, 2017 4:51:45 PM
If I’d thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much—the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you see. But she was such a cool character, your mother, and Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2768-2770
, clipped on Sunday, October 29, 2017 4:58:41 PM
If I’d thought she was uninterested, I never would have worried so much—the prospect of screwing something up is much more daunting than that of screwing nothing up. I definitely thought there was something there, and so there was something to lose, you Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2768-2769
, clipped on Sunday, October 29, 2017 4:58:54 PM
“Understand, Gurion,” my mother once explained, “that most things between people do not work out according to plan, and so when they do, it can fill you with joy. I was not laughing at your father for stumbling. I was laughing because I had been waiting for weeks for him to approach me and—” Why didn’t you approach him? I said. “Because I did not want to. Men approach women all the time. That is how men are. If a man approaches a woman, she will only welcome him if she is interested in him. If a woman approaches a man, though, the man may become interested by the fact of the approach itself, and I did not want your father to ever wonder if it was because I approached him that he fell in love with me. I wanted for him to have no doubts. So you see, I was laughing because we had been noticing one another for eight weeks, and still he had not approached me, and it had been making me crazy since the Wednesday of the third week, at which time I saw he needed an impetus to approach, and I developed my plan. I decided to use a lighter for my cigarettes, thinking: If I use a lighter, my lighter can run out of fuel. If my lighter runs out of fuel, he can come across the street and offer to light my cigarette with his lighter.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2784-2793
, clipped on Sunday, October 29, 2017 5:08:02 PM
“We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we’ve seen can’t be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3013-3014
, clipped on Sunday, October 29, 2017 5:43:51 PM
We agree to act as if what’s about to get said actually took place. Hardly any of it did, but the meaning of what my parents describe is truer than the meaning that would come across if they attempted to describe what actually happened—what actually happened was, I am led to believe, mostly unlistenable, if not untellable: a series of uncomfortable glances cast in near-silence, a few cutting remarks that echoed off the soup tureen, the damage of these remarks magnifying even as the decibels diminished. What actually happened, I am led to believe, was not funny at all, was painful and dull. Yet so would have been the life of the tramp in Chaplin’s City Lights, if the tramp were not fictional; so would have been the life of the blind girl the tramp loved, if the girl were not fictional; so would have been the operation the tramp struggled to pay for and the struggle to pay for it, were the operation and the struggle not fictional. And that operation never would have worked if it weren’t fictional, and even if by some miracle it had worked, the tramp would never have been able to get the money for it. But in City Lights, the tramp does get the money, the operation does succeed, and everything eventually works out for the lovers. And all of it should be true. And so in a way it is true. And they are worth crying for, a non-fictional tramp and the non-fictional blind girl he loves—in real-life such a doomed couple would deserve our tears. Yet had Chaplin presented them as they would have been had they not been fictional, we would turn away after five minutes instead of staying til the end and weeping as we should. I once asked my father: Why do we go to the symphony hall once a year to see City Lights with orchestral accompaniment at seventy-five dollars a head? “Because it is the greatest movie ever made,” he said. And what makes it the greatest? “It is the truest,” he told me. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 2999-3012
, clipped on Sunday, October 29, 2017 5:45:27 PM
If my best friend didn’t want to tell me his own backstory—whether because parts of it caused him pain, or just because he didn’t know how to tell it yet—I could understand that, and I didn’t want to attempt to pull it from him. Especially not if I could hear it from someone else. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3209-3211
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 12:01:15 AM
the next time I had it because I would think of how bad the smell Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3299-3299
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 12:11:30 AM
the next time I had it because I would think of how bad the smell Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3299-3299
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 12:11:35 AM
“Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3315-3316
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 12:15:44 AM
“Really? Does she love you back? I hope so, man. I’m not even in love, I don’t think, just in very deep like, and it’s really fucken Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3573-3574
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 11:02:19 PM
“Really? Does she love you back? I hope so, man. I’m not even in love, I don’t think, just in very deep like, and it’s really fucken Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3573-3574
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 11:02:59 PM
“Really? Does she love you back? I hope so, man. I’m not even in love, I don’t think, just in very deep like, and it’s really fucken Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3573-3574
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 11:03:03 PM
“Really? Does she love you back? I hope so, man. I’m not even in love, I don’t think, just in very deep like, and it’s really fucken lonely not to be very deeply liked back. I can’t imagine how—” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3573-3574
, clipped on Monday, October 30, 2017 11:03:16 PM
Wasn’t to believe that but a way to be arranged? Maybe even the worst kind of arranged? The kind where you think you’re overcoming the arrangement, when, in fact, you’re serving it perfectly? Flipping a covert bird instead of screaming a curse instead of throwing a punch instead of throwing a rock? Revolving in a chair you might have otherwise swung? Cheering for underdogs and calling it action? Smirking at the powerful and calling it subversive? Embracing your meekness instead of getting strong? Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3823-3826
, clipped on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 11:18:33 PM
Ashamed is just grateful waiting to happen. You only taste your own dignity right before you puke it up. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 3838-3839
, clipped on Tuesday, October 31, 2017 11:21:55 PM
When someone’s scared of me, I know they’ll try to damage me the second they have the chance, and that makes me scared of them. And so I think: I better damage them first, while I have the chance—You should be scared of these people because they fear you, Gurion. You should damage them first. You should damage them again and again. You should damage them until they stop being scared of you. Until your dangerousness is undeniable and you’re like highway traffic or the edge of a cliff—something they wouldn’t even consider crossing. Then you make friends. It’s the only way.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 4306-4310
, clipped on Wednesday, November 1, 2017 11:36:20 PM
and sat down at her desk. “Says it’s dashing,” said Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 4667-4667
, clipped on Sunday, November 5, 2017 2:02:45 AM
While I did that, my own eyes got wet, not fakely, and I blinked the wetness away because it was not my privilege to be sad. Leonard Brodsky was the one who was hurt, and I was the one who’d hurt him, and it didn’t matter that I hadn’t wanted to hurt him or that I didn’t know how I’d hurt him. It didn’t matter that I knew not what I did to him. It didn’t need a name to be wrong. It didn’t need reasons I could understand. Verbosity is like the iniquity of idolatry. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 4801-4804
, clipped on Sunday, November 5, 2017 10:05:11 AM
All I need to know is there’s things you don’t want to tell me, and that those things are things that I don’t need to know. So now I know that. I know all I need to. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 5017-5018
, clipped on Sunday, November 5, 2017 10:25:59 AM
said, “Girls decide who gets to kiss them, right? So if you haven’t Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 5362-5363
, clipped on Tuesday, November 7, 2017 10:38:27 PM
Benji said, “Girls decide who gets to kiss them, right? So if you haven’t kissed a girl, it’s because she hasn’t decided to kiss you. And if she hasn’t decided to kiss you, and you ask her to be your girlfriend, which is the same as asking her to kiss you, then it’s like you’re telling her to go faster, which is like telling her she’s prude—it’s either that or she just doesn’t want to kiss you. And that’s the part that’s the most suck, because after you ask her to be your girlfriend and she gets freaked out and stops talking to you, you can’t even just be glad it’s over and that you got it out in the open so that the healing process can begin; you’ll always have to wonder if you might have had a chance that you ruined by asking, and maybe, instead of feeling relieved about having put everything out on the table, what you should do is run very quickly at a picnic table so you trip on the bench of it and your head smacks the boards and gets splintered.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 5362-5369
, clipped on Tuesday, November 7, 2017 10:38:35 PM
African-American is a misnomer, and an irrelevant one when it comes to me… A misnomer because it refers to very general geographical origins that have little if anything to do with the identity of the people who claim the misnomer—their identity is not based in having African ancestors any more than a Polish-American’s is based in having European ancestors… I guess maybe Rwandan-American or Nigerian-American could potentially be more worthwhile descriptors of someone’s ethnicity, though not much more worthwhile, come to think of it—those countries haven’t been around that long and weren’t established as nations by anyone all too indigenous. A tribal identification would make the most sense… Like if people called themselves Tutsi-Americans or Hutu-Americans. Anything less is just… I don’t think you’re hearing me, Sandy. What I’m saying is that you wouldn’t imagine Tutsis doing too much identifying with Hutus, even though they’re all from the same continent, which is Africa, which makes them all African… Because they genocide on each other for kicks is why not… I guess that’s a pretty way to think about it, but even if you’re right, African-American’s mostly just a fancy way to say dark-skinned, and who cares what color anyone is? I mean a lot of people care, but those people won’t usually admit it—that’s why they like to say African-American… Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 5594-5604
, clipped on Tuesday, November 14, 2017 12:05:52 AM
It was as unchanging as his voice, the face, and describing it as a half-smile doesn’t explain much except for what it would look like on someone else in a photograph. A half-smile can mean almost anything, I think. It can fit almost any situation—it can mean whatever the person watching the half-smiler thinks is most appropriate at the time. Bam’s face was more intentional. It was set in a pre-smile. It was the face of someone who has just leaned in your direction to hear something important that you are about to say—maybe the punchline of a joke he is expecting to be entertained by, or the conclusion to an argument he thinks you’ll convince him with. When someone pre-smiles like that, it is impossible to read the stories in the person’s face—at least for me. It is also impossible to want to hurt the person. You want to perform for a person like that. You don’t want to disappoint him. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6003-6010
, clipped on Sunday, November 19, 2017 11:50:11 AM
“But you can explain a little, and then the plot should make sense of the rest. That’s what all the best plots do, man—they bring together disparate elements, linguistic and otherwise. You Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6229-6230
, clipped on Monday, November 20, 2017 9:36:05 AM
And even though they were laughing at me with condescension, I started laughing like I thought they were laughing with me. But I was only pretending to think they were laughing with me. I pretended because their laughing was keeping them from fighting, and that is what I was laughing Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6857-6859
, clipped on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 1:07:09 AM
And even though they were laughing at me with condescension, I started laughing like I thought they were laughing with me. But I was only pretending to think they were laughing with me. I pretended because their laughing was keeping them from fighting, and that is what I was laughing at. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6857-6859
, clipped on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 1:07:15 AM
And then soon enough we were all laughing at the same thing, for the same reason, in the same way: first at how we kept laughing, and then at the sounds of the laughing and the way it warped our faces and made our jaws ache. Finally we were laughing at laughing, the nonsense of it, how when you first start laughing it seems like you’re laughing because something is funny, but later, as you continue to laugh, you see that the funny thing is funny because you’re laughing at Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6860-6863
, clipped on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 1:07:28 AM
And then soon enough we were all laughing at the same thing, for the same reason, in the same way: first at how we kept laughing, and then at the sounds of the laughing and the way it warped our faces and made our jaws ache. Finally we were laughing at laughing, the nonsense of it, how when you first start laughing it seems like you’re laughing because something is funny, but later, as you continue to laugh, you see Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6860-6863
, clipped on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 1:07:35 AM
And then soon enough we were all laughing at the same thing, for the same reason, in the same way: first at how we kept laughing, and then at the sounds of the laughing and the way it warped our faces and made our jaws ache. Finally we were laughing at laughing, the nonsense of it, how when you first start laughing it seems like you’re laughing because something is funny, but later, as you continue to laugh, you see that the funny thing is funny because you’re laughing at it. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 6860-6863
, clipped on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 1:07:40 AM
As a rule, she avoided using the word mental—she did not believe the word described anything real. In the introduction to her doctoral dissertation, she wrote, “Mind is to the study of human psychology what the ether once was to that of pre-Einsteinian physics—a convenient and groundless homuncular hypothesis that obscures exactly that which its proponents insist it describes; an illusion to be dispelled.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 7133-7136
, clipped on Tuesday, November 21, 2017 4:38:06 PM
Had their birth not been thwarted by the decimation of their ancestors, a billion Philistines would today be crying out against David for having cheated in the contest that ended their giant. Underdog stories are easy Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 7202-7204
, clipped on Wednesday, November 22, 2017 5:18:40 AM
Had their birth not been thwarted by the decimation of their ancestors, a billion Philistines would today be crying out against David for having cheated in the contest that ended their giant. Underdog stories are easy to tell. It is best to be suspicious of underdog stories. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 7202-7204
, clipped on Wednesday, November 22, 2017 5:18:45 AM
The whole purpose of Lunch outside of the classroom was to provide time and space for students to engage in benign little fits of halfhearted assault that would dull their urges to damage the arrangement. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 7230-7231
, clipped on Wednesday, November 22, 2017 1:24:00 PM
“Gurion, say that detention comes around and you’re in the bathroom and it makes you late for your meeting with June, okay? When you finally get there, to detention, are you gonna say, ‘Hey June, the reason I’m late is I was playing Victor Dumpenstein to this brown monster I was sadly compelled to bring into the world?’” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 7923-7925
, clipped on Thursday, November 23, 2017 5:45:40 PM
characters start kissing in books the first time. That was easy to remember. Characters firstkissed in many books. But I couldn’t remember any books where characters actually moved from Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8116-8117
, clipped on Thursday, November 23, 2017 7:13:50 PM
I tried to remember characters in books, how characters start kissing in books the first time. That was easy to remember. Characters firstkissed in many books. But I couldn’t remember any books where characters actually moved from not-kissing to kissing, let alone to firstkissing. One sentence they weren’t kissing and the next sentence they were. But what about the space between them? Before they kissed, there had to be space between them, between each mouth, and they had to close the space in order to kiss, but how did they close it? Did they just suddenly close it? Maybe they just suddenly closed it, I thought. It was possible they just suddenly closed it, I thought, but how did they know when to suddenly close it? How did they know if it was okay with the other character to close it? Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8115-8121
, clipped on Thursday, November 23, 2017 7:14:01 PM
If I touched her hair and she let me, then I could bend my head sideways. If she bent her head sideways, then I could lean forward. And if she leaned forward, then I could press my lips against her lips, and then we would be kissing. The only way I’d lose face would be if she did everything but kiss me at the last step; if I pressed my lips against her lips and she didn’t press back. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8128-8131
, clipped on Thursday, November 23, 2017 7:15:48 PM
wanting; there’s a difference, I think. Like how everyone wishes they could fly, or walk through walls, or be invisible… Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8555-8556
, clipped on Friday, November 24, 2017 3:17:08 PM
wished I was the messiah, but the wishing—it wasn’t wanting; there’s a difference, I think. Like how everyone wishes they could fly, or walk through walls, or be invisible… There’s no pain, you know? To wishing like that, I mean. Because there’s no possibility. With wanting, though—there’s some pain, I think… This is hard to explain… Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8554-8557
, clipped on Friday, November 24, 2017 3:17:24 PM
Now that I’m saying it, though, I think that want is the confusing part. It is need I mean by want, I think. Because you can need something without knowing it. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8571-8572
, clipped on Friday, November 24, 2017 3:18:52 PM
It’s like I’ve been a crying just-born baby who doesn’t know he’s hungry, let alone that he’s hungry for his mother’s milk. The newborn doesn’t know who his mother is, or even what mother is. He doesn’t even know what crying is, right? I don’t think he knows he is crying, June. He’s just doing what he’s doing and it is only after his mother has begun to feed him that he begins to understand what he was doing, why he was doing it. It is only after he’s been fed that he can know what hunger is. And so it is only then that he can choose to cry when he is hungry. Before he can go after what he wants, he needs to know what he wants, but before he can know what he wants, he needs to get what he needs. The world must come to him first. I’ve been as dumb as a just-born baby. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8587-8593
, clipped on Friday, November 24, 2017 3:21:04 PM
You cannot simplify what is complicated without subtracting subtlety, and thereby richness; and the willful subtraction of subtlety, no matter how practical it may be (or seem to be), strikes me as a non-scholarly—even anti-scholarly—endeavor. It is not true that a person’s urge to erase or prevent controversy via simplification necessarily indicates that he aspires to become a robot; that urge existed before anyone even dreamed of robots. Nonetheless, by giving in to the urge to render simple what could defensibly remain Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8705-8708
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 10:48:27 AM
You cannot simplify what is complicated without subtracting subtlety, and thereby richness; and the willful subtraction of subtlety, no matter how practical it may be (or seem to be), strikes me as a non-scholarly—even anti-scholarly—endeavor. It is not true that a person’s urge to erase or prevent controversy via simplification necessarily indicates that he aspires to become a robot; that urge existed before anyone even dreamed of robots. Nonetheless, by giving in to the urge to render simple what could defensibly remain complicated, a person becomes more robotic. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8705-8709
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 10:48:34 AM
Imagine the rules of boxing were such that boxers weren’t allowed any footwork, were forced to stand in one spot in the middle of the ring and trade blows, one for one, the block their only legal defensive move. The champions would always be the soundest-bodied heavy-hitters. Muhammed Ali would never have lasted a round with Joe Frazier, let alone ever rope-a-doped Foreman. Eventually, as scientific techniques of measurement grew more advanced, boxers wouldn’t even need to enter the ring, much less hit each other, to determine the winner of a given match; the same kind of violence-allergic people on the state boxing commissions who invented the TKO and made it illegal to fight for more than twelve rounds would employ hack physicists to measure the PSI of the boxers’ punches, the rigidity and pressure-aborption capacities of their upper bodies, their pain-tolerance levels, and the physical integrity of their blocks, then plug all these variables into an algorithm and declare the winner. To box, at that point, would be as barbaric as the haters say: two men clobbering each other to prove nothing that isn’t already known. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8711-8718
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 10:49:40 AM
So what the fuck is a swear then? “It’s a word bad people say.” I said, Take it back. “I can’t take back facts, Gurion ben-Judah.” I said, Take it back now, you pussing leprosy from between the scabrous vaginal lips of a discount vestigially-tailed prostitute for whom any one of your sixty-seven possible syphilitic fathers were either stupid or crazy enough to pay nearly twice her value for at eighteen cents, fuck. “Whoa.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8784-8789
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 10:55:34 AM
almost did. By recess of the thirteenth day since the softpower part’s enactment—September 10—we anticipated only two challengers: Shmooly Gooses and Joshua Pritikin. Whereas Gooses was a slow boy who couldn’t grasp the rules of real, let alone the psychology of faux-faking, Pritikin was not just a champion of simple, but a completely uncompromising loyalist. He was the one simple slapslapper in all of Schechter who’d refused beneath the bigtoy to cave to the crowd. He’d point to us and tell them, “Blame it on these three.” But no one would blame it on us. Instead they’d boo Pritikin, call him a mamzer, demand that he real with our third. Though I admired Pritikin for being such a hardhead, I didn’t doubt for a second I’d rout him. Shmooly Gooses only scored when someone let him, and we’d already decided that for his sake we’d make an exception. To ban Shmooly from playing simple under the bigtoy = banning Shmooly for being slow. He really couldn’t understand the rules of real, so he’d still be allowed to simple in the territory, as would anyone else—just as long as they were doing it with Shmooly. In short, we saw the hardpower part of the plan as a formality. Pritikin was honorable, so we knew he’d take the challenge, we knew I’d shut him down, and that he’d accept the consequences. Shmooly I’d go through the motions of almost losing to, and I’d then, for his benefit, explain to him and the crowd that his near-defeat of me granted him the privilege described above. Victory Undeniable We were halfway Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 8920-8933
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 11:19:44 AM
This is what I know for sure: Neither on 9/11, 9/12, or anytime thereafter did anyone who was in the multipurpose room at Schechter think, “This is how it is now.” We thought, “This is how it is.” Whether we were correct or incorrect, it’s impossible to tell, but the distinction between what a person becomes and what he finds out he’s been—let alone what a people becomes and what it finds out it’s been—is too important to ignore, so I won’t. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 9126-9130
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 1:10:05 PM
And I’m also with you on how hard it would be to stop being the friend of someone who betrayed you, and I would say that when a friend betrays you, it is normal, and understandable, and probably even good if your first impulse is to figure out a way to forgive the betrayal. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 9814-9815
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 2:58:12 PM
Your power to deceive yourself, Gurion—it’s unmatched. And that’s to say nothing of your ability to articulate your self-deceptions. Truly amazing. You keep it up, sonnyboy, you might actually be the end of us. And by ‘us’ I mean the Jews, of whom your girlfriend is one. Of course she is. Of course she’s Jewish. Your girlfriend is Jewish because she has a couple birthmarks and you’ve got a gift for casuistry.” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 9907-9910
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 3:07:54 PM
If the point of fighting with people you love is to kill your desire to fight them; if it is best, in the course of this killing, to inflict as little lasting damage as possible; and if that means fights fought smartest by loved ones can’t but scream topspeed toward stalemate, then let no scholar confuse the following for overstatement: My parents fought like geniuses that Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 9923-9926
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 3:10:10 PM
If the point of fighting with people you love is to kill your desire to fight them; if it is best, in the course of this killing, to inflict as little lasting damage as possible; and if that means fights fought smartest by loved ones can’t but scream topspeed toward stalemate, then let no scholar confuse the following for overstatement: My parents fought like geniuses that night. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 9923-9926
, clipped on Monday, November 27, 2017 3:10:17 PM
those with whom they share responsibility, they will be shown Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 10581-10582
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 8:27:53 AM
would blow his whistle for attention and say something to the Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 10605-10605
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 8:28:22 AM
I don’t mean to do is make it seem like Ronrico is bad because Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 10616-10617
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 8:32:39 AM
“Loyalty without friendship creates hypocrisy.” That’s just a whiny word, I said. Benji said, “There’s only so much loyalty to go around, Gurion. And there’s even less friendship. If you’re loyal to someone who isn’t your friend, and they come into conflict with someone who is, then what are you supposed to do?” I said, Be loyal to the friend. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 10756-10759
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 8:58:47 AM
It hurt like visceral descriptions of hurt hurt, and it hurt all of us, and all at the same time, and we all knew at the same time that that was how it was for all of us at the same time. And it is true that you cannot box a man who you are watching on television. And it’s true you can’t balance a stumbling baby who’s out of reach. You can never bleed from another’s wounds, and no one, no matter Whose son he says he is, can bleed from yours. But your body can describe the condition of another’s. Your body can describe the condition to you, and that kind of description is also an action. The action is sympathy. Sometimes you can push it. Sometimes it pushes. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 10982-10987
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 9:18:09 AM
To be yours does not mean you control them. To be theirs does not mean they control you. It only means there is mutual influence. And the more one element influences the other, the more the other influences the one. What you animate animates you back. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 11451-11453
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 9:53:01 AM
that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain? Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 196-199
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 12:50:18 PM
Faced with a quantity of books so vast that nearly all of them must remain unknown, how can we escape the conclusion that even a lifetime of reading is utterly in vain? Reading is first and foremost non-reading. Even in the case of the most passionate lifelong readers, the act of picking up and opening a book masks the countergesture that occurs at the same time: the involuntary act of not picking up and not opening all the other books in the universe. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 195-199
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 12:50:27 PM
Rather than any particular book, it is indeed these connections and correlations that should be the focus of the cultivated individual, much as a railroad switchman should focus on the relations between trains—that is, their crossings and transfers—rather than the contents of any specific convoy. And Musil’s image of the brain powerfully underscores this theory that relations among ideas are far more important than the ideas themselves. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 235-238
, clipped on Wednesday, November 29, 2017 12:55:12 PM
Not. Now. Baby,’” she said. “Should I feel offended or charmed? It is hard to say, no?” She dragged and the cigarette crackled, but she kept it there in her mouthcorner. “On the first hand, it is a kind of brush-off: he does not want to hear the affectionate small jab I was about to make regarding his mood. On the second hand, he calls me ‘baby’ which is sweet, but on the third hand, it is precisely because ‘baby’ is sweet and he is using it to brush me off that saying to me ‘baby’ is a little condescending. Do I decide that he is sweet for painting with honey the brushoff, or cruel for pretending to me that a brush-off is honey?” Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 12779-12784
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 4:15:02 PM
I’d never watched myself cry, so I didn’t know, but I thought I must be one of those people who smiles before he cries, because my mom sat next to me on the floor and did stuff to my hair while my dad kept reassuring me that everything would be alright, and I wasn’t crying at all. I was smiling so hard my face hurt. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 12856-12858
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 5:24:30 PM
Your defiances showed you where you truly stood, but they didn’t tell you if you should stand there. Yet they seemed to. They seemed to tell you you should stand there. Why else would you be standing there, despite? Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 13816-13817
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 8:49:11 PM
The goodness of our intentions was in direct correlation to the heights from which we condescended to each other. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 13884-13885
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 9:05:37 PM
The Side of Damage returned art supplies to the Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 13944-13945
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 9:12:55 PM
No great book is explicable, and I shall not attempt to explain this one. An explanation—indeed, any explanation—would defile it, for reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy William Gaddis, William H. Gass
, The Recognitions.
loc. 146-148
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 10:03:46 PM
No great book is explicable, and I shall not attempt to explain this one. An explanation—indeed, any explanation—would defile it, for reduction is precisely what a work of art opposes. Easy answers, convenient summaries, quiz questions, annotations, arrows, highlight lines, lists of its references, the numbers of its sources, echoes, and influences, an oudine of its design—useful as sometimes such helps are—nevertheless very seriously mislead. Guidebooks are useful, but only to what is past. Interpretation replaces the original with the lamest sort of substitute. It tames, disarms. “Okay, I get it,” we say, dusting our hands, “and that takes care of that.” “At last I understand Kafka” is a foolish and conceited remark. William Gaddis, William H. Gass
, The Recognitions.
loc. 146-151
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 10:04:02 PM
Video is the chosen medium of tyrants, and that’s not because tyrants lack print technology, but rather because video cannot be examined as rigorously as can the written word. It cannot be as deeply plumbed—at least not yet. The reality a given video does or doesn’t convey, even without effects (allowing, hypothetically, that rendering three dimensions as two isn’t a host of effects in itself), cannot be fully parsed = The viewer can all too easily mistake realism for reality. E.g., every actor in a movie is wearing makeup, but few of them ever seem Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 14785-14789
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 10:46:26 PM
Video is the chosen medium of tyrants, and that’s not because tyrants lack print technology, but rather because video cannot be examined as rigorously as can the written word. It cannot be as deeply plumbed—at least not yet. The reality a given video does or doesn’t convey, even without effects (allowing, hypothetically, that rendering three dimensions as two isn’t a host of effects in itself), cannot be fully parsed = The viewer can all too easily mistake realism for reality. E.g., every actor in a movie is wearing makeup, but few of them ever seem to be. Furthermore, while filmed imagery may very well be possessed of a grammar, that grammar is either mostly unknown to us or changing at a pace with which we can’t keep up. It’s impossible to tell. Video may be like a beautiful girl whose every genuine emotion, thought, and intention gets betrayed by the expressiveness of her brow, but that’s of no consequence if we don’t look at her brow. And we don’t, scholars. Not at all. We can’t take our eyes off those fulsome… lips. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 14785-14793
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 10:46:48 PM
And of course it is possible that I make it too simple, that deep inside all of them were latent desires and motivations that pushed against those which these factions would (or even could) profess—that maybe the Jennys and Ashleys were relieved to see Boystar’s face made ugly, that maybe they thought his ugliness would give them a better shot at being loved by him, or maybe the ugliness freed them of their love for him, which, unrequieted, had been causing them pain, and maybe that’s why they didn’t rush the floor, but then again maybe they were just frozen from heartbreak; and maybe the Shovers (like so many others who miss the point of worship) contained in their worship a streak of envy, a desire to discover Slokum wasn’t so great as they’d always suspected or feared, and that may be why they didn’t rush the floor, but then maybe they just thought he could protect himself, just give him a second to get his bearings, Slokum the king, Slokum the beloved—but latent desires and motivations, if they do exist (I suspect they don’t, my mother is sure of it, Adonai doesn’t care), are, at least in here, inadmissable. Even if they were, in fact, present, they’d be too complicated for me to describe with confidence: I didn’t know most of these people at all. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 14855-14864
, clipped on Wednesday, December 13, 2017 10:54:20 PM
“Hey,” I say, offering up by rote the meaningless thing my father always used to say, when confronted with any kind of pessimism or resignation. “It’s never too Ben H. Winters
, The Last Policeman.
loc. 434-436
, clipped on Thursday, December 14, 2017 9:29:01 AM
“Hey,” I say, offering up by rote the meaningless thing my father always used to say, when confronted with any kind of pessimism or resignation. “It’s never too late.” Ben H. Winters
, The Last Policeman.
loc. 434-436
, clipped on Thursday, December 14, 2017 9:29:06 AM
All great books command re-reading, but you can’t ever read the same book twice. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 16891-16891
, clipped on Thursday, December 14, 2017 11:48:16 AM
The act of analysis can’t help but create a sense of distance between you and what’s analyzed. This seems much stranger than it actually is. It seems strange because not only does analysis require you to get up close to a thing, but analysis is undertaken (at least in the case of re-reading great books) with the overt desire to get up close to that thing. The resultant sense of distance thus seems to suggest that to get up close to something is to get away from it, to push it away or be pushed away by Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 17509-17512
, clipped on Thursday, December 14, 2017 11:49:06 AM
The act of analysis can’t help but create a sense of distance between you and what’s analyzed. This seems much stranger than it actually is. It seems strange because not only does analysis require you to get up close to a thing, but analysis is undertaken (at least in the case of re-reading great books) with the overt desire to get up close to that thing. The resultant sense of distance thus seems to suggest that to get up close to something is to get away from it, to push it away or be pushed away by it. Levin, Adam
, The Instructions.
loc. 17509-17512
, clipped on Thursday, December 14, 2017 11:49:11 AM
In our quest for this perspective, we must guard against getting lost in any individual passage, for it is only by maintaining a reasonable distance from the book that we may be able to appreciate its true meaning. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 487-488
, clipped on Thursday, December 14, 2017 2:39:07 PM
They are all reconstructions of originals that lie so deeply buried beneath our words and the words of others that, even were we prepared to risk our lives, we stand little chance of ever finding them within reach. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 672-673
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 6:23:17 AM
Even as I read, I start to forget what I have read, and this process is unavoidable. It extends to the point where it’s as though I haven’t read the book at all, so that in effect I find myself rejoining the ranks of non-readers, where I should no doubt have remained in the first place. At this point, saying we have read a book becomes essentially a form of metonymy. When it comes to books, we never read more than a portion of greater or lesser length, and that portion is, in the longer or shorter term, condemned to disappear. When we talk about books, then, to ourselves and to others, it would be more accurate to say that we are talking about our approximate recollections of books, rearranged as a function of current circumstances. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 698-703
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 6:24:22 AM
Authority is an essential element at play in our discussions of books, if only because citing a text is most often a way of establishing one’s own authority or contesting that of others. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 929-930
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 6:44:09 AM
For we are more than simple shelters for our inner libraries; we are the sum of these accumulated books. Little by little, these books have made us who we are, and they cannot be separated from us without causing us suffering. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 961-963
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 6:45:36 AM
As may be seen, there is only one sensible piece of advice to give to those who find themselves having to talk to an author about one of his books without having read it: praise it without going into detail. An author does not expect a summary or a rational analysis of his book and would even prefer you not to attempt such a thing. He expects only that, while maintaining the greatest possible degree of ambiguity, you will tell him that you like what he wrote. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 1291-1294
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 7:31:46 AM
We are never dealing with just the book in our hand, but with a set of books common to our particular culture, where any individual book in the set might be lacking. So there is no reason not to tell the truth: to acknowledge that we haven’t read some specific element in the collective library, which in no way prevents us from having an overall view of the library and remaining one of its readers. It is the entire library that is called into play through each book, which serves as a kind of temporary Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 1467-1470
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 7:46:40 AM
We are never dealing with just the book in our hand, but with a set of books common to our particular culture, where any individual book in the set might be lacking. So there is no reason not to tell the truth: to acknowledge that we haven’t read some specific element in the collective library, which in no way prevents us from having an overall view of the library and remaining one of its readers. It is the entire library that is called into play through each book, which serves as a kind of temporary shimmering prism through which we see the whole. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 1467-1470
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 7:46:47 AM
Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 1618-1619
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 1:46:00 PM
Truth destined for others is less important than truthfulness to ourselves, something attainable only by those who free themselves from the obligation to seem cultivated, which tyrannizes us from within and prevents us from being ourselves. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 1618-1619
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 1:46:05 PM
Yes; independent. Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 2134-2137
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 8:13:46 PM
The work itself, meanwhile, vanishes into the discourse around it and gives way to a fleeting, hallucinatory object, a phantom book that attracts our every projection and shifts its shape with each remark we make about it. We would do well, therefore, to use this phantom book primarily to support the work we do on ourselves, drawing on its available elements to compose passages of our inner books and taking heed of those elements that reveal something intimate and irreplaceable about us. It is ourselves we should be listening to, not the “actual” book—even if it sometimes provides us momentum—and it is the writing of self that we must pursue without swerving. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 2207-2211
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 8:19:27 PM
Beyond the possibility of self-discovery, the discussion of unread books places us at the heart of the creative process, by leading us back to its source. To talk about unread books is to be present at the birth of the creative subject. In this inaugural moment when book and self separate, the reader, free at last from the weight of the words of others, may find the strength to invent his own text, and in that moment, he becomes a writer himself. Pierre Bayard
, How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read.
loc. 2219-2222
, clipped on Friday, December 15, 2017 8:21:39 PM
“This thing is going to fall out of the sky,” says Nico, “it’s going to fall on our heads. I don’t want to be sitting here by myself when it happens.” “It is not falling on our heads.” “What?” “Everybody says that, and it’s just—it’s just arrogant, is what it is.” I’m so tired of this, all of it, and I should stop talking, but I can’t. “Two objects are moving through space on separate but overlapping orbits, and this one time, we’ll both be at the same place at the same time. It’s not ‘falling on our heads,’ okay? It’s not ‘coming for us.’ It just is. Do you understand?” Ben H. Winters
, The Last Policeman.
loc. 1591-1597
, clipped on Saturday, December 16, 2017 6:08:16 AM
You tell a story like that, about your parents being killed, and people end up looking at you really closely, right in the eyes, advertising their empathy, when really what they’re doing is trying to peer into your soul, see what kind of marks and stains have been left on there. Ben H. Winters
, The Last Policeman.
loc. 2660-2662
, clipped on Sunday, December 17, 2017 7:15:58 AM
We dealt with the small surface transient objects, the books and the flowers and the spoons, but underneath we had always a solid foundation of stable possessions. Shirley Jackson
, We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
loc. 10-11
, clipped on Monday, December 18, 2017 3:04:29 AM
way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!” “I have Austen, Jane
, Pride and Prejudice (Wisehouse Classics - with Illustrations by H.M. Brock).
loc. 776-777
, clipped on Tuesday, December 19, 2017 2:03:38 AM
“There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!” “I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy. “Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.” Austen, Jane
, Pride and Prejudice (Wisehouse Classics - with Illustrations by H.M. Brock).
loc. 776-780
, clipped on Tuesday, December 19, 2017 2:03:44 AM
looking young man of five-and-twenty. His air was grave and stately, Austen, Jane
, Pride and Prejudice (Wisehouse Classics - with Illustrations by H.M. Brock).
loc. 1100-1101
, clipped on Tuesday, December 19, 2017 2:34:16 AM
He lived in the Pacific Northwest. More specifically, he lived in a shithole. The shithole in question was some subsidized housing Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 89-90
, clipped on Thursday, December 21, 2017 7:00:20 PM
Sandford Deane stood in as a representation of what the owner might have looked like had he been a human being instead of a collection of codes and spreadsheets, meetings, and quarterly reports in sexy buildings. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 301-303
, clipped on Thursday, December 21, 2017 11:04:30 PM
Behind her Rocco assembled the apparatus for turning dried leaves into flavored water. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 983-984
, clipped on Friday, December 22, 2017 12:41:45 AM
Americans never paid much attention to Canadians anyway unless they were good at telling jokes. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 2404-2405
, clipped on Friday, December 22, 2017 9:22:02 PM
“As that fateful day came to a close, a girl named Deidre Franklin wandered through the wasteland of her city and came to the place where the ancient glacial ice turned at last to water. All that was left now was a single chunk, no bigger than a typical ice cube, containing the dying breaths of ancient mammals, which Deidre used to cool a glass of Mountain Dew X-Treme Lime.” Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 2421-2423
, clipped on Friday, December 22, 2017 9:24:04 PM
Becoming famous had been a process similar to losing his virginity. He’d been convinced so explicitly from so many sources that fame would solve every problem he’d ever had, vault him into a state of permanent euphoria, that when it actually happened he considered his glittered surroundings and thought, Okay, not what I imagined. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 2894-2896
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 1:10:52 AM
“Did you even hear what I said about The Man Who Got Marketed to Death?” “Are you talking about a movie or my life?” Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 3056-3058
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 1:34:29 AM
Something about bare feet on hardwood with clean clothes and Brazilian music playing while coffee brewed meant civilization, meant purchasing power, meant freedom. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 4460-4463
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 10:19:44 AM
like right now? I have no idea. I’m no doctor. I’m a docent. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 4526-4526
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 10:25:24 AM
Imagining a postapocalyptic future is just a way to cope with your sense of being an outsider. Since you can’t fix the disappointments of your real life, you imagine a future life in which you’ve miraculously survived and are looked to as some sort of prophet. But this is all there is. All we have are roads, buildings, institutions, commerce, entertainment, governments, and jobs. This is the real world. There is no other world. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 4618-4621
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 10:38:56 AM
Point to any era and I’ll show you pestilence, war, slavery, genocide. Even the supposed good times were tinged in darkness. There’s no such thing as a new era of fucked-up shit because the shit has always been fucked-up. Fucked-up is the nature of the shit. And yet somehow we endure it. And little by little life improves. Fewer women die in childbirth. Slavery is abolished. Children don’t have to work in factories anymore. Life Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 4632-4635
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 10:39:57 AM
The two wandered to separate corners of the house and started extracting physical objects, disrupting the disorder of things, upsetting piles of parts of stuff, tossing aside tools of dubious purpose. Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 4720-4721
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 10:49:25 AM
other while Skinner danced through the grass, added a pirouette, Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 4815-4816
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 10:55:33 AM
“The world was full of precious garbage.” Ryan Boudinot
, Blueprints of the Afterlife.
loc. 5814-5815
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 7:17:00 PM
it’s such a teenage set of gestures: the impetuous grab for comfort, the immediate and disgusted self-abnegation. Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 128-129
, clipped on Saturday, December 23, 2017 11:27:02 PM
“What’s the point?” but he already knows the point, and I do, too. Culverson gives it to us anyway. “Maybe it’s false hope you’re giving this girl, your old babysitter—but it’s hope, right? Little spark in the darkness?” McGully makes an irritated sputter, and Culverson turns to him, says, “I’m serious, man. Maybe having Palace working on her case keeps this lady from going nuts.” “Exactly,” I say. “That’s—exactly.” Culverson takes a hard look at me, turns back to McGully. “Hell, maybe it keeps Palace from going nuts.” Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 453-458
, clipped on Sunday, December 24, 2017 12:14:04 AM
There is an aspect of my character that tends to latch on to one difficult but potentially solvable problem, rather than grapple with the vast and unsolvable problem that would be all I could see, if I were to look up, figuratively speaking, from my small blue notebooks. Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 1220-1222
, clipped on Sunday, December 24, 2017 9:22:06 PM
“You have a way of saying you’re going to listen to something, but then when the other person is talking you’re up in your head having some sort of complicated policeman dialog with yourself about something else.” Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 1246-1247
, clipped on Sunday, December 24, 2017 9:23:50 PM
“I’m looking for someone.” “Aren’t we all.” “Someone specific, jackass,” Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 1456-1457
, clipped on Sunday, December 24, 2017 10:07:44 PM
“Radical social theories when put into practice have a notoriously short half-life. They dissolve into anarchy. Or the people’s power, even when carefully delegated to provisional authorities, is seized by totalitarians and autocrats. Can you think of a single counterexample?” Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 1735-1737
, clipped on Sunday, December 24, 2017 11:56:15 PM
Among my regrets about what has just unfolded is that Brett never did ask me why I had come to find him, why I cared. I had my answer all figured out. Because a promise is a promise, Officer Cavatone, and civilization is just a bunch of promises, that’s all it is. A mortgage, a wedding vow, a promise to obey the law, a pledge to enforce it. And now the world is falling apart, the whole rickety world, and every broken promise is a small rock tossed at the wooden side of its tumbling form. Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 2190-2193
, clipped on Monday, December 25, 2017 5:32:46 AM
But what I feel is nothing. Numbness and cold. I’m a house full of burned-out rooms. Ben H. Winters
, Countdown City.
loc. 3066-3067
, clipped on Monday, December 25, 2017 9:49:15 PM
He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.” Hecuba’s David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 4248-4256
, clipped on Monday, December 25, 2017 11:49:20 PM
He and Hecuba ended up over coffee, and when H.H. finally cleared his throat and asked the cop why such an obviously decent fellow squarely on the side of law and civic virtue was a porn fan, the detective confessed that what drew him to the films was “the faces,” i.e. the actresses’ faces, i.e. those rare moments in orgasm or accidental tenderness when the starlets dropped their stylized “fuck-me-I’m-a-nasty-girl” sneer and became, suddenly, real people. “Sometimes — and you never know when, is the thing — sometimes all of a sudden they’ll kind of reveal themselves” was the detective’s way of putting it. “Their what-do-you-call… humanness.” It turned out that the LAPD detective found adult films moving, in fact far more so than most mainstream Hollywood movies, in which latter films actors — sometimes very gifted actors — go about feigning genuine humanity, i.e.: “In real movies, it’s all on purpose. I suppose what I like in porno is the accident of it.” David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 4248-4255
, clipped on Monday, December 25, 2017 11:49:25 PM
It’s that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. And Toward the End of Time’s author, so far as I can figure out, believes it too. Updike makes it plain that he views the narrator’s final impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I am not shocked or offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the novel’s first page. It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 851-855
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 4:31:20 AM
Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 867-870
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 4:33:01 AM
This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 871-875
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 4:34:12 AM
There are probably whole Johns Hopkins U. Press books to be written on the lallating function that humor serves in today’s US psyche. A crude way to put the whole thing is that our present culture is, both developmentally and historically, adolescent. And since adolescence is acknowledged to be the single most stressful and frightening period of human development — the stage when the adulthood we claim to crave begins to present itself as a real and narrowing system of responsibilities and limitations (taxes, death) and when we yearn inside for a return to the same childish oblivion we pretend to scorn* — it’s not difficult to see why we as a culture are so susceptible to art and entertainment whose primary function is escape, i.e. fantasy, adrenaline, spectacle, romance, etc. Jokes are a kind of art, and because most of us Americans come to art now essentially to escape ourselves — to pretend for a while that we’re not mice and walls are parallel and the cat can be outrun — it’s understandable that most of us are going to view “A Little Fable” as not all that funny, or maybe even see it as a repulsive instance of the exact sort of downer-type death-and-taxes reality for which “real” humor serves as a respite. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 4672-4683
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 4:50:11 AM
we’ve taught them to see humor as something you get—the same way we’ve taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It’s hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward—we’ve been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komisch. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 921-928
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 4:50:57 AM
perspicacity, discernment, reason. As the body of ADMAU makes David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 1145-1145
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 6:32:31 AM
As of 4 March 1999, the question of defining human life in utero is hopelessly vexed. That is, given our best present medical and philosophical understandings of what makes something not just a living organism but a person, there is no way to establish at just what point during gestation a fertilized ovum becomes a human being. This conundrum, together with the basically inarguable soundness of the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about whether something is a human being or not, it is better not to kill it,” appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Life. At the same time, however, the principle “When in irresolvable doubt about something, I have neither the legal nor the moral right to tell another person what to do about it, especially if that person feels that s/he is not in doubt” is an unassailable part of the Democratic pact we Americans all make with one another, a pact in which each adult citizen gets to be an autonomous moral agent; and this principle appears to me to require any reasonable American to be Pro-Choice. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 1226-1233
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 6:41:47 AM
be honest, the example here has a special personal resonance for this reviewer because in real life I always seem to have a hard time winding up a conversation or asking somebody to leave, and sometimes the moment becomes so delicate and fraught with social complexity that I’ll get overwhelmed trying to sort out all the different possible ways of saying it and all the different implications of each option and will just sort of blank out and do it totally straight — “I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore” — which evidently makes me look either as if I’m very rude and abrupt or as if I’m semi-autistic and have no sense of how to wind up a conversation gracefully. Somehow, in other words, my reducing the statement to its bare propositional content “sends a message” that is itself scanned, sifted, interpreted, and judged by my auditor, who then sometimes never comes back. I’ve actually lost friends this way. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 5083-5089
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 7:35:51 AM
Suppose that you and I are acquaintances and we’re in my apartment having a conversation and that at some point I want to terminate the conversation and not have you be in my apartment anymore. Very delicate social moment. Think of all the different ways I can try to handle it: “Wow, look at the time”; “Could we finish this up later?”; “Could you please leave now?”; “Go”; “Get out”; “Get the hell out of here”; “Didn’t you say you had to be someplace?”; “Time for you to hit the dusty trail, my friend”; “Off you go then, love”; or that sly old telephone-conversation-ender: “Well, I’m going to let you go now”; etc. etc.n And then think of all the different factors and implications of each option. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 1432-1438
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 7:36:11 AM
The SNOOTlet is, as it happens, an indispensable part of the other children’s playground education. School and peers are kids’ first socialization outside the family. In learning about Groups and Group tectonics, the kids are naturally learning that a Group’s identity depends as much on exclusion as inclusion. They are, in other words, starting to learn about Us and Them, and about how an Us always needs a Them because being not-Them is essential to being Us. Because they’re little children and it’s school, the obvious Them is the teachers and all the values and appurtenances of the teacher-world. * This teacher-Them helps the kids see how to start to be an Us, but the SNOOTlet completes the puzzle by providing a kind of missing link: he is the traitor, the Us who is in fact not Us but Them. The SNOOTlet, who at first appears to be one of Us because like Us he’s three feet tall and runny-nosed and eats paste, nevertheless speaks an erudite SWE that signals membership not in Us but in Them, which since Us is defined as not-Them is equivalent to a rejection of Us that is also a betrayal of Us precisely because the SNOOTlet is a kid, i.e., one of Us. Point: The SNOOTlet is teaching his peers that the criteria for membership in Us are not just age, height, paste-ingestion, etc., that in fact Us is primarily a state of mind and a set of sensibilities. An ideology. The SNOOTlet is also teaching the kids that Us has to be extremely vigilant about persons who may at first appear to be Us but are in truth not Us and may need to be identified and excluded at a moment’s notice. The SNOOTlet is not the only type of child who can serve as traitor: the Teacher’s Pet, the Tattletale, the Brown-Noser, and the Mama’s Boy can also do nicely… just as the Damaged and Deformed and Fat and Generally Troubled children all help the nascent mainstream Us-Groups refine the criteria for in- and exclusion. In these crude and fluid formations of ideological Groupthink lies American kids’ real socialization. We all learn early that community and Discourse Community are the same thing, and a fearsome thing indeed. It helps to know where We come from. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 5156-5175
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 7:50:30 AM
And by the time the SNOOTlet hits adolescence it’ll have supplanted the family to become the most important Group. And it will be a Group that depends for its definition on a rejection of traditional Authority. * And because it is the recognized dialect of mainstream adult society, there is no better symbol of traditional Authority than SWE. It is not an accident that adolescence is the time when slang and code and subdialects of subdialects explode all over the place and parents begin to complain that they can hardly even understand their kids’ language. Nor are lyrics like “I can’t get no / Satisfaction” an accident or any kind of sad commentary on the British educational system. Jagger et al. aren’t stupid; they’re rhetoricians, and they know their audience. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 5182-5190
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 7:52:01 AM
This reviewer acknowledges that there seems to be some, umm, personal stuff getting dredged up and worked out here; 56 but the stuff is germane. The point is that the little A+ SNOOTlet is actually in the same dialectal position as the class’s “slow” kid who can’t learn to stop using ain’t or bringed. Exactly the same position. One is punished in class, the other on the playground, but both are deficient in the same linguistic skill—viz., the ability to move between various dialects and levels of “correctness,” the ability to communicate one way with peers and another way with teachers and another with family and another with T-ball coaches and so on. Most of these dialectal adjustments are made below the level of conscious awareness, and our ability to make them seems part psychological and part something else—perhaps something hardwired into the same motherboard as Universal Grammar—and in truth this ability is a much better indicator of a kid’s raw “verbal IQ” than test scores or grades, since US English classes do far more to retard dialectal talent than to cultivate David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 1556-1565
, clipped on Tuesday, December 26, 2017 7:52:56 AM
The fact of the matter is that if you’re a true-blue, market-savvy Young Voter, the only thing you’re certain to feel about John McCain’s campaign is a very modern and American type of ambivalence, a sort of interior war between your deep need to believe and your deep belief that the need to believe is bullshit, that there’s nothing left anywhere but sales and salesmen. David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 3526-3528
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:29:34 AM
Am I a good person? Deep down, do I even really want to be a good person, or do I only want to seem like a good person so that people (including myself) will approve of me? Is there a difference? How do I ever actually know whether I’m bullshitting myself, morally speaking? David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 3924-3926
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:32:26 AM
What exactly does “faith” mean? As in “religious faith,” “faith in God,” etc. Isn’t it basically crazy to believe in something that there’s no proof of? Is there really any difference between what we call faith and some primitive tribe’s sacrificing virgins to volcanoes because they believe it’ll produce good weather? How can somebody have faith before he’s presented with sufficient reason to have faith? Or is somehow needing to have faith a sufficient reason for having faith? But then what kind of need are we talking about? David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 3949-3953
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:32:34 AM
Is the real point of my life simply to undergo as little pain and as much pleasure as possible? My behavior sure seems to indicate that this is what I believe, at least a lot of the time. But isn’t this kind of a selfish way to live? Forget selfish—isn’t it awful lonely? David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 3965-3967
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:32:40 AM
But if I decide to decide there’s a different, less selfish, less lonely point to my life, won’t the reason for this decision be my desire to be less lonely, meaning to suffer less overall pain? Can the decision to be less selfish ever be anything other than a selfish decision? David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 3978-3980
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:32:48 AM
Is it possible really to love other people? If I’m lonely and in pain, everyone outside me is potential relief—I need them. But can you really love what you need so badly? Isn’t a big part of love caring more about what the other person needs? How am I supposed to subordinate my own overwhelming need to somebody else’s needs that I can’t even feel directly? And yet if I can’t do this, I’m damned to loneliness, which I definitely don’t want … so I’m back at trying to overcome my selfishness for self-interested reasons. Is there any way out of this bind? ** David Foster Wallace
, Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays.
loc. 4029-4033
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:32:58 AM
When I was ten, I spent a long night burrowed under my comforter, cuddled up with Funshine Bear, who, filled with a foamy enigmatic sense of language and a Bloomian dogmatism, was the most literary of the Care Bears and my harshest critic. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 134-136
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:43:46 AM
In the musty darkness of that rayon bat cave, his stubby, all-but-immobile yellow arms struggled to hold the flashlight steady as together we tried to save the black race in eight words or less. Putting my homeschool Latin to good use, I’d crank out a motto, then shove it under his heart-shaped plastic nose for approval. My first effort, Black America: Veni, vidi, vici—Fried Chicken! peeled back Funshine’s ears and closed his hard plastic eyes in disappointment. Semper Fi, Semper Funky raised his polyester hackles, and when he began to paw the mattress in anger and reared up on his stubby yellow legs, baring his ursine fangs and claws, I tried to remember what the Cub Scout manual said to do when confronted by an angry stuffed cartoon bear drunk on stolen credenza wine and editorial power. “If you meet an angry bear—remain calm. Speak in gentle tones, stand your ground, get large, and write in clear, simple, uplifting Latin sentences.” Unum corpus, una mens, una cor, unum amor. One body, one mind, one heart, one love. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 136-144
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 2:44:30 AM
there is a heaven worth the effort that people make to get there, then I hope for my father’s sake there’s a celestial psychology journal. One that publishes the results of failed experiments, because acknowledging unsubstantiated theories and negative results is just as important as publishing studies proving red wine is the cure-all we’d always pretended it was. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 463-466
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 3:10:25 AM
If there is a heaven worth the effort that people make to get there, then I hope for my father’s sake there’s a celestial psychology journal. One that publishes the results of failed experiments, because acknowledging unsubstantiated theories and negative results is just as important as publishing studies proving red wine is the cure-all we’d always pretended it was. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 463-466
, clipped on Friday, December 29, 2017 3:10:30 AM
The three basic laws of ghetto physics are: Niggers in your face tend to stay in your face; no matter where the sun is in the sky, the time is always “Half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter to his balls”; Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 537-538
, clipped on Saturday, December 30, 2017 11:21:43 PM
The three basic laws of ghetto physics are: Niggers in your face tend to stay in your face; no matter where the sun is in the sky, the time is always “Half past a monkey’s ass and a quarter to his balls”; Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 537-538
, clipped on Saturday, December 30, 2017 11:21:51 PM
I compromised the crime scene by picking lint off his matted Afro, straightening the rumpled collar of his Oxford shirt, brushing the pebbles of gravel from his cheek, and, according to the police report, most egregiously by sticking my hand in the blood pooled around his body, which to my surprise was cold. Not hot, roiling with the black anger and lifelong frustration of a decent, albeit slightly crazy man who never became what he thought he was. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 545-548
, clipped on Sunday, December 31, 2017 11:13:31 AM
Shouting down Beverly Hills dowagers asserting their luxury sedan right of way by nosing their gigantic cars into spaces marked COMPACT ONLY. You stupid overmedicated bitch. If you don’t back that fucking jalopy out my space, I swear to God, I’m going to punch you in your anti-aging-cold-cream face and permanently reverse five hundred years of white privilege Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 728-731
, clipped on Sunday, December 31, 2017 11:33:56 AM
think about all the lines of ad infinitum bullshit my father shoveled down my throat, until his dreams became my dreams. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 734-735
, clipped on Sunday, December 31, 2017 11:33:58 AM
Shouting down Beverly Hills dowagers asserting their luxury sedan right of way by nosing their gigantic cars into spaces marked COMPACT ONLY. You stupid overmedicated bitch. If you don’t back that fucking jalopy out my space, I swear to God, I’m going to punch you in your anti-aging-cold-cream face and permanently reverse five hundred years of white privilege and five hundred thousand dollars of plastic surgery. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 728-731
, clipped on Sunday, December 31, 2017 11:34:06 AM
Jaguar model names sound like rockets: XJ–S, XJ8, E–Type. Hondas sound like cars designed by pacifists and humanitarian diplomats. The Accord, Civic, Insight. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 1144-1145
, clipped on Saturday, January 6, 2018 10:58:29 AM
I’ve always liked rote. The formulaic repetitiveness of filing and stuffing envelopes appeals to me in some fundamental life-affirming way. I would’ve made a good factory worker, supply-room clerk, or Hollywood scriptwriter. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 1385-1387
, clipped on Sunday, January 7, 2018 8:24:55 AM
A child, middle name Bonbon, a milk-guzzling, nipple-gnawing terror who serves as your incentive to apply for a Class B driver’s license, reminds you that next to Kafka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Eisenstein, and Tolstoy your favorite thing is to drive. Is to keep moving, to guide your bus and your life gently and slowly into the terminus and take a well-deserved respite. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 1616-1618
, clipped on Sunday, January 7, 2018 9:25:01 AM
But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn’t Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 1813-1813
, clipped on Sunday, January 7, 2018 9:46:42 AM
But if you really think about it, the only thing you absolutely never see in car commercials isn’t Jewish people, homosexuals, or urban Negroes, it’s traffic. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 1813-1814
, clipped on Sunday, January 7, 2018 9:46:50 AM
“What’s ‘castration,’ maestro?” “It’s a way of preventing male animals from fathering any children.” “Don’t they got cow rubbers?” “That’s not a bad idea, but cows don’t have hands and, like the Republican Party, any regard for a female’s reproductive rights, so this is a way to control the population. It also makes them more docile. Anyone know what ‘docile’ means?” Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 2049-2052
, clipped on Sunday, January 7, 2018 10:54:00 PM
And although like most black males raised in Los Angeles, I’m bilingual only to the extent that I can sexually harass women of all ethnicities in their native languages, I understood the gist of the message. Those kids were fucked. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 2134-2135
, clipped on Sunday, January 7, 2018 11:00:02 PM
Maybe I was like every other contemporary artist, I had only one good book, one album, one despicable act of large-scale self-hatred in me. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 2692-2693
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 2:42:12 AM
You’d rather be here than in Africa. The trump card all narrow-minded nativists play. If you put a cupcake to my head, of course, I’d rather be here than any place in Africa, though I hear Johannesburg ain’t that bad and the surf on the Cape Verdean beaches is incredible. However, I’m not so selfish as to believe that my relative happiness, including, but not limited to, twenty-four-hour access to chili burgers, Blu-ray, and Aeron office chairs is worth generations of suffering. I seriously doubt that some slave ship ancestor, in those idle moments between being raped and beaten, was standing knee-deep in their own feces rationalizing that, in the end, the generations of murder, unbearable pain and suffering, mental anguish, and rampant disease will all be worth it because someday my great-great-great-great-grandson will have Wi-Fi, no matter how slow and intermittent the signal is. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 2808-2814
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 2:56:18 AM
When Charisma asked me why he cited those specific writers, I told her I didn’t know, but neglected to mention that the list was composed solely of novelists who had taken their lives. It was hard to say if the statement was some sort of suicidal ideation, but one could hope. There aren’t many black firsts left these days, and as much as Foy would be a good a candidate for the position of “first black writer to off themselves,” I had to be prepared. If he was indeed an “autodidact,” there’s no doubt he had the world’s shittiest teacher. Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 3291-3295
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 4:19:33 AM
He was unpaid-electricity-bill dark Paul Beatty
, The Sellout.
loc. 3709-3709
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 7:12:24 AM
successfully in many parts of the developing world. It seemed Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 169-169
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 7:46:44 AM
Liberal democracy is more than majority voting in elections; it is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power through law and a system of checks and balances. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 280-282
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:30:39 AM
The cumulative effect of these economic crises has not necessarily been to undermine confidence in market-based economics and globalization as engines of economic growth. China, India, Brazil, and any number of other so-called emerging market countries continue to perform well economically based on their participation in global capitalism. But it is clear that the political job of finding the right regulatory mechanisms to tame capitalism’s volatility have not yet been found. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 326-329
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:36:16 AM
The American system was built around a firm conviction that concentrated political power constituted an imminent danger to the lives and liberty of citizens. For this reason, the U.S. Constitution was designed with a broad range of checks and balances by which different parts of the government could prevent other parts from exercising tyrannical control. This system has served the country well, but only because at certain critical junctures in its history when strong government was necessary, it was possible to forge the consensus to bring it about through the exercise of political leadership. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 337-341
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:38:13 AM
certain basic political institutions. It is not only that we take democracy for granted; we also take for granted the fact that we have a state at all that can carry out certain basic Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 447-448
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:50:52 AM
It is not only that we take democracy for granted; we also take for granted the fact that we have a state at all that can carry out certain basic functions. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 447-448
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:50:59 AM
Political institutions are necessary and cannot be taken for granted. A market economy and high levels of wealth don’t magically appear when you “get government out of the way”; they rest on a hidden institutional foundation of property rights, rule of law, and basic political order. A free market, a vigorous civil society, the spontaneous “wisdom of crowds” are all important components of a working democracy, but none can ultimately replace the functions of a strong, hierarchical government. There has been a broad recognition among economists in recent years that “institutions matter”: poor countries are poor not because they lack resources, but because they lack effective political institutions. We need therefore to better understand where those institutions come from. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 469-474
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:54:24 AM
The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 486-487
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:55:17 AM
The struggle to create modern political institutions was so long and so painful that people living in industrialized countries now suffer from a historical amnesia regarding how their societies came to that point in the first place. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 486-487
, clipped on Thursday, January 11, 2018 8:55:23 AM
There is really nothing more to say—except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how. Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 98-99
, clipped on Saturday, January 13, 2018 9:49:06 AM
We do not hear their words, but with grown-ups we listen to and watch out for their voices. Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 164-165
, clipped on Saturday, January 13, 2018 9:52:06 AM
When a toddler stumbles and scrapes his knee, his mom bends down to give it a kiss. No actual healing takes place, and yet both parties appreciate the ritual. The toddler finds comfort in knowing his mom is there to help him, especially if something more serious were to happen. And the mother, for her part, is eager to show that she’s worthy of her son’s trust. This small, simple example shows how we might be programmed both to seek and give healthcare even when it isn’t medically useful. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 154-157
, clipped on Sunday, January 14, 2018 8:17:28 PM
We now realize that our brains aren’t just hapless and quirky—they’re devious. They intentionally hide information from us, helping us fabricate plausible prosocial motives to act as cover stories for our less savory agendas. As Trivers puts it: “At every single stage [of processing information]—from its biased arrival, to its biased encoding, to organizing it around false logic, to misremembering and then misrepresenting it to others—the mind continually acts to distort information flow in favor of the usual goal of appearing better than one really is.”5 Emily Pronin calls it the introspection illusion, the fact that we don’t know our own minds nearly as well as we pretend to. For the price of a little self-deception, we get to have our cake and eat it too: act in our own best interests without having to reveal ourselves as the self-interested schemers we often are. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 253-260
, clipped on Sunday, January 14, 2018 10:09:48 PM
The art scene, for example, isn’t just about “appreciating beauty”; it also functions as an excuse to affiliate with impressive people and as a sexual display (a way to hobnob and get laid). Education isn’t just about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers. Religion isn’t just about private belief in God or the afterlife, but about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 288-292
, clipped on Monday, January 15, 2018 7:34:59 AM
Their only respect was for what they would have described as “good Christian colored women.” The woman whose reputation was spotless, and who tended to her family, who didn’t drink or smoke or run around. These women had their undying, if covert, affection. They would sleep with their husbands, and take their money, but always with a vengeance. Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 729-731
, clipped on Monday, January 15, 2018 9:42:33 AM
Frieda agreed with me. “Miss Forrester said he was incorrigival.” Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 839-839
, clipped on Tuesday, January 16, 2018 5:16:40 AM
And then the tears rushed down his cheeks, to make a bouquet under his chin. Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 2001-2001
, clipped on Wednesday, January 17, 2018 8:49:30 AM
With the confidence born of a conviction of superiority, they performed well at schools. They were industrious, orderly, Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 2115-2115
, clipped on Thursday, January 18, 2018 11:28:19 PM
With the confidence born of a conviction of superiority, they performed well at schools. They were industrious, orderly, Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 2115-2115
, clipped on Thursday, January 18, 2018 11:28:40 PM
We looked for eyes creased with concern, but saw only veils. Toni Morrison
, The Bluest Eye.
loc. 2362-2362
, clipped on Saturday, January 20, 2018 11:59:22 AM
buried. For this reason, “They never failed to bury [a dead Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1346-1347
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 7:55:26 AM
afield, he would have discovered identical burial practices in ancient Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1357-1357
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 7:56:21 AM
Tribal societies like the Nuer pose a challenge to rational-choice political science because so much behavior in such groups seems grounded not in individual choice but in complex social norms. It is very difficult to see how one arrives at Nuer social organization based on the individual maximizing choices of the members of the society, as opposed to a sociological explanation that would ground social organization in religious beliefs like ancestor worship. The political scientist Robert Bates has taken up this challenge. According to him, the sociological tradition, whether Durkheimian, Marxist, or Weberian, sees order arising from norms that are either moral, coercive, or authoritative. He goes on to review Evans-Pritchard’s The Nuer through the lens of rational-choice theory, a model that grounds behavior in radical individualism. He argues that many of the choices made by Nuer families or segments in dealing with one another reflect rational calculations of self-interest, usually related to the maximization of cattle resources. He cites the ways dispute resolution among family groups can be modeled using individualistic premises; Nuer institutions can be seen as efficient ways of solving coordination problems and modeled through game theory. He concludes: “It is damning, but true: the problem with political sociology is that it is too sociological. In affirming the primacy of society, it gives little reason to ask if it is possible for organized behavior to be orchestrated out of the decisions of individuals. Further signaling its inability to deal with the problem is the vigorous assertion of such methodological postulates as the ‘independent validity of social facts’ or the rigorous separation of ‘levels of analysis.’ An intellectual posture characterized by a conviction that social life is not problematic simply offers little encouragement to those who wish to examine the nexus between private choice and collective behavior. And yet the problem of social order requires precisely such an examination” Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 9286-9300
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 8:37:53 AM
Bates is, however, setting up a false dichotomy between economics and sociology. From a sociological or anthropological perspective, there is no requirement that all behavior be understood as normatively based, or any assertion that individual rational choice plays no role in final outcomes. There is always some level of social interaction—usually at the level of the most highly aggregated social units—in which rational choice works best as an explanation of behavior of a social unit. Thus, for all their cultural differences from their European counterparts, the Ottomans behaved according to very familiar rules in their foreign policy, following not religious but realpolitik choices to advance their interests. What cannot be so readily explained from a rational-choice perspective is the nature of the lower-level social units themselves. Why do the Nuer organize themselves into descent groups, rather than forming religious fraternities, or organizing themselves into voluntary associations like young Americans? Rational choice provides no theory of social mobilization since it deliberately ignores the role of ideas and norms. The latter may reflect a deeper evolutionary, as opposed to individual, rationality related to the interests of groups. There is a large discussion among evolutionary biologists whether genes can encode behaviors that promote group rather than individual fitness (understood in terms of inclusive fitness). There is no particular reason, however, why social norms cannot facilitate such behavior. The simple existence of phenomena like suicide bombing suggests that this is not unheard Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 9302-9313
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 8:38:06 AM
Among the noneconomic sources of cohesion is simple personal loyalty through the reciprocal exchange of favors over time. Tribal societies invest kinship with religious meaning and supernatural sanctions. Militias, moreover, are typically made up of young men without families, land, or assets, but with raging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure. For them, economic resources are not the only objects of predation. We should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange. In these relatively small-scale societies, one could often follow the rules of clan exogamy only through external aggression due to the lack of nonrelated women. Genghis Khan, founder of the great Mongol Empire, was reported to have said, “The greatest pleasure … is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1655-1662
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 10:39:51 AM
Among the noneconomic sources of cohesion is simple personal loyalty through the reciprocal exchange of favors over time. Tribal societies invest kinship with religious meaning and supernatural sanctions. Militias, moreover, are typically made up of young men without families, land, or assets, but with raging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure. For them, economic resources are not the only objects of predation. We should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange. In these relatively small-scale societies, one could often follow the rules of clan exogamy only through external aggression due to the lack of nonrelated women. Genghis Khan, founder of the great Mongol Empire, was reported to have said, “The greatest pleasure … is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1655-1662
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 10:39:56 AM
Among the noneconomic sources of cohesion is simple personal loyalty through the reciprocal exchange of favors over time. Tribal societies invest kinship with religious meaning and supernatural sanctions. Militias, moreover, are typically made up of young men without families, land, or assets, but with raging hormones that incline them toward lives of risk and adventure. For them, economic resources are not the only objects of predation. We should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange. In these relatively small-scale societies, one could often follow the rules of clan exogamy only through external aggression due to the lack of nonrelated women. Genghis Khan, founder of the great Mongol Empire, was reported to have said, “The greatest pleasure … is to vanquish your enemies and chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth and see those dear to them bathed in tears, to ride their horses and clasp to your bosom their wives and daughters.” Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1655-1662
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 10:39:59 AM
One of the great mistakes of early modernization theory, beyond the error in thinking that politics, economics, and culture had to be congruent with one another, was to think that transitions between the “stages” of history were clean and irreversible. The only part of the world where tribalism was fully superseded by more voluntary and individualistic forms of social relationship was Europe, where Christianity played a decisive role in undermining kinship as a basis for social cohesion. Since most early modernization theorists were European, they assumed that other parts of the world would experience a similar shift away from kinship as part of the modernization process. But they were mistaken. Although China was the first civilization to invent the modern state, it never succeeded in suppressing the power of kinship on social and cultural levels. Hence much of its subsequent two-thousand-year political history revolved around attempts to block the reassertion of kinship structures into state administration. In India, kinship interacted with religion and mutated into the caste system, which up to the present day has proved much stronger than any state in defining the nature of Indian society. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1690-1698
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 10:44:03 AM
An act of grooming conveys a number of related messages. The groomer says, “I’m willing to use my spare time to help you,” while the groomee says, “I’m comfortable enough to let you approach me from behind (or touch my face).” Meanwhile, both parties strengthen their alliance merely by spending pleasant time in close proximity. Two rivals, however, would find it hard to let their guards down to enjoy such a relaxed activity.8 The bottom line: “Grooming,” says Dunbar, “creates a platform off which trust can be built.” Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 397-402
, clipped on Sunday, January 21, 2018 11:56:51 PM
Knowledge suppression is useful only when two conditions are met: (1) when others have partial visibility into your mind; and (2) when they’re judging you, and meting out rewards or punishments, based on what they “see” in your mind. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 467-468
, clipped on Monday, January 22, 2018 9:53:33 AM
could learn more, collaborate better against the harsh external Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 508-509
, clipped on Monday, January 22, 2018 9:58:28 AM
But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 633-634
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 1:47:23 AM
To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.” Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 704-705
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 1:56:04 AM
To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.” Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 704-705
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 1:56:07 AM
To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.” Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 704-705
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 2:06:25 AM
Unlike other natural processes, we can look ahead. And we’ve developed ways to avoid wasteful competition, by coordinating our actions using norms and norm enforcement—a topic we turn to in the next chapter. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 759-761
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 2:12:35 AM
Unlike other natural processes, we can look ahead. And we’ve developed ways to avoid wasteful competition, by coordinating our actions using norms and norm enforcement Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 759-761
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 2:12:40 AM
Human groups develop norms because they (typically) benefit the majority of people in the group. Now, some norms, especially top-down laws, can be oppressive or extractive and an overall detriment to the societies that enforce them. But most norms—especially of the bottom-up, grassroots variety—are beneficial; they’re one of the main ways we suppress competition and promote cooperation. In other words, we hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 787-790
, clipped on Tuesday, January 23, 2018 2:15:04 AM
So, if Boehm, Bingham, and the others are right, it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior. Once our ancestors learned how to kill and punish each other collectively, nothing would be the same. Coalition size would balloon almost overnight. Politics would then become exponentially more complicated and require more intelligence to navigate, and brains would struggle to catch up for thousands of generations. And soon, norms would begin to proliferate, starting with the norm against being a too-dominant alpha, and continuing to this day as we invent new norms for every new context we develop (e.g., netiquette). Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 898-902
, clipped on Wednesday, January 24, 2018 12:44:40 AM
It’s part of that forager aversion to dominance, since bragging is a way to increase one’s influence and dominance within a community. We’d be wary of Daniel Kahneman, for example, if he went around introducing himself as a Nobel Prize–winner; we’d wonder why he felt the need to put himself above everyone else. For this reason, we actively celebrate people for being humble, and Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 966-968
, clipped on Thursday, January 25, 2018 3:21:24 AM
Note that professional norm enforcers, such as police, teachers, and human resource managers, have a strong incentive to enforce norms: it’s their job. Even so, they’re often overworked or subject to lax oversight, and therefore tempted to cut corners. Sometimes the threat of mere paperwork can be enough to keep police from enforcing minor infractions. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 1099-1102
, clipped on Friday, January 26, 2018 2:07:47 AM
Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face.26 Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 1385-1387
, clipped on Sunday, January 28, 2018 2:07:48 AM
Like the general who erases the mountain range on the map, then leads the army to a dead end, self-deceivers similarly run the risk of acting on false or missing information. Luckily, however, we don’t have to bear the full brunt of our own deceptions. Typically, at least part of our brain continues to know the truth. In other words, our saving grace is inconsistency. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 1464-1466
, clipped on Sunday, January 28, 2018 3:08:35 PM
What this means for self-deception is that it’s possible for our brains to maintain a relatively accurate set of beliefs in systems tasked with evaluating potential actions, while keeping those accurate beliefs hidden from the systems (like consciousness) involved in managing social impressions. In other words, we can act on information that isn’t available to our verbal, conscious egos. And conversely, we can believe something with our conscious egos without necessarily making that information available to the systems charged with coordinating our behavior. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 1494-1498
, clipped on Sunday, January 28, 2018 3:11:13 PM
It’s not that we’re entirely or irredeemably selfish and self-deceived—just that we’re often rewarded for acting on selfish impulses, but less so for acknowledging them, and that our brains respond predictably to those incentives. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 1550-1552
, clipped on Monday, January 29, 2018 8:38:42 AM
Robin, for example, has often said his main goal in academic life is to get his ideas “out there” in the name of intellectual progress. But then he began to realize that whenever he spotted his ideas “out there” without proper attribution, he had mixed feelings. In part, he felt annoyed and cheated. If his main goal was actually to advance the world’s knowledge, he should have been celebrating the wider circulation of his ideas, whether or not he got credit for them. But the more honest conclusion is that he wants individual prestige just as much as, if not more than, impersonal intellectual progress. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 1763-1767
, clipped on Tuesday, January 30, 2018 12:06:31 AM
On the surface, laughter seems to be all fun and games, an expression of joy. Picture an infant giggling at a game of peekaboo with her father—what could be more wholesome and innocent? But from earlier chapters, we know that ignorance often serves a deceptive purpose; our brains hide certain things from us in order to hide them more effectively from others. This suggests there may be a hidden dark side to laughter. Consider how we often use humor as an excuse to trot out our most taboo subjects: race, sex, politics, and religion. Or how we laugh at people who are different from us or people who aren’t in the room. We can say things in the comedic register that we’d never dream of saying in a straight-faced discussion. The paradox of laughter is that it puts us at ease in social situations, and yet its meaning and purpose seem to reside squarely in our introspective blind spot. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 2176-2182
, clipped on Friday, February 2, 2018 8:37:24 AM
Conversation, therefore, looks on the surface like an exercise in sharing information, but subtextually, it’s a way for speakers to show off their wit, perception, status, and intelligence, and (at the same time) for listeners to find speakers they want to team up with. These are two of our biggest hidden motives in conversation. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 2642-2645
, clipped on Monday, February 5, 2018 8:30:24 AM
Instead, we seem content with just the veneer of confidence and expertise, as long as our pundits are engaging, articulate, connected to us, and have respected pedigrees. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 2744-2745
, clipped on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 12:20:46 AM
Of course, the peer review process does sometimes reward the work of new and/or outside researchers. But in the long experience of one of us (Robin), the judgments of referees in these cases typically focus on whether a submission makes the author seem impressive. That is, referees pay great attention to spit and polish—whether a paper covers every possible ambiguity and detail. They show a distinct preference for papers that demonstrate a command for difficult methods. And referees almost never discuss a work’s long-term potential for substantial social benefit. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 2797-2801
, clipped on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 12:25:57 AM
Many possible reforms, such as a review process that’s blind to a paper’s conclusions, could help journals to increase the accuracy of their publications.47 But such reforms would limit journals’ ability to select papers more likely to bring prestige, so we see surprisingly little interest in them. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 2801-2804
, clipped on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 12:26:13 AM
trip to the Galápagos isn’t something we can tote around like a handbag, but by telling frequent stories about the trip, bringing home souvenirs, or posting photos to Facebook, we can achieve much of the same effect. (Of course, we get plenty of personal pleasure from travel, but some of the value comes from being able to share the experience with friends and family.) Buying experiences also allows us to demonstrate qualities that we can’t signal as easily with material goods, such as having a sense of adventure or being open to new experiences. A 22-year-old woman who spends six months backpacking across Asia sends a powerful message about her curiosity, open-mindedness, and even courage. Similar (if weaker) signals can be bought for less time and money simply by eating strange foods, watching foreign films, and reading widely. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 2897-2903
, clipped on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 11:23:08 AM
Unless we’re paying careful attention, the third-person effect can be hard to notice. In part, this is because we typically assume that ads are targeting us directly, as individual buyers; indirect influence can be harder to see. But it’s also a mild case of the elephant in the brain, something we’d rather not acknowledge. All else being equal, we prefer to think that we’re buying a product because it’s something we want for ourselves, not because we’re trying to manage our image or manipulate the impressions of our friends. We want to be cool, but we’d rather be seen as naturally, effortlessly Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3046-3050
, clipped on Thursday, February 8, 2018 12:50:08 AM
Unless we’re paying careful attention, the third-person effect can be hard to notice. In part, this is because we typically assume that ads are targeting us directly, as individual buyers; indirect influence can be harder to see. But it’s also a mild case of the elephant in the brain, something we’d rather not acknowledge. All else being equal, we prefer to think that we’re buying a product because it’s something we want for ourselves, not because we’re trying to manage our image or manipulate the impressions of our friends. We want to be cool, but we’d rather be seen as naturally, effortlessly cool, rather than someone who’s trying too hard. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3046-3051
, clipped on Thursday, February 8, 2018 12:50:15 AM
Taken to the extreme during major TV events like the Super Bowl, the majority of ads are selling social goods. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3095-3096
, clipped on Thursday, February 8, 2018 12:55:44 AM
This way of approaching art—of looking beyond the object’s intrinsic properties in order to evaluate the effort and skill of the artist—is endemic to our experience of art. In everything that we treat as a work of “art,” we care about more than the perceptual experience it affords. In particular, we care about how it was constructed and what its construction says about the virtuosity of the artist. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3290-3293
, clipped on Saturday, February 10, 2018 9:29:36 AM
We spend an incredible amount of our leisure time refining our critical faculties in this way. Rarely are we satisfied simply to sit back and passively enjoy art (or any other type of human achievement for that matter). Instead we lean forward and take an active role in our experiences. We’re eager to evaluate art, reflect on it, criticize it, calibrate our criticisms with others, and push ourselves to new frontiers of discernment. And we do this even in art forms we have no intention of practicing ourselves. For every novelist, there are 100 readers who care passionately about fiction, but have no plans ever to write a novel. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3423-3428
, clipped on Saturday, February 10, 2018 9:54:41 AM
Singer may be right that there’s no moral principle that differentiates between a child drowning nearby and another one starving thousands of miles away. But there are very real social incentives that make it more rewarding to save the local boy. It’s a more visible act, more likely to be celebrated by the local community, more likely to result in getting laid or making new friends. In contrast, writing a check to feed foreign children offers fewer personal rewards. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3780-3783
, clipped on Saturday, February 17, 2018 10:11:08 AM
The traditional view of education is that it raises a student’s value via improvement—by taking in rough, raw material and making it more attractive by reshaping and polishing it. The signaling model says that education raises a student’s value via certification—by taking an unknown specimen, subjecting it to tests and measurements, and then issuing a grade that makes its value clear to buyers. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 3923-3926
, clipped on Saturday, February 17, 2018 12:03:14 PM
This third-party scrutiny of medical treatments isn’t just a historical phenomenon. Even today, there are strong incentives to be seen receiving the best possible care. Consider what happened to Steve Jobs. When he died of pancreatic cancer in 2011, the world mourned the loss of a tech-industry titan. At the same time, many were harsh in condemning Jobs for refusing to follow the American Medical Association’s best practices for treating his cancer. “Jobs’s faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life,” said Barrie Cassileth, a department chief at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “He essentially committed suicide.” Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4175-4180
, clipped on Sunday, February 18, 2018 2:14:54 AM
The point here is that whenever we fail to uphold the (perceived) highest standards for medical treatment, we risk becoming the subject of unwanted gossip and even open condemnation. Our seemingly “personal” medical decisions are, in fact, quite public and even political. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4185-4186
, clipped on Sunday, February 18, 2018 2:15:21 AM
There are other ways to explain each of these phenomena, of course. But taken together, they suggest that we are less interested in “health at any cost,” and more interested in treatments that third parties will appreciate. Like King Charles II, we want the very best medicine for ourselves (especially when others can see that it’s the best). Like the woman bringing food to a sick friend, we want to help people in need (and maximize the credit we get for it). And because there are two reasons to consume and provide medicine—health and conspicuous care—we end up overtreated. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4408-4412
, clipped on Monday, February 19, 2018 9:33:13 AM
robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay. We’ve seen this Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4540-4540
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:13:38 AM
To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay. We’ve seen this Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4539-4540
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:13:48 AM
To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4539-4540
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:13:56 AM
To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4539-4540
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:14:22 AM
To lock in the benefits of cooperation, then, a community also needs robust mechanisms to keep cheaters at bay. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4539-4540
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 12:15:07 AM
To the secular mentality, many of these norms—like the one against contraception—make little sense, especially on moral grounds. Why shouldn’t an individual woman be allowed to use birth control? But in a tight-knit community, each woman’s “individual” choices have social externalities. If you’re using birth control, you’re also more likely to delay marriage, get an advanced degree, and pursue a dynamic, financially rewarding career. This makes it harder on your more traditional, family-oriented neighbors. Your lifestyle interferes with theirs (and vice versa), and avoiding such tensions is largely why we self-segregate into communities in the first place. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4628-4633
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 9:04:20 AM
Thus, by attending a sermon, you’re learning not just what “God” or the preacher thinks, but also what the rest of your congregation is willing to accept. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4672-4673
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 9:08:04 AM
to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4707-4707
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 9:12:55 AM
An analysis of this kind of belief should proceed in three steps. (1) People who believe they risk punishment for disobeying God are more likely to behave well, relative to nonbelievers. (2) It’s therefore in everyone’s interests to convince others that they believe in God and in the dangers of disobedience. (3) Finally, as we saw in Chapter 5, one of the best ways to convince others of one’s belief is to actually believe it. This is how it ends up being in our best interests to believe in a god that we may not have good evidence for. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4704-4708
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 9:13:14 AM
These high costs are exactly the point. Joining a religious community isn’t like signing up for a website; you can’t just hop in on a lark. You have to get socialized into it, coaxed in through social ties and slowly acculturated to the belief system. And when this process plays out naturally, it won’t even feel like a painful sacrifice because you’ll be getting more out of it than you give up. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4745-4748
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 9:20:38 AM
In all of these cases, instincts that are adaptive in one context can lead us fatefully astray in another. But we shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that the instincts are necessarily maladaptive, or that the people acting on them are hopelessly foolish or deluded. They’re just chasing their highs, same as the rest of us. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 4774-4776
, clipped on Tuesday, February 20, 2018 10:36:31 AM
The answer we’ve given in this chapter is that we use far-off national politics as a medium in which to jockey for local advantages. As apparatchiks, we’re motivated less by civic virtue than by the desire to appear loyal to our political coalitions. And if politics is a performance, then our audience is mostly our peers—friends and family, coworkers and bosses, churchmates and potential romantic partners, and anyone who might follow us on social media. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5113-5116
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 3:28:35 PM
Above all, what the elephant teaches us is humility. It’s a call for more thoughtful interactions with our fellow self-deceivers, a spur to step outside our own conniving minds. There’s a second side to every story, if only we can quiet our egos enough to hear Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5172-5174
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 8:56:57 PM
Above all, what the elephant teaches us is humility. It’s a call for more thoughtful interactions with our fellow self-deceivers, a spur to step outside our own conniving minds. There’s a second side to every story, if only we can quiet our egos enough to hear it Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5172-5174
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 8:57:02 PM
Thus there’s an element of hubris in any reform effort, but at least by taking accurate stock of an institution’s purposes, both overt and covert, we can hope to avoid common mistakes. “The curious task of economics,” wrote Friedrich Hayek, “is to demonstrate to men how little they really know about what they imagine they can design.”8 In this regard, our approach falls squarely in an economic tradition. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5271-5274
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 9:11:07 PM
First and foremost, humans are who we are, and we’ll probably remain this way for a good while, so we might as well take accurate stock of ourselves. If many of our motives are selfish, it doesn’t mean we’re unlovable; in fact, to many sensibilities, a creature’s foibles make it even more endearing. The fact that we’re self-deceived—and that we’ve built elaborate institutional structures to accommodate our hidden motives—makes us far more interesting than textbook Homo economicus. This portrait of human nature hints at some of the depth found in the characters of the world’s great novels: Moriarty, Caulfield, Ahab, Bovary, Raskolnikov. Straightforward characters aren’t nearly as compelling, perhaps because they strike us as less than fully human. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5282-5288
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 9:12:38 PM
Even if a philanthropist’s motives are selfish, her behaviors need not be—and we would be fools to conflate these two ways of measuring virtue. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5290-5291
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 9:13:00 PM
In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon. NOTES INTRODUCTION 1Wikiquote, “Karl Popper,” last modified March 15, 2017, https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Karl_Popper. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5302-5308
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 9:14:07 PM
In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5302-5304
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 9:14:14 PM
When John F. Kennedy described the space race with his famous speech in 1962, he dressed up the nation’s ambition in a suitably prosocial motive. “We set sail on this new sea,” he told the crowd, “because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.” Everyone, of course, knew the subtext: “We need to beat the Russians!” In the end, our motives were less important than what we managed to achieve by them. We may be competitive social animals, self-interested and self-deceived, but we cooperated our way to the god-damned moon. Kevin Simler
, The Elephant in the Brain.
loc. 5299-5304
, clipped on Sunday, February 25, 2018 9:14:19 PM
Supple physiology allows lichens to shine with life when most other creatures are locked down for the winter. Lichens master the cold months through the paradox of surrender. They burn no fuel in quest of warmth, instead letting the pace of their lives rise and fall with the thermometer. Lichens don’t cling to water as plants and animals do. A lichen body swells on damp days, then puckers as the air dries. Plants shrink back from the chill, packing up their cells until spring gradually coaxes them out. Lichen cells are light sleepers. When winter eases for a day, lichens float easily back to life. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 162-166
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:16:00 PM
Some biologists claim that the fungi are exploiters, ensnaring their algal victims. This interpretation fails to see that the lichen partners have ceased to be individuals, surrendering the possibility of drawing a line between oppressor and oppressed. Like a farmer tending her apple trees and her field of corn, a lichen is a melding of lives. Once individuality dissolves, the scorecard of victors and victims makes little sense. Is corn oppressed? Does the farmer’s dependence on corn make her a victim? These questions are premised on a separation that does not exist. The heartbeat of humans and the flowering of domesticated plants are one life. “Alone” is not an option: the farmer’s physiology is sculpted by a dependence on plants for food that dates back hundreds of millions of years to the first wormlike animals. Domesticated plants have experienced only ten thousand years of life with humans, but they too have shed their independence. Lichens add physical intimacy to this interdependence, fusing their bodies and intertwining the membranes of their cells, like cornstalks fused with the farmer, bound by evolution’s hand. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 181-188
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:19:11 PM
The “tree” of life is a poor metaphor. The deepest parts of our genealogies resemble networks Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 204-204
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:22:07 PM
The “tree” of life is a poor metaphor. The deepest parts of our genealogies resemble networks or deltas, with much interweaving and cross flow. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 204-205
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:22:12 PM
profoundly out of place in the winter forest. The chickadees’ insouciant Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 343-344
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:55:21 PM
profoundly out of place in the winter forest. The chickadees’ insouciant Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 343-344
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:55:34 PM
Chickadees must daily find hundreds of food morsels to meet their Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 355-356
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:57:18 PM
Chickadees must daily find hundreds of food morsels to meet their Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 355-356
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:57:24 PM
Chickadees must daily find hundreds of food morsels to meet their Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 355-356
, clipped on Monday, February 26, 2018 12:57:29 PM
This is natural selection’s paradox: from death comes life’s increasing perfection. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 425-426
, clipped on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 10:25:11 AM
We are condemned by our skill with fire and cloth to be forever out of place in the winter world. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 431-431
, clipped on Tuesday, February 27, 2018 10:25:50 AM
When temperatures are very low, cells pucker into balls of syrup, unfrozen repositories of life, surrounded by shards of ice. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 478-479
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 12:41:15 AM
has frozen solid, no more heat is released. But water inside cells Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 475-476
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 12:45:26 AM
Although their evergreen leaves and stems let them feed on warm winter days, the source of their green, chlorophyll, can be unruly in cold weather. Chlorophyll captures energy from the sun and converts it into a buzz of excited electrons. In warm weather, the electrons’ energy is quickly shunted to the food-making process in the cell. But this shunt seizes up in cold weather, leaving cells awash in overexcited electrons. Unchecked, the undirected energy will trash the cell. To forestall the riot of electrons, evergreens prepare for winter by stocking their cells with chemicals that intercept and neutralize the unwanted electron energy. We know these chemicals as vitamins, particularly vitamins C and E. Native Americans also knew this and chewed winter evergreens to keep healthy through the winter. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 480-485
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 10:41:30 AM
If a deer is fed corn or leafy greens in the middle of winter, its rumen will be knocked off balance, acidity will rise uncontrollably, and gases will bloat the rumen. Indigestion of this kind can be lethal. Young ruminants face a similar digestive problem when they suckle their mother’s teats. Milk would ferment and create gas in the rumen, especially in immature animals whose rumens have yet to be fully colonized by microbes. The sucking reflex therefore triggers the opening of a bypass that sends milk past the rumen, into the next part of the stomach. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 560-564
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 11:53:28 AM
These widowed plants wear history on their sleeves, giving us a glimpse into the bereavement of the whole forest. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 629-630
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 11:59:37 AM
A forest without large herbivores is an orchestra without violins. We have grown accustomed to incomplete symphonies, and we balk when the violins’ incessant tones return and push against the more familiar instruments. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 644-645
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 12:01:42 PM
Then again, no one is quite sure what a salamander “species” really is, which suggests that nature doesn’t conform to our desire to draw firm lines. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 751-752
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 2:17:35 PM
Plethodon is a shape-shifter, truly a cloud. Its courtship and parenting defy our haughty categories, its lungs were traded for stronger jaws, its body parts are detachable, and it is paradoxically moisture loving yet never enters bodies of water. And, like all clouds, it is vulnerable to strong winds. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 807-810
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 2:30:03 PM
Our physicians no longer believe that God left providential medicinal hints in the shapes of leaves and in the arrangement of the stars. We should not, however, be too quick to dismiss the Doctrine of Signatures as a trifling superstition. As a method of cultural transmission of medical knowledge, the doctrine was a powerful organizing device, richer and perhaps more coherent than the mnemonics used by modern physicians to navigate their large stores of knowledge. The method gave healers, most of whom could not read, linguistic cues to connect patients’ symptoms with the sometimes arcane details of botanical identification and medical knowledge. The Doctrine of Signatures persisted for so many years not because our ancestors were simpleminded but because it was so useful. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 862-867
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 2:34:27 PM
These may not reflect life’s complicated genealogies and reproductive exchanges. Modern genetics suggests that boundaries in nature are often more permeable than we suppose when we name “separate” species. On this bright morning in early Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 872-874
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 2:35:36 PM
Likewise, our naming imposes tidy categories on nature. These may not reflect life’s complicated genealogies and reproductive exchanges. Modern genetics suggests that boundaries in nature are often more permeable than we suppose when we name “separate” species. On this bright morning in early spring, the Hepatica’s confident welcome of the first warm sun and flying bees reminds me that the mandala exists independent of human doctrines. Like all people, I am culture-bound, so I only partly see the flower; the rest of my field of vision is occupied by centuries of human words. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 871-876
, clipped on Thursday, March 1, 2018 2:35:50 PM
I return to the lens world and rediscover the vivid tentacles, the snail’s black-and-silver grace. The hand lens helps me harvest the world’s beauty, throwing my eyes wide open. Layers of delight are hidden by the limitations of everyday human vision. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 910-912
, clipped on Friday, March 2, 2018 1:52:49 AM
eggs into the nursery. The queen responds by eating Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1007-1008
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 2:27:27 AM
by eating the eggs and releasing odors that suppress Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1008-1008
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 2:27:40 AM
by eating the eggs and releasing odors that suppress Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1008-1008
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 2:27:48 AM
After all, disturbance is natural. The old “balance of nature” cliché went out of fashion decades ago. Now the forest is a “dynamic system,” constantly assaulted by wind, fire, and humans, always in motion. Indeed, we can turn the question on its head and ask whether we need to go out and do some clear-cutting, to replace the fires that used to clear large areas of forest but have been suppressed by land managers for nearly a hundred years now. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1065-1068
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 12:54:36 PM
We are tempted to use nature as a model, but nature provides a Baskin-Robbins of justifications. Which flavor of forest life cycle would you like: the annihilating force of an ice age; or an ancient, undisturbed mountainside; or the dancing mischief of a summer tornado? Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1070-1072
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 12:54:58 PM
believe that the answers, or their beginnings, are found in our quiet windows on the whole. Only by examining the fabric that holds and sustains us can we see our place and, therefore, our responsibilities. A direct experience of the forest gives us the humility to put our life and desires into that bigger context that inspires all the great moral traditions. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1101-1104
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 8:43:58 PM
For these species, desperate self-love is better than no love at all when inclement weather grounds their pollinating insects. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1131-1132
, clipped on Saturday, March 3, 2018 8:59:16 PM
Nectar robbers, for example, exert a stealthy but powerful influence over floral design. An ant has buried its head in a spring beauty flower in front of me. I use the hand lens to watch it bypass the pollen and stigma, then upend and steal the flower’s sugary nectar. This robbery is the cost borne by open-cupped flowers for welcoming a diverse set of pollinators: freeloaders move in and exploit your openness. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1163-1166
, clipped on Sunday, March 4, 2018 9:02:44 AM
Like all living creatures, our own lives included, the flowers layer adaptation over history, creating the tension between diversity and unity, individuality and tradition, that makes the mandala’s immoderate blaze so compelling. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1187-1189
, clipped on Sunday, March 4, 2018 9:19:19 AM
Philosophers and theologians love paradoxes, regarding them as honorable signposts to important truths. Scientists take a dimmer view, having learned from experience that “paradox” is a polite way of saying that we are missing something obvious. The resolution of the paradox will likely show one of our “self-evident” assumptions to be embarrassingly false. Perhaps this is not so far removed from a philosophical paradox. The difference lies in the depth of the false assumption: relatively shallow and easily uprooted in science, deep and hard to dislodge in philosophy. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1442-1446
, clipped on Monday, March 5, 2018 12:47:02 AM
The tempo and scale of geology are incommensurable with biological experience. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1517-1517
, clipped on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:06:03 AM
earthquake scoring 3 on the scale is minor, a 6 will do some damage, Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1509-1510
, clipped on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:09:13 AM
and see nothing but trunks in motion. They scissor past one another, bending alarmingly as their crowns surge back Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1582-1583
, clipped on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 1:13:09 AM
The leafhopper on the branch in front of me is therefore Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1659-1659
, clipped on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 7:03:37 AM
The leafhopper on the branch in front of me is therefore a fusion of lives, another Russian doll in the mandala. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1659-1660
, clipped on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 7:03:46 AM
The mandala contains insects designed to steal every part of a plant. Flowers, pollen, leaves, roots, sap are all preyed upon by a diverse toolbox of insect mouthparts. Yet the mandala is green. Leaves are a little tattered, but they still dominate the forest. Above, leaves are stacked in layers, blocking my view of the sky; around me, shrubs stretch out across the hillside, again hemming in my sight; below, my feet rest in a carpet of saplings and forest herbs. The forest seems to be an herbivore’s heavenly banquet. Why is the mandala not stripped bare? This is a simple question, but it is much fought over, and it stirs up controversy among ecologists for good reason. The relationship between herbivores and plants sets the stage for the rest of the forest ecosystem. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1667-1672
, clipped on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 7:05:15 AM
Our domesticated crops have had the toxins bred out of them, giving us a distorted view of the realities of herbivory. Granted, we have not evolved to be leaf eaters and lack the detoxifying biochemistry of most true herbivores, but our inability to eat most of the plants that surround us reveals an important point: the world is not as green as it seems. This point is reinforced by the very fact that other herbivores have specialized biochemical methods to neutralize the toxins in their food. The mandala is not a banquet waiting for guests to arrive but a devil’s buffet of poisoned plates from which herbivores snatch the least deadly morsels. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1688-1692
, clipped on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 7:10:13 AM
Female birds take to heart Thoreau’s wish to “suck out all the marrow of life”—they suck dry their own bones to make new life each spring. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1800-1801
, clipped on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 9:14:47 AM
This ripple in the cloth floats across the forest, perhaps finding a hem at which to end, perhaps floating on forever, drifting through the mosquitoes, viruses, humans, ever outward. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1822-1823
, clipped on Wednesday, March 7, 2018 9:21:56 AM
Love triangles are fraught; love hexagons are war zones. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 1995-1996
, clipped on Saturday, March 10, 2018 9:05:22 PM
Evolutionary theorists have treated this puzzle as a problem in natural economics. Just as a business manager decides how best to allocate the company’s resources, biologists conceptualize natural selection as a process that decides how organisms will invest their reproductive energies. The human manager uses foresight and reason, but natural selection works by continually throwing out new ideas, then weeding out the ineffective in favor of the fecund. Nature has no shortage of new sexual ideas: every generation of snails has a few individuals that are unisexual, just as a small number of birds, insects, and mammals are born as hermaphrodites. There is therefore plenty of raw material to stimulate nature’s free market of sexual roles. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2008-2013
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:03:22 AM
The snails’ hermaphroditic embrace, seemingly so alien to most humans, is a reminder that sexuality in nature is more malleable and diverse than we might at first suppose. July 2nd—Fungi Rain has gushed over the mandala for two days and two nights. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2030-2036
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:05:38 AM
The snails’ hermaphroditic embrace, seemingly so alien to most humans, is a reminder that sexuality in nature is more malleable and diverse than we might at first suppose. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2030-2031
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:05:44 AM
From my prostrate position, I see hundreds of small cups and mushrooms spread across the surface of the mandala’s leaf litter. Every decaying twig has one or more clusters of colored cups. Tiny brown mushrooms crown most of the dead leaves. That so many species and individuals could suddenly appear from a forest floor that I have gazed at for months is a reminder of how much of the forest’s life is invisible to us, even with close observation. But unseen does not mean unimportant: these are the engines of decay, keeping nutrients and energy moving through the forest ecosystem. The lush summer productivity of this forest depends on the vitality of the underground fungal network. July 13th—Fireflies My body is tense as I pick through the misty air on my way to the mandala. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2116-2125
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:17:22 AM
From my prostrate position, I see hundreds of small cups and mushrooms spread across the surface of the mandala’s leaf litter. Every decaying twig has one or more clusters of colored cups. Tiny brown mushrooms crown most of the dead leaves. That so many species and individuals could suddenly appear from a forest floor that I have gazed at for months is a reminder of how much of the forest’s life is invisible to us, even with close observation. But unseen does not mean unimportant: these are the engines of decay, keeping nutrients and energy moving through the forest ecosystem. The lush summer productivity of this forest depends on the vitality of the underground fungal network. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2116-2120
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:17:28 AM
When laughing children chase after fireflies, they are not pursuing beetles but catching wonder. When wonder matures, it peels back experience to seek deeper layers of marvel below. This is science’s highest purpose. And Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2157-2158
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:53:54 AM
The plants’ response to the sudden influx of light is paradoxical. They unplug and roll away, seeming to shun the very thing that they have been seeking. The mandala’s herbs sip at a mean trickle of light for most of the day, then hide their mouths under an umbrella when the deluge comes. But such is the force of the sunfleck’s downpour that water splashes under the umbrella’s rim, and plants receive a mouthful of Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2216-2219
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:58:45 PM
The plants’ response to the sudden influx of light is paradoxical. They unplug and roll away, seeming to shun the very thing that they have been seeking. The mandala’s herbs sip at a mean trickle of light for most of the day, then hide their mouths under an umbrella when the deluge comes. But such is the force of the sunfleck’s downpour that water splashes under the umbrella’s rim, and plants receive a mouthful of life. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2216-2219
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 10:58:51 PM
Darwin’s claim is that all life is made from the same cloth, so we cannot dismiss the effects of jangling nerves in caterpillars by claiming that only our nerves cause real pain. If we accept the evolutionary continuity of life, we can no longer close the door to empathy with other animals. Our flesh is their flesh. Our nerves are built on the same plan as insect nerves. Descent from a common ancestor implies that caterpillar pain and human pain are similar, just as caterpillar nerves and human nerves are similar. Certainly, caterpillar pain may differ in texture or quantity from our own, just as caterpillar skin or eyes differ, but we have no reason to believe that the weight of suffering is any lighter for nonhuman animals. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2246-2251
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 11:02:14 PM
The idea that consciousness is a humans-only gift likewise has no empirical basis: it is an assumption. But even if the assumption were correct, it would not resolve Darwin’s ichneumon challenge. Is suffering greater when pain is embedded in a mind that can see beyond the present moment? Or, would it be worse to be locked in an unconscious world where pain is the only reality? A matter of taste, perhaps, but the latter option strikes me as the poorer one. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2252-2255
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 11:02:33 PM
The beauty of it cannot be understood, either, and when you see beauty in desolation it changes something inside you. Desolation tries to colonize you. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 47-48
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 11:17:24 PM
Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 76-77
, clipped on Sunday, March 11, 2018 11:22:25 PM
The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been deemed an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining. And I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally. For example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the psychologist’s lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still floundering and apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 106-109
, clipped on Monday, March 12, 2018 5:06:00 AM
The surveyor cursed, and glared at her. She had a temper that must have been deemed an asset. The anthropologist, as was her way, got to her feet, uncomplaining. And I, as was my way, was too busy observing to take this rude awakening personally. For example, I noticed the cruelty of the almost imperceptible smile on the psychologist’s lips as she watched us struggle to adjust, the anthropologist still floundering and apologizing for floundering. Later I realized I might have misread her expression; it might have been pained or self-pitying. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 106-110
, clipped on Monday, March 12, 2018 5:06:07 AM
Unlike top predators such as wolves, coyotes are abundant, and this makes them particularly invulnerable to attempts at eradication. As the French Revolution discovered, and the predator control arms of the U.S. federal and state governments rediscovered, it is harder Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2361-2363
, clipped on Thursday, March 15, 2018 12:47:30 AM
Unlike top predators such as wolves, coyotes are abundant, and this makes them particularly invulnerable to attempts at eradication. As the French Revolution discovered, and the predator control arms of the U.S. federal and state governments rediscovered, it is harder to stamp out the upper classes than it is to kill the king. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2361-2363
, clipped on Thursday, March 15, 2018 12:47:37 AM
Ecological mandalas do not sit isolated in tidy meditation halls, their shapes carefully designed and circumscribed. Rather, the many-hued sands of this mandala bleed into and out of the shifting rivers of color that wash all around. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2396-2397
, clipped on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:22:30 AM
The mandala’s community emerges from the give-and-take of thousands of species; a golf course’s ecological community is a monoculture of alien grass that emerged from the mind of just one species. The mandala’s visual field is dominated by sex and death: dead leaves, pollen, birdsong. The golf course has been sanitized by the puritan life-police. The golf green is fed and trimmed to keep it in perpetual childhood: no dead stems, no flowers or seed heads. Sex and death are erased. A strange country. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2414-2417
, clipped on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:25:48 AM
But, to love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful, and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, lack of compassion for the world. Including ourselves. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2436-2439
, clipped on Thursday, March 15, 2018 8:28:03 AM
By specializing on the task of feasting, caterpillars have opened a business in which they have few rivals. In most forests they consume more leaves than all other herbivores combined. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2603-2605
, clipped on Saturday, March 17, 2018 3:40:42 PM
To ride the wind with such energy-saving ease, the great paddlelike wings catch updrafts and eddies, turning to the birds’ advantage every rising puff of air. This results in a slow, teetering flight style whose superficial inelegance hides its extraordinary efficiency. The drunkard is a thrifty genius with no need for maneuverability, grace, or speed. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2679-2682
, clipped on Sunday, March 18, 2018 2:42:41 AM
In the modern world, the turkey vultures’ sense of smell can sometimes lead them up dead ends (figuratively, for a change). They circle over abattoirs that, although they look like ordinary warehouses, send skyward the aroma of the recently departed. Pipelines offer similar frustrations. Gas companies add a small amount of an odorous chemical called ethyl mercaptan to the otherwise odorless natural gas in their transmission pipes. If a valve or pipe seam fails, the smelly chemical leaks out with the natural gas, alerting human noses to an explosion hazard. But vultures also smell the leak and will congregate around cracked pipes, becoming unwitting assistants in the search for pipeline flaws. This tangle of vulture and human noses is caused by the bouquet of death—ethyl mercaptan is given off naturally by corpses. Because humans have a deep aversion to rotting meat, our noses are extremely sensitive to ethyl mercaptan. We can pick out its smell at concentrations two hundred times lower than our threshold for ammonia, which is itself strongly odorous. Gas companies need therefore add only minuscule amounts of the smelly chemical to their pipes. Unfortunately for turkey vultures, they also can smell these low concentrations and gather in confusion at leaks. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2692-2701
, clipped on Monday, March 19, 2018 12:45:16 AM
caterpillar toxins have loosed their allegiance to the status quo or, more likely, their molt strategy is like their breeding style, designed to take advantage of local bursts of richness, Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2784-2785
, clipped on Thursday, March 22, 2018 2:06:01 AM
The mandala’s birds and mammals live embedded in an acoustic network, each individual connected to others through sound. The forest’s news ripples through this network, carrying the latest information about the location and activities of troublemakers. It takes some effort for us urbanized humans to become aware of these traveling signals. We are accustomed to ignoring “background noise,” instead taking our cues from the interior noise of our minds. Most of my time sitting or walking in the woods is spent riding waves inside my head, thinking of past or future. I suspect that this is a common experience. Only a repeated act of the will can bring us back to the present, back to our senses. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2815-2820
, clipped on Saturday, March 24, 2018 8:11:50 AM
When I sit or walk in the forest I am not a “subject” observing “objects.” I enter the mandala and am caught up in webs of communication, networks of relationships. Whether or not I am aware of it, I change these webs by alarming a deer, startling a chipmunk, or stepping on a living leaf. Dissociated observation is not possible in the mandala. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2850-2852
, clipped on Saturday, March 24, 2018 8:22:21 AM
My zoological self was immediately embarrassed by these thoughts. Naturalists are meant to have outgrown such judgments. “Cute” is for children and amateurs, especially when applied to a common animal like a raccoon. I try to see animals for what they are, independent beings, not as projections of desires leaping unbidden from my psyche. But, like it or not, the feelings were there. I wanted to pick up a raccoon and tickle it under the chin. Surely this was the ultimate humiliation of the zoologist’s scientific hauteur. Darwin might have sympathized with my plight; he knew the emotional power of faces. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published a decade after On the Origin of Species, Darwin explained how human and animal faces reflect emotional states. Our nervous systems scribe our inward feelings onto our faces, even when our intellect would rather conceal what is within. Sensitivity to the nuances of facial expression is a core part of our being, Darwin claimed. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 2980-2988
, clipped on Saturday, March 24, 2018 10:39:21 AM
My ancestors lived in community with animals of forests and grasslands for hundreds of thousands of years. As in all other species, my brain and my psychological affinities have been built by these millennia of ecological interactions. Human culture now modifies, blends, and transforms my mental predispositions, but it does not replace them. By my returning to the forest, albeit as an observer rather than a full participant in the community, my psychological inheritance starts to reveal itself. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3016-3019
, clipped on Saturday, March 24, 2018 10:47:21 AM
The superior pattern-finding abilities of dichromats may seem a peculiar but unimportant quirk of an unlucky mutation. Two facts suggest otherwise. First, the frequency of dichromatism in humans, two to eight percent of all males (the genetic change is on the male sex chromosome), is much higher than would be expected if the condition were a maladaptation. Such commonness suggests that evolution may, in some circumstances, smile on the condition. Second, our cousins the monkeys, specifically the New World monkeys, also have both dichromats and trichromats living together within the same species. Dichromats in these species make up half or more of the population, again suggesting that dichromatism is not just an accidental defect. Feeding experiments with marmosets found that dichromats have an advantage over trichromats when light is dim, perhaps by seeing patterns and texture that were missed by trichromats. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3115-3121
, clipped on Sunday, March 25, 2018 10:31:00 AM
The balance between weight and power is the background to the rest of bird biology. Land-bound animals carry their reproductive organs around all year, but birds atrophy their testes and ovaries after they breed, shrinking them to tiny specks of tissue. Teeth are likewise dispensed with in favor of a paper-thin beak and grinding stomach. The droppings on our car windshields are another part of the birds’ strategy. By excreting white crystals of uric acid instead of watery urea, birds forgo the need for a heavy bladder. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3175-3179
, clipped on Sunday, March 25, 2018 11:17:21 PM
The precision and beauty of bird flight is so familiar that our wonder is jaded. We should be frozen in amazement at the cardinal landing on the feeder or the sparrow banking around cars in the parking lot. Instead, we walk by as if an animal Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3190-3192
, clipped on Sunday, March 25, 2018 11:20:06 PM
The precision and beauty of bird flight is so familiar that our wonder is jaded. We should be frozen in amazement at the cardinal landing on the feeder or the sparrow banking around cars in the parking Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3190-3191
, clipped on Sunday, March 25, 2018 11:20:24 PM
A peek is about all that anyone is given. Of the billion microbes that live in the half handful of soil that I have exposed, only one percent can be cultivated and studied in the lab. The interdependencies among the other ninety-nine percent are so tight, and our ignorance about how to mimic or replicate these bonds is so deep, that the microbes die if isolated from the whole. The soil’s microbial community is therefore a grand mystery, with most of its inhabitants living unnamed and unknown to humanity. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3375-3379
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 1:10:22 AM
As we chisel away at the edges of this mystery, jewels fall out of the eroding block of ignorance. The earthy smell that embraces my nose comes from one of the brightest jewels, the actinomycetes, strange semicolonial bacteria from which soil biologists have extracted many of our most successful antibiotics. Like the healing chemicals in foxglove, willow, and spirea, the actinomycetes use these molecules in their struggle with other species, secreting antibiotics to subdue or kill their competitors or enemies. We Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3379-3383
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 1:10:33 AM
The fungus-root, or mycorrhizal, relationship was first discovered as a spin-off from the King of Prussia’s attempts to cultivate truffles. His biologist failed to domesticate the valuable fungus, but he discovered that the underground fungal network that produces truffles is connected to tree roots. He later showed that these fungi were not parasites, as he first suspected, but acted as “wet nurses” passing nutrients to trees and increasing their rate of growth. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3444-3447
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 1:21:16 AM
Our minds are like trees—they are stunted if grown without the nourishing fungus of culture. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3465-3465
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 1:22:52 AM
Perhaps soil scientists are rediscovering and extending what our culture already knows and has embedded into our language. The more we learn about the life of the soil, the more apt our language’s symbols become: “roots,” “groundedness.” These words reflect not only a physical connection to place but reciprocity with the environment, mutual dependence with other members of the community, and the positive effects of roots on the rest of their home. All these relationships are embedded in a history so deep that individuality has started to dissolve and uprootedness is impossible. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3481-3485
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 1:24:52 AM
Yet the separation that I feel is more than a heightened awareness of my ignorance. I have understood in some deep place that I am unnecessary here, as is all humanity. There is loneliness in this realization, poignancy in my irrelevance. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3669-3670
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 10:20:22 AM
Indeed, one outcome of my watch at the mandala has been to realize that we create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding “pristine” places that will bring wonder to us. Gardens, urban trees, the sky, fields, young forests, a flock of suburban sparrows: these are all mandalas. Watching them Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3708-3710
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 10:23:40 AM
Indeed, one outcome of my watch at the mandala has been to realize that we create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding “pristine” places that will bring wonder to us. Gardens, urban trees, the sky, fields, young forests, a flock of suburban sparrows: these are all mandalas. Watching them closely is as fruitful as watching an ancient woodland. Haskell, DavidGeorge
, The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature.
loc. 3708-3710
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 10:23:45 AM
There are certain kinds of deaths that one should not be expected to relive, certain kinds of connections so deep that when they are broken you feel the snap of the link inside you. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 538-539
, clipped on Monday, March 26, 2018 9:43:30 PM
I enjoyed the bars, but not for the same reasons as my husband. I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1296-1297
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:04:39 PM
I enjoyed the bars, but not for the same reasons as my husband. I loved the late-night slow burn of being out, my mind turning over some problem, some piece of data, while able to appear sociable but still existing apart. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1296-1297
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:04:47 PM
“Ghost bird, do you love me?” he whispered once in the dark, before he left for his expedition training, even though he was the ghost. “Ghost bird, do you need me?” I loved him, but I didn’t need him, and I thought that was the way it was supposed to be. A ghost bird might be a hawk in one place, a crow in another, depending on the context. The sparrow that shot up into the blue sky one morning might transform mid-flight into an osprey the next. This was the way of things here. There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1312-1316
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:07:01 PM
(For the same reason, I suppose, I have continued to refer to the changes in me as a “brightness,” because to examine this condition too closely—to quantify it or deal with it empirically when I have little control over it—would make it too real.) VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1378-1380
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:19:23 PM
About me she had only this cryptic phrase: “Silence creates its own violence.” How insightful. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1609-1609
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:39:12 PM
I hesitated for just a moment. Some part of me wanted to see the creature, after having heard it for so many days. Was it the remnants of the scientist in me, trying to regroup, trying to apply logic when all that mattered was survival? VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1688-1689
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 5:50:44 PM
I didn’t tell my husband my walk had a destination because I wanted to keep the lot for myself. There are so many things couples do from habit and because they are expected to, and I didn’t mind those rituals. Sometimes I even enjoyed them. But I needed to be selfish about that patch of urban wilderness. It expanded in my mind while I was at work, calmed me, gave me a series of miniature dramas to look forward VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 1857-1860
, clipped on Tuesday, March 27, 2018 6:07:46 PM
But the longer I stared at it, the less comprehensible the creature became. The more it became something alien to me, and the more I had a sense that I knew nothing at all—about nature, about ecosystems. There was something about my mood and its dark glow that eclipsed sense, that made me see this creature, which had indeed been assigned a place in the taxonomy—catalogued, studied, and described—irreducible down to any of that. And if I kept looking, I knew that ultimately I would have to admit I knew less than nothing about myself as well, whether that was a lie or the truth. VanderMeer, Jeff
, Annihilation: A Novel (The Southern Reach Trilogy).
loc. 2089-2093
, clipped on Thursday, March 29, 2018 8:37:11 AM
She said I made virtues of her flaws because it was my nature to shelter loved ones from the truth. Something lurked inside the truth, Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 70-71
, clipped on Saturday, March 31, 2018 10:41:43 AM
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die, to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name, you Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 451-454
, clipped on Tuesday, April 3, 2018 10:58:57 PM
In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It's everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die, to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don't know a name, you know a street name, a dog's name. 'He drove an orange Mazda.' Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 451-454
, clipped on Tuesday, April 3, 2018 10:59:06 PM
Sometimes I feel I've wandered into a Far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted. Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 487-487
, clipped on Wednesday, April 4, 2018 11:41:49 PM
In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Cavalli-Sforza wrote that he was excluding from his analysis populations known to be the product of major migrations, such as those of European and African ancestry in the Americas that owe their origin to transatlantic migrations in the last five hundred years, or European minorities such as Roma and Jews. His bet was that the past was a much simpler place than the present, and that by focusing on populations today that are not affected by major migrations in their recorded history, he might be studying direct descendants of people who lived in the same places long before. But what the study of ancient DNA has now shown is that the past was no less complicated than the present. Human populations have repeatedly turned over. David Reich
, Who We Are and How We Got Here.
loc. 262-267
, clipped on Friday, April 6, 2018 7:27:12 PM
my Ph.D. supervisor, David Goldstein, and his wife, Kavita Nayar, both of whom had been students of Cavalli-Sforza. It was 1999, a decade before the advent of genome-wide ancient DNA, and we daydreamed together, wondering how accurately events of the past could be reconstructed by traces left behind. After a grenade explosion in a room, could the exact position of each object prior to the explosion be reconstructed by piecing together the scattered remains and studying the shrapnel in the wall? Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago? Today, ancient DNA is enabling this kind of detailed reconstruction of deep relationships among ancient human populations. David Reich
, Who We Are and How We Got Here.
loc. 358-363
, clipped on Friday, April 6, 2018 8:32:39 PM
I remember a dinner at the end of graduate school with my Ph.D. supervisor, David Goldstein, and his wife, Kavita Nayar, both of whom had been students of Cavalli-Sforza. It was 1999, a decade before the advent of genome-wide ancient DNA, and we daydreamed together, wondering how accurately events of the past could be reconstructed by traces left behind. After a grenade explosion in a room, could the exact position of each object prior to the explosion be reconstructed by piecing together the scattered remains and studying the shrapnel in the wall? Could languages long extinct be recalled by unsealing a cave still reverberating with the echoes of words spoken there thousands of years ago? Today, ancient DNA is enabling this kind of detailed reconstruction of deep relationships among ancient human populations. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 371-377
, clipped on Friday, April 6, 2018 10:42:46 PM
A great surprise that emerges from the genome revolution is that in the relatively recent past, human populations were just as different from each other as they are today, but that the fault lines across populations were almost unrecognizably different from today. DNA extracted from remains of people who lived, say, ten thousand years ago shows that the structure of human populations at that time was qualitatively different. Present-day populations are blends of past populations, which were blends themselves. The African American and Latino populations of the Americas are only the latest in a long line of major population mixtures. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 414-419
, clipped on Friday, April 6, 2018 10:44:20 PM
I make arguments along these lines in my applications to the U.S. National Institutes of Health, in which I propose to find disease risk factors that occur at different frequencies across populations. Grants of this type have funded much of my work since I started my laboratory in 2003. True as these arguments are, I wish I had responded differently. We scientists are conditioned by the system of research funding to justify what we do in terms of practical application to health or technology. But shouldn’t intrinsic curiosity be valued for itself? Shouldn’t fundamental inquiry into who we are be the pinnacle of what we as a species hope to achieve? Isn’t an attribute of an enlightened society that it values intellectual activity that may not have immediate economic or other practical impact? The study of the human past—as of art, music, literature, or cosmology—is vital because it makes us aware of aspects of our common condition that are profoundly important and that we heretofore never imagined. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 464-472
, clipped on Friday, April 6, 2018 11:49:07 PM
Outside of Africa and the Near East, though, there is no convincing evidence of anatomically modern humans older than a hundred thousand years and very limited evidence older than around fifty thousand years.6 Archaeological evidence of stone tool types also points to a great change after around fifty thousand years ago, a period known to archaeologists of West Eurasia as the Upper Paleolithic, and to archaeologists of Africa as the Later Stone Age. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 527-531
, clipped on Friday, April 6, 2018 11:59:07 PM
The intensification of evidence for modern human behavior after fifty thousand years ago is undeniable, and raises the question of whether biological change contributed to it. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 565-566
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 12:06:00 AM
Females create an average of about forty-five new splices when producing eggs, while males create about twenty-six splices when producing sperm, for a total of about seventy-one new splices per generation.20 So it is that as we trace each generation back further into the past, a person’s genome is derived from an ever-increasing number of spliced-together ancestral fragments. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 623-626
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 12:20:51 AM
Twenty generations in the past, the number of ancestors is almost a thousand times greater than the number of ancestral stretches of DNA in a person’s genome, so it is a certainty that each person has not inherited any DNA from the great majority of his or her actual ancestors. These calculations mean that a person’s genealogy, as reconstructed from historical records, is not the same as his or her genetic inheritance. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 632-636
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 7:09:32 AM
Walt Whitman, in the poem “Song of Myself,” wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Whitman could just as well have been talking about the Li and Durbin experiment and its demonstration that a whole population history is contained within a single person as revealed by the multitude of ancestors Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 686-689
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 7:24:43 AM
Walt Whitman, in the poem “Song of Myself,” wrote, “Do I contradict myself? / Very well, then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes).” Whitman could just as well have been talking about the Li and Durbin experiment and its demonstration that a whole population history is contained within a single person as revealed by the multitude of ancestors whose histories are recorded within that person’s genome. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 686-690
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 7:24:50 AM
The story that is emerging differs from the one we learned as children, or from popular culture. It is full of surprises: massive mixtures of differentiated populations; sweeping population replacements and expansions; and population divisions in prehistoric times that did not fall along the same lines as population differences that exist today. It is a story about how our interconnected human family was formed, in myriad ways never imagined. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 804-807
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 9:28:57 AM
Early on, scientists studying ancient DNA focused almost exclusively on mitochondrial DNA, for two reasons. First, there are about one thousand copies of mitochondrial DNA in each cell, compared to two copies of most of the rest of the genome, increasing the chance of successful extraction. Second, mitochondrial DNA is information-dense: there are many more differences for a given number of DNA letters than in most other places in the genome, making it possible to obtain a more precise measurement of genetic separation time for every letter of DNA that is successfully analyzed. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 885-889
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 9:41:22 AM
The reduction in Neanderthal ancestry in present-day Europeans is due to the fact that they harbor some of their ancestry from a group of people who separated from all other non-Africans prior to the mixture with Neanderthals Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1066-1068
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 3:28:23 PM
The problematic mutations in the Neanderthal genome form a sharp contrast with more recent mixtures of divergent modern human populations where there is no evidence for such effects. For example, among African Americans, in studies of about thirty thousand people, we have found no evidence for natural selection against African or European ancestry.43 One explanation for this is that when Neanderthals and modern humans mixed they had been separated for about ten times longer than had West Africans and Europeans, giving that much more time for biological incompatibilities to develop. A second explanation relates to the observation, from studies of many species, that when infertility arises between populations, it is often due to interactions between two genes in different parts of the genome. Since two changes are required to produce such an incompatibility, the rate of infertility increases with the square of population separation time, so a ten-times-larger population separation translates to one hundred times more genetic incompatibility. In light of this the lack of infertility in hybrids of present-day humans may no longer seem so surprising. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1200-1210
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 3:54:18 PM
These teeth were enormous, beyond the range of nearly all teeth previously reported in the genus Homo. Large molars are thought to be biological adaptations to a diet that includes lots of tough uncooked plants. Prior to the Denisovans, the humans closest to us who were known to have had teeth of this size were the primarily plant-eating australopithecenes, like the famous “Lucy,” whose skeleton, dating to more than three million years ago, was found in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia. “Lucy” did not use tools and had a brain only slightly larger than chimpanzees’ after correcting for her smaller body size, but she walked upright. Thus the little skeletal information we had confirmed the idea that Denisovans were very distinctive compared to both Neanderthals and modern humans. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1305-1311
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 4:10:34 PM
One of the profound implications of the Denisovan discovery was that East Eurasia is a central stage of human evolution and not a sideshow as westerners often assume. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1417-1418
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 4:31:43 PM
By examining mutations that occur at 100 percent frequency in present-day Africans, and measuring the excess rate at which they matched the Neanderthal over the Denisovan genome, we estimated that the unknown archaic population that interbred into Denisovans first split off from the lineage leading to modern humans 1.4 to 0.9 million years ago and that this unknown archaic population contributed at least 3 to 6 percent of Denisovan-related ancestry. The date is shaky, as knowledge of the human mutation rate is poor. However, even with the uncertainty about the mutation rate, we can estimate relative dates reasonably well, and we can be confident that this previously unsampled human population split off at about twice the separation time of Denisovans, Neanderthals, and modern humans. I think of this group as “superarchaic” humans, as they represent a more deeply splitting lineage than Denisovans. They are what I call a “ghost” population, a population we do not have data from in unmixed form, but whose past existence can be detected from its genetic contributions to later people. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1467-1475
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 4:49:58 PM
At roughly half this time, another group may have split off the lineage leading to modern humans and then spread throughout Eurasia. This group may have mixed into the superarchaic population, contributing the largest proportion of ancestry to populations in the west that evolved into Neanderthals, and a smaller but still substantial proportion of ancestry to populations in the east that became the ancestors of Denisovans. This scenario would explain the findings of two anciently divergent mitochondrial DNA types in the different groups. It could also explain an odd unpublished observation I have: that in studying the variation in the time since the common genetic ancestor of modern human genomes with both Denisovan and Neanderthal genomes, I have not been able to find evidence for a superarchaic population that contributed to Denisovans but not to Neanderthals. Instead the patterns suggest that Denisovans and Neanderthals both had ancestry from the same superarchaic population, with just a larger proportion present in the Denisovans. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1562-1570
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 5:56:15 PM
What we had found was evidence that people in northern Europe, such as the French, are descended from a mixture of populations, one of which shared more ancestry with present-day Native Americans than with any other population living today. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1652-1654
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 6:17:02 PM
The case of the Ancient North Eurasians showed that while a tree is a good analogy for the relationships among species—because species rarely interbreed and so like real tree limbs are not expected to grow back together after they branch5—it is a dangerous analogy for human populations. The genome revolution has taught us that great mixtures of highly divergent populations have occurred repeatedly.6 Instead of a tree, a better metaphor may be a trellis, branching and remixing far back into the past. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1669-1674
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 6:18:37 PM
The second breakthrough was the recognition that the inner-ear part of the skull—known as the petrous bone—preserves a far higher density of DNA than most other skeletal parts, up to one hundred times more for each milligram of bone powder. Within the petrous bone, the anthropologist Ron Pinhasi, working in Dublin, showed that the mother lode of DNA is found in the cochlea, Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1883-1885
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:11:41 PM
the degree of genetic differentiation between the first farmers of the western part of the Near East (the Fertile Crescent, including Anatolia and the Levant) and the first farmers of the eastern part (Iran) was about as great as the differentiation between Europeans and East Asians today. In the Near East, the expansion of farming was accomplished not just by the movement of people, as happened in Europe, but also by the spread of common ideas across genetically very different groups. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1895-1898
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:12:45 PM
Spurred by the revolutionary technology of plant and animal domestication, which could support much higher population densities than hunting and gathering, the farmers of the Near East began migrating and mixing with their neighbors. But instead of one group displacing all the others and pushing them to extinction, as had occurred in some of the previous spreads of hunter-gatherers in Europe, in the Near East all the expanding groups contributed to later populations. The farmers in present-day Turkey expanded into Europe. The farmers in present-day Israel and Jordan expanded into East Africa, and their genetic legacy is greatest in present-day Ethiopia. Farmers related to those in present-day Iran expanded into India as well as the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas. They mixed with local populations there and established new economies based on herding that allowed the agricultural revolution to spread into parts of the world inhospitable to domesticated crops. The different food-producing populations also mixed with one another, a process that was accelerated by technological developments in the Bronze Age after around five thousand years ago. This meant that the high genetic substructure that had previously characterized West Eurasia collapsed into the present-day very low level of genetic differentiation by the Bronze Age. It is an extraordinary example of how technology—in this case, domestication—contributed to homogenization, not just culturally but genetically. It shows that what is happening with the Industrial Revolution and the information revolution in our own time is not unique in the history of our species. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1904-1916
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:15:46 PM
The fusion of these highly different populations into today’s West Eurasians is vividly evident in what might be considered the classic northern European look: blue eyes, light skin, and blond hair. Analysis of ancient DNA data shows that western European hunter-gatherers around eight thousand years ago had blue eyes but dark skin and dark hair, a combination that is rare today.33 The first farmers of Europe mostly had light skin but dark hair and brown eyes—thus light skin in Europe largely owes its origins to migrating farmers.34 The earliest known example of the classic European blond hair mutation is in an Ancient North Eurasian from the Lake Baikal region of eastern Siberia from seventeen thousand years ago.35 The hundreds of millions of copies of this mutation in central and western Europe today likely derive from a massive migration into the region of people bearing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, an event that is related in the next chapter Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1916-1924
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:16:32 PM
northern European look: blue eyes, light skin, and blond hair. Analysis of ancient DNA data shows that western European hunter-gatherers around eight thousand years ago had blue eyes but dark skin and dark hair, a combination that is rare today.33 The first farmers of Europe mostly had light skin but dark hair and brown eyes—thus light skin in Europe largely owes its origins to migrating farmers.34 The earliest known example of the classic European blond hair mutation is in an Ancient North Eurasian from the Lake Baikal region of eastern Siberia from seventeen thousand years ago.35 The hundreds of millions of copies of this mutation in central and western Europe today likely derive from a massive migration into the region of people bearing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, an event that is related in the next chapter Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1917-1924
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:16:44 PM
The fusion of these highly different populations into today’s West Eurasians is vividly evident in what might be considered the classic northern European look: blue eyes, light skin, and blond hair. Analysis of ancient DNA data shows that western European hunter-gatherers around eight thousand years ago had blue eyes but dark skin and dark hair, a combination that is rare today.33 The first farmers of Europe mostly had light skin but dark hair and brown eyes—thus light skin in Europe largely owes its origins to migrating farmers.34 The earliest known example of the classic European blond hair mutation is in an Ancient North Eurasian from the Lake Baikal region of eastern Siberia from seventeen thousand years ago.35 The hundreds of millions of copies of this mutation in central and western Europe today likely derive from a massive migration into the region of people bearing Ancient North Eurasian ancestry, Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1916-1924
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:16:59 PM
By demonstrating that the genetic fault lines in West Eurasia between ten thousand and four thousand years ago were entirely different from today’s, the ancient DNA revolution has shown that today’s classifications do not reflect fundamental “pure” units of biology. Instead, today’s divisions are recent phenomena, with their origin in repeating mixtures and migrations. The findings of the ancient DNA revolution suggest that the mixtures will continue. Mixture is fundamental to who we are, and we need to embrace it, not deny that it occurred. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 1928-1932
, clipped on Saturday, April 7, 2018 11:17:38 PM
The extraordinary fact that emerges from ancient DNA is that just five thousand years ago, the people who are now the primary ancestors of all extant northern Europeans had not yet arrived. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2062-2064
, clipped on Sunday, April 8, 2018 8:08:22 AM
Is it possible that the steppe people had picked up the plague and built up an immunity to it, and then transmitted it to the immunologically susceptible central European farmers, causing their numbers to collapse and thereby clearing the way for the Corded Ware culture expansion? This would be a great irony. One of the most important reasons for the collapse of Native American populations after 1492 was infectious diseases spread by Europeans who plausibly had built up some immunity to these diseases after thousands of years of exposure as a result of living in close proximity to their farm animals. But Native Americans, who by and large lacked domesticated animals, likely had much less resistance to them. Was it possible that, in a similar way, northern European farmers after five thousand years ago were decimated by plagues brought from the east, paving the way for the spread of steppe ancestry through Europe? Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2191-2198
, clipped on Sunday, April 8, 2018 8:20:55 AM
The main counterargument to the Anatolian hypothesis is the steppe hypothesis—the idea that Indo-European languages spread from the steppe north of the Black and Caspian seas. The best single argument for the steppe hypothesis prior to the availability of genetic data may be the one constructed by David Anthony, who has shown that the shared vocabulary of the great majority of present-day Indo-European languages is unlikely to be consistent with their having originated much earlier than about six thousand years ago. His key observation is that all extant branches of the Indo-European language family except for the most anciently diverging Anatolian ones that are now extinct (such as ancient Hittite) have an elaborate shared vocabulary for wagons, including words for axle, harness pole, and wheels. Anthony interpreted this sharing as evidence that all Indo-European languages spoken today, from India in the east to the Atlantic fringe in the west, descend from a language spoken by an ancient population that used wagons. This population could not have lived much earlier than about six thousand years ago, since we know from archaeological evidence that it was around then that wheels and wagons spread.44 This date rules out the Anatolian farming expansion into Europe between nine thousand and eight thousand years ago. The obvious candidate for dispersing most of today’s Indo-European languages is thus the Yamnaya, who depended on the technology of wagons and wheels that became widespread around five thousand years ago. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2283-2295
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:13:16 AM
This suggests to me that the most likely location of the population that first spoke an Indo-European language was south of the Caucasus Mountains, perhaps in present-day Iran or Armenia, because ancient DNA from people who lived there matches what we would expect for a source population both for the Yamnaya and for ancient Anatolians. If this scenario is right, the population sent one branch up into the steppe—mixing with steppe hunter-gatherers in a one-to-one ratio to become the Yamnaya as described earlier—and another to Anatolia to found the ancestors of people there who spoke languages such as Hittite. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2304-2309
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:16:22 AM
The genetic data have provided what might seem like uncomfortable support for some of these ideas—suggesting that a single, genetically coherent group was responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages. But the data also reveal that these early discussions were misguided in supposing purity of ancestry. Whether the original Indo-European speakers lived in the Near East or in eastern Europe, the Yamnaya, who were the main group responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across a vast span of the globe, were formed by mixture. The people who practiced the Corded Ware culture were a further mixture, and northwestern Europeans associated with the Bell Beaker culture were yet a further mixture. Ancient DNA has established major migration and mixture between highly divergent populations as a key force shaping human prehistory, and ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science. 6 The Collision That Formed India The Fall of the Indus Civilization In the oldest text of Hinduism, the Rig Veda, the warrior god Indra rides against his impure enemies, or dasa, in a horse-drawn chariot, destroys their fortresses, or pur, and secures land and water for his people, the arya, or Aryans.1 Composed between four thousand and three thousand years ago in Old Sanskrit, the Rig Veda was passed down orally for some two thousand years before being written down, much like the Iliad and Odyssey in Greece, which were composed several hundred years later in another early Indo-European language.2 The Rig Veda is an extraordinary window into the past, as it provides a glimpse of what Indo-European culture might have been like in a period far closer in time to when these languages radiated from a common source. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2321-2340
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:19:44 AM
A great lesson of the ancient DNA revolution is that its findings almost always provide accounts of human migrations that are very different from preexisting models, showing how little we really knew about human migrations and population formation prior to the invention of this new technology. The vision of Indo-Europeans or “Aryans” as a “pure” group has sparked nationalist sentiments in Europe since the nineteenth century.45 There were debates about whether the Celts or the Teutons or other groups were the real “Aryans,” and Nazi racism was fueled by this discussion. The genetic data have provided what might seem like uncomfortable support for some of these ideas—suggesting that a single, genetically coherent group was responsible for spreading many Indo-European languages. But the data also reveal that these early discussions were misguided in supposing purity of ancestry. Whether the original Indo-European speakers lived in the Near East or in eastern Europe, the Yamnaya, who were the main group responsible for spreading Indo-European languages across a vast span of the globe, were formed by mixture. The people who practiced the Corded Ware culture were a further mixture, and northwestern Europeans associated with the Bell Beaker culture were yet a further mixture. Ancient DNA has established major migration and mixture between highly divergent populations as a key force shaping human prehistory, and ideologies that seek a return to a mythical purity are flying in the face of hard science. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2316-2327
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:20:05 AM
The first genetic work in India gave seemingly contradictory results. Researchers studying mitochondrial DNA, always passed down from mothers, found that the vast majority of mitochondrial DNA in Indians was unique to the subcontinent, and they estimated that the Indian mitochondrial DNA types only shared common ancestry with ones predominant outside South Asia many tens of thousands of years ago.16 This suggested that on the maternal line, Indian ancestors had been largely isolated within the subcontinent for a long time, without mixing with neighboring populations to the west, east, or north. In contrast, a good fraction of Y chromosomes in India, passed from father to son, showed closer relatedness to West Eurasians—Europeans, central Asians, and Near Easterners—suggesting mixture. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2420-2427
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:28:03 AM
Some historians of India have thrown up their hands and discounted genetic information due to these apparently conflicting findings. The situation has not been helped by the fact that geneticists do not have formal training in archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics—the fields that have dominated the study of human prehistory—and are prone to make elementary mistakes or to be tripped up by known fallacies when summarizing findings from those fields. But it is foolhardy to ignore genetics. We geneticists may be the barbarians coming late to the study of the human past, but it is always a bad idea to ignore barbarians. We have access to a type of data that no one has had before, and we are wielding these data to address previously unapproachable questions about who ancient peoples were. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2427-2433
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:28:25 AM
Having identified the mixture, we searched for present-day Indian populations that might have escaped it. All the populations on the mainland had some West Eurasian–related ancestry. However, the people of Little Andaman Island had none. The Andamanese were consistent with being isolated descendants of an ancient East Asian–related population that contributed to South Asians. The indigenous people of Little Andaman Island, despite a census size of fewer than one hundred, turned out to be key to understanding the population history of India. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2508-2513
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:34:17 AM
They did not want to be part of a study that suggested a major West Eurasian incursion into India without being absolutely certain as to how the whole-genome data could be reconciled with their mitochondrial DNA findings. They also implied that the suggestion of a migration from West Eurasia would be politically explosive. They did not explicitly say this, but it had obvious overtones of the idea that migration from outside India had a transformative effect on the subcontinent. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2522-2526
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:35:14 AM
We wrote that the people of India today are the outcome of mixtures between two highly differentiated populations, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), who before their mixture were as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians are today. The ANI are related to Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus, but we made no claim about the location of their homeland or any migrations. The ASI descend from a population not related to any present-day populations outside India. We showed that the ANI and ASI had mixed dramatically in India. The result is that everyone in mainland India today is a mix, albeit in different proportions, of ancestry related to West Eurasians, and ancestry more closely related to diverse East Asian and South Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2535-2540
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:36:26 AM
We wrote that the people of India today are the outcome of mixtures between two highly differentiated populations, “Ancestral North Indians” (ANI) and “Ancestral South Indians” (ASI), who before their mixture were as different from each other as Europeans and East Asians are today. The ANI are related to Europeans, central Asians, Near Easterners, and people of the Caucasus, but we made no claim about the location of their homeland or any migrations. The ASI descend from a population not related to any present-day populations outside India. We showed that the ANI and ASI had mixed dramatically in India. The result is that everyone in mainland India today is a mix, albeit in different proportions, of ancestry related to West Eurasians, and ancestry more closely related to diverse East Asian and South Asian populations. No group in India can claim genetic purity. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2535-2542
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:36:32 AM
To make these estimates, we measured the degree of the match of a West Eurasian genome to an Indian genome on the one hand and to a Little Andaman Islander genome on the other. The Little Andamanese were crucial here because they are related (albeit distantly) to the ASI but do not have the West Eurasian–related ancestry present in all mainland Indians, so we could use them as a reference point for our analysis. We then repeated the analysis, now replacing the Indian genome with the genome of a person from the Caucasus to measure the match rate we should expect if a genome was entirely of West Eurasian–related ancestry. By comparing the two numbers, we could ask: “How far is each Indian population from what we would expect for a population of entirely West Eurasian ancestry?” By answering this question we could estimate the proportion of West Eurasian–related ancestry in each Indian population Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2544-2550
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:40:27 AM
The genetic data also hinted at the social status of the ancient ANI (higher social status on average) and ASI (lower social status on average). Groups of traditionally higher social status in the Indian caste system typically have a higher proportion of ANI ancestry than those of traditionally lower social status, even within the same state of India where everyone speaks the same language.23 For example, Brahmins, the priestly caste, tend to have more ANI ancestry than the groups they live among, even those speaking the same language. Although there are groups in India that are exceptions to these patterns, including well-documented cases where whole groups have shifted social status,24 the findings are statistically clear, and suggest that the ANI-ASI mixture in ancient India occurred in the context of social stratification. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2557-2565
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:42:15 AM
The genetic data from Indians today also reveal something about the history of differences in social power between men and women. Around 20 to 40 percent of Indian men and around 30 to 50 percent of eastern European men have a Y-chromosome type that, based on the density of mutations separating people who carry it, descends in the last sixty-eight hundred to forty-eight hundred years from the same male ancestor.25 In contrast, the mitochondrial DNA, passed down along the female line, is almost entirely restricted to India, suggesting that it may have nearly all come from the ASI, even in the north. The only possible explanation for this is major migration between West Eurasia and India in the Bronze Age or afterward. Males with this Y chromosome type were extraordinarily successful at leaving offspring while female immigrants made far less of a genetic contribution. The discrepancy between the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA patterns initially confused historians.26 But a possible explanation is that most of the ANI genetic input into India came from males. This pattern of sex-asymmetric population mixture is disturbingly familiar. Consider African Americans. The approximately 20 percent of ancestry that comes from Europeans derives in an almost four-to-one ratio from the male side.27 Consider Latinos from Colombia. The approximately 80 percent of ancestry that comes from Europeans is derived in an even more unbalanced way from males (a fifty-to-one ratio).28 I explore in part III what this means for the relationships among populations, and between males and females, but the common thread is that males from populations with more power tend to pair with females from populations with less. It is amazing that genetic data can reveal such profound information about the social nature of past Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2565-2581
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:43:42 AM
The genetic data from Indians today also reveal something about the history of differences in social power between men and women. Around 20 to 40 percent of Indian men and around 30 to 50 percent of eastern European men have a Y-chromosome type that, based on the density of mutations separating people who carry it, descends in the last sixty-eight hundred to forty-eight hundred years from the same male ancestor.25 In contrast, the mitochondrial DNA, passed down along the female line, is almost entirely restricted to India, suggesting that it may have nearly all come from the ASI, even in the north. The only possible explanation for this is major migration between West Eurasia and India in the Bronze Age or afterward. Males with this Y chromosome type were extraordinarily successful at leaving offspring while female immigrants made far less of a genetic contribution. The discrepancy between the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA patterns initially confused historians.26 But a possible explanation is that most of the ANI genetic input into India came from males. This pattern of sex-asymmetric population mixture is disturbingly familiar. Consider African Americans. The approximately 20 percent of ancestry that comes from Europeans derives in an almost four-to-one ratio from the male side.27 Consider Latinos from Colombia. The approximately 80 percent of ancestry that comes from Europeans is derived in an even more unbalanced way from males (a fifty-to-one ratio).28 I explore in part III what this means for the relationships among populations, and between males and females, but the common thread is that males from populations with more power tend to pair with females from populations with less. It is amazing that genetic data can reveal such profound information about the social nature of past events. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2565-2582
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:44:08 AM
We found that all Indian groups we analyzed had ANI-ASI mixture dates between four thousand and two thousand years ago, with Indo-European-speaking groups having more recent mixture dates on average than Dravidian-speaking groups. The older mixture dates in Dravidian speakers surprised us. We had expected that the oldest mixtures would be found in Indo-European-speaking groups of the north, as it is presumably there that the mixture first occurred. We then realized that an older date in Dravidians actually makes sense, as the present-day locations of people do not necessarily reflect their past locations. Suppose that the first round of mixture in India happened in the north close to four thousand years ago, and was followed by subsequent waves of mixture in northern India as previously established populations and people with much more West Eurasian ancestry came into contact repeatedly along a boundary zone. The people who were the products of the first mixtures in northern India could plausibly, over thousands of years, have mixed with or migrated to southern India, and thus the dates in southern Indians today would be those of the first round of mixture. Later waves of mixture of West Eurasian–related people into northern Indian groups would then cause the average date of mixture estimated in northern Indians today to be more recent than in southern Indians. A hard look at the genetic data confirms the theory of multiple waves of ANI-related mixture into the north. Interspersed among the short stretches of ANI-derived DNA we find in northern Indians, we also find quite long stretches of ANI-derived DNA, which must reflect recent mixtures with people of little or no ASI ancestry Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2604-2615
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:47:43 AM
So between four thousand and three thousand years ago—just as the Indus Civilization collapsed and the Rig Veda was composed—there was a profound mixture of populations that had previously been segregated. Today in India, people speaking different languages and coming from different social statuses have different proportions of ANI ancestry. Today, ANI ancestry in India derives more from males than from females. This pattern is exactly what one would expect from an Indo-European-speaking people taking the reins of political and social power after four thousand years ago and mixing with the local peoples in a stratified society, with males from the groups in power having more success in finding mates than those from the disenfranchised groups. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2620-2626
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:53:09 AM
These findings led us to surmise that many Indian groups today might be the products of population bottlenecks. These occur when relatively small numbers of individuals have many offspring and their descendants too have many offspring and remain genetically isolated from the people who surround them due to social or geographic barriers. Famous population bottlenecks in the history of people of European ancestry include the ones that contributed most of the ancestry of the Finnish population (around two thousand years ago), a large fraction of the ancestry of today’s Ashkenazi Jews (around six hundred years ago), and most of the ancestry of religious dissenters such as Hutterites and Amish who eventually migrated to North America (around three hundred years ago). In each case, a high reproductive rate among a small number of individuals caused the rare mutations carried in those individuals to rise in frequency in their descendants. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2676-2683
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:58:58 AM
We looked for the telltale signs of population bottlenecks in India and found them: identical long stretches of sequence between pairs of individuals within the same group. The only possible explanation for such segments is that the two individuals descend from an ancestor in the last few thousand years who carried that DNA segment. What’s more, the average size of the shared DNA segments reveals how long ago in the past that shared ancestor lived, as the shared segments break up at a regular rate in each generation through the process of recombination. The genetic data told a clear story. Around a third of Indian groups experienced population bottlenecks as strong or stronger than the ones that occurred among Finns or Ashkenazi Jews. We later confirmed this finding in an even larger dataset that we collected working with Thangaraj: genetic data from more than 250 jati groups spread throughout India. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2684-2691
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 12:59:53 AM
Many of the population bottlenecks in India were also exceedingly old. One of the most striking we discovered was in the Vysya of the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, a middle caste group of approximately five million people whose population bottleneck we could date (from the size of segments shared between individuals of the same population) to between three thousand and two thousand years ago. The observation of such a strong population bottleneck among the ancestors of the Vysya was shocking. It meant that after the population bottleneck, the ancestors of the Vysya had maintained strict endogamy, allowing essentially no genetic mixing into their group for thousands of years. Even an average rate of influx into the Vysya of as little as 1 percent per generation would have erased the genetic signal of a population bottleneck. The ancestors of the Vysya did not live in geographic isolation. Instead, they lived cheek by jowl with other groups in a densely populated part of India. Despite proximity to other groups, the endogamy rules and group identity in the Vysya have been so strong that they maintained strict social isolation from their neighbors, and transmitted that culture of social isolation to each and every subsequent generation. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2691-2700
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:00:27 AM
Rather than an invention of colonialism as Dirks suggested, long-term endogamy as embodied in India today in the institution of caste has been overwhelmingly important for millennia Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2703-2705
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:01:00 AM
Learning this feature of Indian history had a strong resonance for me. When I started my work on Indian groups, I came to it as an Ashkenazi Jew, a member of an ancient caste of West Eurasia. I was uncomfortable with my affiliation but did not have a clear sense of what I was uncomfortable about. My work on India crystallized my discomfort. There is no escaping my background as a Jew. I was raised by parents whose highest priority was being open to the secular world, but they themselves had been raised in a deeply religious community and were children of refugees from persecution in Europe that left them with a strong sense of ethnic distinctiveness. When I was growing up, we followed Jewish dietary rules at home—I believe my parents did so in part in the hope that their own families would feel comfortable eating at our house—and I went for nine years to a Jewish school and spent many summers in Jerusalem. From my parents as well as from my grandparents and cousins I imbibed a strong sense of difference—a feeling that our group was special—and a knowledge that I would cause disappointment and embarrassment if I married someone non-Jewish (a conviction that I know also had a powerful effect on my siblings). Of course, my concern about disappointing my family is nothing compared to the shame, isolation, and violence that many expect in India for taking a partner outside their group. And yet my perspective as a Jew made me empathize strongly with all the likely Romeos and Juliets over thousands of years of Indian history whose loves across ethnic lines have been quashed by caste. My Jewish identity also helped me to understand on a visceral level how this institution had successfully perpetuated itself for so long. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2705-2717
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:01:57 AM
What the data were showing us was that the genetic distinctions among jati groups within India were in many cases real, thanks to the long-standing history of endogamy in the subcontinent. People tend to think of India, with its more than 1.3 billion people, as having a tremendously large population, and indeed many Indians as well as foreigners see it this way. But genetically, this is an incorrect way to view the situation. The Han Chinese are truly a large population. They have been mixing freely for thousands of years. In contrast, there are few if any Indian groups that are demographically very large, and the degree of genetic differentiation among Indian jati groups living side by side in the same village is typically two to three times higher than the genetic differentiation between northern and southern Europeans.39 The truth is that India is composed of a large number of small populations. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2717-2725
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:03:25 AM
Despite the fact that no one has systematically looked, a few such cases are already known. For example, the Vysya are known to have a high rate of prolonged muscle paralysis in response to muscle relaxants given prior to surgery. As a result, clinicians in India know not to give these drugs to people of Vysya ancestry. The condition is due to low levels of the protein butylcholinesterase in some Vysya. Genetic work has shown that this condition is due to a recessively acting mutation that occurs at about 20 percent frequency in the Vysya, a far higher rate than in other Indian groups, presumably because the mutation was carried in one of the Vysya’s founders.40 This frequency is sufficiently high that the mutation occurs in two copies in about 4 percent of the Vysya, causing disastrous reactions for people who carry the mutation and go under anesthesia. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2741-2747
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:07:21 AM
The opportunities for making a medical difference in India through surveys of rare recessive disease are particularly great because arranged marriage is very common. Much as I find restrictions on marriage discomfiting, arranged marriages are a fact in numerous communities in India—as they are in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. A number of my own first cousins in the Ashkenazi Jewish Orthodox community have found their spouses that way. In this religious community, a genetic testing organization founded by Rabbi Josef Ekstein in 1983, after he lost four of his own children to Tay-Sachs, has driven many recessive diseases almost to extinction.41 In many Orthodox religious high schools in the United States and Israel, nearly all teenagers are tested for whether they are carriers of the handful of rare recessive disease-causing mutations that are common in the Ashkenazi Jewish community. If they are carriers, they are never introduced by matchmakers to other teenagers carrying the same mutation. There is every opportunity to do the same in India, but instead of affecting a few hundred thousand people, in India the approach could have an impact on hundreds of millions. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2754-2764
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:13:10 AM
Our finding that both the ANI and ASI had large amounts of Iranian-related ancestry meant that we had been wrong in our original presumption that one of the two major ancestral populations of the Indian Cline had no West Eurasian ancestry. Instead, people descended from Iranian farmers made a major impact on India twice, admixing both into the ANI and the ASI. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2786-2789
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:20:29 AM
The ANI were a mixture of about 50 percent steppe ancestry related distantly to the Yamnaya, and 50 percent Iranian farmer–related ancestry from the groups the steppe people encountered as they expanded south. The ASI were also mixed, a fusion of a population descended from earlier farmers expanding out of Iran (around 25 percent of their ancestry), and previously established local hunter-gatherers of South Asia (around 75 percent of their ancestry). So the ASI were not likely to have been the previously established hunter-gatherer population of India, and instead may have been the people responsible for spreading Near Eastern agriculture across South Asia. Based on the high correlation of ASI ancestry to Dravidian languages, it seems likely that the formation of the ASI Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2790-2795
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:21:19 AM
The ANI were a mixture of about 50 percent steppe ancestry related distantly to the Yamnaya, and 50 percent Iranian farmer–related ancestry from the groups the steppe people encountered as they expanded south. The ASI were also mixed, a fusion of a population descended from earlier farmers expanding out of Iran (around 25 percent of their ancestry), and previously established local hunter-gatherers of South Asia (around 75 percent of their ancestry). So the ASI were not likely to have been the previously established hunter-gatherer population of India, and instead may have been the people responsible for spreading Near Eastern agriculture across South Asia. Based on the high correlation of ASI ancestry to Dravidian languages, it seems likely that the formation of the ASI was the process that spread Dravidian languages as well. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2790-2796
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:21:30 AM
These results reveal a remarkably parallel tale of the prehistories of two similarly sized subcontinents of Eurasia—Europe and India. In both regions, farmers migrating from the core region of the Near East after nine thousand years ago—in Europe from Anatolia, and in India from Iran—brought a transformative new technology, and interbred with the previously established hunter-gatherer populations to form new mixed groups between nine thousand and four thousand years ago. Both subcontinents were then also affected by a second later major migration with an origin in the steppe, in which Yamnaya pastoralists speaking an Indo-European language mixed with the previously established farming population they encountered along the way, in Europe forming the peoples associated with the Corded Ware culture, and in India eventually forming the ANI. These populations of mixed steppe and farmer ancestry then mixed with the previously established farmers of their respective regions, forming the gradients of mixture we see in both subcontinents today. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2802-2810
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:22:17 AM
The people who were custodians of Indo-European language and culture were the ones with relatively more steppe ancestry, and because of the extraordinary strength of the caste system in preserving ancestry and social roles over generations, the ancient substructure in the ANI is evident in some of today’s Brahmins even after thousands of years. This finding provides yet another line of evidence for the steppe hypothesis, showing that not just Indo-European languages, but also Indo-European culture as reflected in the religion preserved over thousands of years by Brahmin priests, was likely spread by peoples whose ancestors originated in the steppe. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2819-2823
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 1:23:38 AM
There is a general issue here about the ethical responsibilities of genetic research. When I examine an individual’s genome, I learn not only about the genome of the individual, but also about those of his or her family, and ancestors. I also learn about other members of the community—other descendants of those same ancestors. What are my responsibilities here? What do I owe not only to close relatives of the individual I study, but also to other more distantly related members of their family, to their population, and to our species as a whole? An extreme position that everyone needs to be consulted would make scientific progress in human genetics (including genetic medicine) nearly impossible. There would not be enough time for scientists in modest-sized laboratories like mine to talk with every tribal group that might be interested in the work. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 2997-3003
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 10:58:00 PM
My own perspective is that we need as a scientific community to arrive at a middle ground, an approach that does not require obtaining permission from every possible interested group or tribe. On the other hand, given the well-founded concerns of tribal communities in North America, which have developed as a result of a persistent history of exploitation, we scientists should aspire to carry out meaningful outreach when we study Native American population history to ensure that any manuscripts we write are sensitive to indigenous perspectives. The details of how to achieve such consultation need to be worked out, and it seems to me that there will never be a solution that everyone will find comfortable. But we need to try to make progress beyond the situation we are facing right now, in which many researchers are reluctant to undertake any studies of Native American genetic variation for fear of criticism, and because of the extraordinary time commitment that would be required in order to accomplish all the consultations that some tribal representatives and scholars have recommended. This has had the effect of putting research into genetic variation among Native Americans into a deep chill—with far less research in this area going on than anyone Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 3003-3012
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 10:58:27 PM
My own perspective is that we need as a scientific community to arrive at a middle ground, an approach that does not require obtaining permission from every possible interested group or tribe. On the other hand, given the well-founded concerns of tribal communities in North America, which have developed as a result of a persistent history of exploitation, we scientists should aspire to carry out meaningful outreach when we study Native American population history to ensure that any manuscripts we write are sensitive to indigenous perspectives. The details of how to achieve such consultation need to be worked out, and it seems to me that there will never be a solution that everyone will find comfortable. But we need to try to make progress beyond the situation we are facing right now, in which many researchers are reluctant to undertake any studies of Native American genetic variation for fear of criticism, and because of the extraordinary time commitment that would be required in order to accomplish all the consultations that some tribal representatives and scholars have recommended. This has had the effect of putting research into genetic variation among Native Americans into a deep chill—with far less research in this area going on than anyone but the people most hostile to scientific research would like. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 3003-3013
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 10:58:40 PM
Scientists working with indigenous people have an incentive to make such claims, as claims like this are often welcomed by local groups, and open the door to sampling. The normal scientific process, in which scientists point out claims that are not compellingly supported by data, is also not working as it should. A concern is that when members of groups are directly engaged in scientific investigation of their own history, people’s wish that certain things should be true often colors presentation of the findings. And scientists not involved in the work are often too anxious about repercussions to point out problems. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 3047-3052
, clipped on Monday, April 9, 2018 11:02:50 PM
If we allow for the likelihood that there was mixture with populations related to First Americans on the way, the proportion of Population Y in the Suruí could be as high as 85 percent and still produce the observed statistical evidence of relatedness to Australasians. If the true proportion is even a fraction of this, then the story of First Americans expanding into virgin territory is profoundly misleading. Instead, we need to think in terms of an expansion of a highly substructured founding population of the Americas. The history and timing of the arrival of Population Y in the Americas is likely to be resolved only with recovery of ancient DNA from skeletons with Population Y ancestry. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 3286-3292
, clipped on Tuesday, April 10, 2018 8:06:50 AM
The landscape of human biological and cultural diversity in Africa today, dominated as it is by the effects of the agricultural expansions of the last few thousand years, is extraordinary, but it is also distracting if one’s interest is in understanding the big picture of what happened. A trap that researchers of African genetics, archaeology, and linguistics repeatedly fall into is celebrating Africa’s present-day diversity, epitomized by a slide showing the faces of people from across the continent who look very different from each other that many of us use when presenting on Africa. It is tempting to think that in order to comprehend deep time in Africa we need to be able to hold all of that diversity in our heads and explain all of it at once. But most of the present-day population structure of Africa is shaped by the agricultural expansions of the past few thousand years, and so focusing on describing Africa’s mesmerizing diversity paradoxically does the project of understanding the big picture of humans in Africa a disservice just as much as focusing on the common origins of all modern humans in Africa does Africa a disservice. We need to stop focusing on describing the veil and instead rip it away, and for this we need ancient DNA. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 3879-3889
, clipped on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 7:51:53 AM
By computing the proportion of European male and female ancestors that would be necessary to produce the observed difference in European ancestry between chromosome X and the autosomes, Bryc was able to estimate the separate male (38 percent) and female (10 percent) proportion of European ancestors in African Americans. These numbers imply that the contribution of European American men to the genetic makeup of the present-day African American population is about four times that of European American women. When I discussed these findings with the sociologist Orlando Patterson, he pointed out that the fraction of the European ancestry in African Americans that came from males—which if different from half is called “sex bias”—must have been far greater during the time of slavery. Since the civil rights movement in the United States in the mid-twentieth century, cultural changes have caused the sex bias to reverse, with more coupling between black men and white women. If we carried out DNA studies of African American skeletons from a hundred years ago, there is every reason to expect an even greater sex bias. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 4093-4101
, clipped on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 10:55:32 PM
At the present time, our methods for using genetic data to study sex bias in human history are frustratingly primitive. Many of the most interesting findings about sex bias so far have been based on just two locations in the genome, the Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA, which reflect only tiny fractions of our family trees. Studies of sex-biased population dynamics using these sections of the genome become nearly useless for understanding events that occurred more than around ten thousand years ago, because at that time depth, everyone in the world descends from only a small handful of male and female ancestors who are too few in number to support a statistically precise measurement of sex bias. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 4284-4289
, clipped on Friday, April 13, 2018 2:07:33 AM
One explanation that has been suggested for this pattern is that in early Pacific island societies, property usually passed down the female line and males were the primary people who moved across islands.39 But there is another process that may also have contributed. As described in part II, my laboratory showed that the first people of the open Pacific had little Papuan-related ancestry.40 We showed that later west-to-east waves of migration of people of mixed Papuan and mainland East Asian ancestry explain the ubiquity of Papuan ancestry in the remote Pacific today. If males from this later-arriving population had social advantages relative to the previously resident population, this could have resulted in newly arriving males of primarily Papuan ancestry mixing with previously established females of primarily East Asian–related ancestry. The Pacific islander example highlights the importance of not simply assuming that genetic analyses of sex-biased events will fulfill expectations from anthropology. Now that the genome revolution has arrived, with its power to reject long-standing theories, we need to abandon the practice of approaching questions about the human past with strong expectations. To understand who we are, we need to approach the past with humility and with an open mind, and to be ready to change our minds out of respect for the power of hard data. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 4271-4283
, clipped on Friday, April 13, 2018 2:11:25 AM
If selection on height and infant head circumference can occur within a couple of thousand years,31 it seems a bad bet to argue that there cannot be similar average differences in cognitive or behavioral traits. Even if we do not yet know what the differences are, we should prepare our science and our society to be able to deal with the reality of differences instead of sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that differences cannot be discovered. The approach of staying mum, of implying to the public and to colleagues that substantial differences in traits across populations are unlikely to exist, is a strategy that we scientists can no longer afford, and that in fact is positively harmful. If as scientists we willfully abstain from laying out a rational framework for discussing human differences, we will leave a vacuum that will be filled by pseudoscience, an outcome that is far worse than anything we could achieve by talking openly. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 4522-4530
, clipped on Friday, April 13, 2018 7:20:33 PM
We truly have no idea right now what the nature or direction of genetically encoded differences among populations will be. An example is the extreme overrepresentation of people of West African ancestry among elite sprinters. All the male finalists in the Olympic hundred-meter race since 1980, even those from Europe and the Americas, had recent West African ancestry.46 The genetic hypothesis most often invoked to explain this is that there has been an upward shift in the average sprinting ability of people of West African ancestry due to natural selection. A small increase in the average might not sound like much, but it can make a big difference at the extremes of high ability—for example, a 0.8-standard-deviation increase in the average sprinting ability in West Africans would be expected to lead to a hundredfold enrichment in the proportion of people above the 99.9999999th percentile point in Europeans. But an alternative explanation that would predict the same magnitude of effect is that there is simply more variation in sprinting ability in people of West African ancestry—with more people of both very high and very low abilities. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 4632-4641
, clipped on Friday, April 13, 2018 7:32:57 PM
The right way to deal with the inevitable discovery of substantial differences across populations is to realize that their existence should not affect the way we conduct ourselves. As a society we should commit to according everyone equal rights despite the differences that exist among individuals. If we aspire to treat all individuals with respect regardless of the extraordinary differences that exist among individuals within a population, it should not be so much more of an effort to accommodate the smaller but still significant average differences across populations. Reich, David
, Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past.
loc. 4654-4658
, clipped on Friday, April 13, 2018 7:34:45 PM
"I'm sorry you didn't bring the kids. I want to get to know small kids. This is the society of kids. I tell my students they're already too old to Figure importantly in the making of society. Minute by minute they're beginning to diverge from each other. 'Even as we sit here,' I tell them, 'you are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you're well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you're out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.' Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 588-593
, clipped on Sunday, April 15, 2018 9:10:42 AM
"Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom." Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 797-801
, clipped on Sunday, April 15, 2018 11:41:03 PM
Royal Hawaiian Beach, and I also read, in the papers that came one day late from the mainland, the story of Betty Lansdown Fouquet, a 26-year-old woman with faded blond hair who put her five-year-old Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 35-36
, clipped on Monday, April 16, 2018 12:18:45 AM
The family is the cradle of the world's misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 999-1000
, clipped on Wednesday, April 18, 2018 7:52:17 AM
I admired her in a distant and uneasy way, sensing a nameless threat, as if she were not my child at all but the sophisticated and self-reliant friend of one of my children. Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 1178-1179
, clipped on Thursday, April 19, 2018 7:40:12 AM
Who will die first? She says she wants to die first Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 1246-1246
, clipped on Friday, April 20, 2018 12:24:43 AM
And so it goes into the night. These arguments never seem Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 1256-1256
, clipped on Friday, April 20, 2018 6:41:17 AM
We need the confluence of several factors. First, there needs to be a sufficient abundance of resources to permit the creation of surpluses above what is necessary for subsistence. This abundance can be natural: the Pacific Northwest was so full of game and fish that the hunter-gatherer-level societies there were able to generate chiefdoms, if not states. But more often abundance is made possible through technological advances like agriculture. Second, the absolute scale of the society has to be sufficiently large to permit the emergence of a rudimentary division of labor and a ruling elite. Third, that population needs to be physically constrained so that it increases in density when technological opportunities present themselves, and in order to make sure that subjects cannot run away when coerced. And finally, tribal groups have to be motivated to give up their freedom to the authority of a state. This can come about through the threat of physical extinction by other, increasingly well-organized groups. Or it can result from the charismatic authority of a religious leader. Taken together, these appear to be plausible factors leading to the emergence of a state in places like the Nile valley. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1903-1911
, clipped on Sunday, April 22, 2018 9:30:12 AM
Unlike China but like Europe, India’s institutionalization of countervailing social actors—an organized priestly class and the metastacization of kinship structures into the caste system—acted as a brake on the accumulation of power by the state. The result was that over the past twenty-two hundred years, China’s default political mode was a unified empire punctuated by periods of civil war, invasion, and breakdown, whereas India’s default mode was a disunited system of petty political units, punctuated by brief periods of unity and empire. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 1994-1998
, clipped on Sunday, April 22, 2018 9:41:15 AM
societies, this problem was traditionally addressed through concubinage, by which high-status men could effectively Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2123-2124
, clipped on Monday, April 23, 2018 9:08:39 AM
important parallels and where the civilizations diverged. Among the most confusing and misused terms are “feudal” and “feudalism,” which have been rendered largely meaningless as a result of promiscuous Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2172-2174
, clipped on Monday, April 23, 2018 9:39:34 AM
a field army at war, meritocracy is not a cultural norm but a condition for survival, and it is very likely that the principle of merit-based promotion began in military hierarchies before it was introduced into the civilian bureaucracy. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2325-2326
, clipped on Tuesday, April 24, 2018 12:04:50 AM
Second, the mobility of intellectuals across China encouraged the growth of something that looked increasingly like a national culture. The great Chinese classics composed in this period became the basis of elite education and the foundation of subsequent Chinese culture. National identity came to be anchored in knowledge of the classics; their prestige was such that they penetrated into the remotest parts of the empire and indeed well beyond the empire’s borders. Although nomad kingdoms on the frontier at times were militarily stronger than China, none could match its intellectual tradition. The non-Chinese people who attacked and periodically ruled parts of China seldom imposed their own institutions on the latter; rather, they tended to rule China using Chinese institutions and techniques. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2379-2384
, clipped on Tuesday, April 24, 2018 5:45:12 PM
The Legalists were proposing to treat subjects not as moral beings to be cultivated through education and learning but as Homo economicus, self-interested individuals who would respond to positive and negative incentives—especially punishments. The Legalist state therefore sought to undermine tradition, break the bonds of family moral obligation, and rebind citizens to the state on a new basis. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2473-2475
, clipped on Tuesday, April 24, 2018 11:46:33 PM
execrated it for centuries to come as one of the most immoral Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2611-2612
, clipped on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 12:03:19 AM
The Confucian idea that a ruler ought to rule in the interests of his people thus introduced a principle of accountability into the government of China. As noted, accountability was not formal or procedural but based rather on the emperor’s own moral sense as shaped by the bureaucracy. Levenson and Schurmann argue that the kinds of moral injunctions fostered by the bureaucracy reflected primarily the interests of the bureaucrats themselves. That is, they were strongly opposed to the raw exercise of state power under Legalist rulers because Confucian bureaucrats were the first victims of that power. They sought nothing more than to protect their positions during the Han restoration. These bureaucrats were custodians not of a public interest but of a hierarchical, kinship-based social system at whose pinnacle they stood. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2699-2704
, clipped on Wednesday, April 25, 2018 12:14:21 AM
And here the answer is likely to be normative: somehow, in the crucible of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the idea arose that true political authority lies in education and literacy rather than in military prowess. Military men who wanted to rule found they had to garb themselves in Confucian learning if they were to be obeyed and have their sons educated by learned academics if they were to succeed them as rulers. If it seems unsatisfying to think that the pen is mightier than the sword, we should reflect on the fact that all successful efforts by civilian authorities to control their militaries are ultimately based on normative ideas about legitimate authority. The U.S. military could seize power from the president tomorrow if it wanted; that it has not done so reflects the fact that the vast majority of officers wouldn’t dream of overturning the U.S. Constitution, and that the vast majority of soldiers they command would not obey their authority if they tried to do Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2778-2785
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 1:42:25 AM
And here the answer is likely to be normative: somehow, in the crucible of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the idea arose that true political authority lies in education and literacy rather than in military prowess. Military men who wanted to rule found they had to garb themselves in Confucian learning if they were to be obeyed and have their sons educated by learned academics if they were to succeed them as rulers. If it seems unsatisfying to think that the pen is mightier than the sword, we should reflect on the fact that all successful efforts by civilian authorities to control their militaries are ultimately based on normative ideas about legitimate authority. The U.S. military could seize power from the president tomorrow if it wanted; that it has not done so reflects the fact that the vast majority of officers wouldn’t dream of overturning the U.S. Constitution, and that the vast majority of soldiers they command would not obey their authority if they tried to do so. The initial Han equilibrium was based Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2778-2785
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 1:42:37 AM
And here the answer is likely to be normative: somehow, in the crucible of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods, the idea arose that true political authority lies in education and literacy rather than in military prowess. Military men who wanted to rule found they had to garb themselves in Confucian learning if they were to be obeyed and have their sons educated by learned academics if they were to succeed them as rulers. If it seems unsatisfying to think that the pen is mightier than the sword, we should reflect on the fact that all successful efforts by civilian authorities to control their militaries are ultimately based on normative ideas about legitimate authority. The U.S. military could seize power from the president tomorrow if it wanted; that it has not done so reflects the fact that the vast majority of officers wouldn’t dream of overturning the U.S. Constitution, and that the vast majority of soldiers they command would not obey their authority if they tried to do so. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2778-2785
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 1:42:44 AM
In a Malthusian economy where intensive growth is not possible, strong property rights simply reinforce the existing distribution of resources. The actual distribution of wealth is more likely to represent chance starting conditions or the property holder’s access to political power than productivity or hard work. (Even in today’s mobile, entrepreneurial capitalist economy, rigid defenders of property rights often forget that the existing distribution of wealth doesn’t always reflect the superior virtue of the wealthy and that markets aren’t always efficient.) Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 2868-2872
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 1:51:28 AM
Although contemporary anthropologists are aware of all of the incredibly nuanced differences in kinship structures across societies, they are sometimes guilty of missing the forest for the trees and fail to adequately recognize the degree to which different societies at similar levels of social development resemble one another. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3126-3128
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 8:59:49 AM
In the twentieth century, Indian nationalists, drawing partly on these interpretations, imagined an idyllic picture of an indigenous village democracy, the panchayat, which was said to have been the source of political order until it was undermined by the British colonial administration. Article 40 of the modern Indian constitution has detailed provisions for the organization of revived panchayats that were intended to promote democracy on a local level, something that was given particular emphasis by Rajiv Gandhi’s government in 1989 when it sought to decentralize power further within India’s federal system. The actual nature of local governance in early India was not, however, democratic and secular, as later commentators and nationalists claimed, but based on jati or caste. Each village tended to have a dominant caste, that is, a caste that numerically outnumbered the others and owned the greater part of the village’s land. The panchayat was simply the traditional leadership of that caste. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3397-3404
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 9:24:10 AM
The social system that grew out of Indian religion thus severely constrained the ability of states to concentrate power. Rulers could not create a powerful military instrument capable of mobilizing a large proportion of the population; they could not penetrate the self-governing, highly organized jatis that existed in every village; they and their administrators lacked education and literacy; and they faced a well-organized priestly class that protected a normative order in which they were consigned to a subordinate role. In every one of these respects their situation was very different from that of the Chinese. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3484-3488
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 9:31:52 AM
Evidence of the Mauryan empire’s light control over the territories it nominally ruled lies in the survival of tribal federations or chiefdoms—the gana-sanghas—throughout the period of its hegemony. Indian historians sometimes refer to these as “republics” because their political decision making was more participatory and consensual than in the hierarchical kingdoms. But this puts a modern gloss on what were simply surviving tribal polities still grounded in kinship. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3571-3574
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 11:52:05 AM
The fact that the Maurya empire lasted such a short time is prima facie evidence that it never exerted strong control over its constituent territories in the first place. This is not just a matter of post hoc ergo propter hoc. The Mauryas never established strong state institutions and never made the leap from patrimonial to impersonal administration. It maintained a strong network of spies throughout the empire, but there is no evidence of any of the road or canal building to facilitate communications like that of the early Chinese governments. It is remarkable that the Mauryans left no monuments to their power anywhere except in their capital city of Pataliputra, which is perhaps one reason why Ashoka failed to be remembered by later generations as an empire builder. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3588-3594
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 11:53:59 AM
Treatises like the Arthasastra did offer advice to princes that could be Machiavellian, but it was always in the service of a set of values and a social structure that lay outside of politics. More than that, Brahmanic spiritualism spawned ideas that were distinctly nonmilitary in character. The doctrine of ahimsa, or nonviolence, has its roots in Vedic texts, which suggests that the killing of living beings can have negative consequences for karma. Some texts criticized meat eating and the sacrificial slaughter of animals, though others approved it. As we have seen, nonviolence was even more central to protest religions like Jainism and Buddhism. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3601-3605
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 11:54:53 AM
Ashoka went on to urge that unsubdued peoples on the frontiers of the empire “should not be afraid of him, that they should trust him, and should receive from him happiness not sorrow,” and he called on his sons and grandsons to eschew further conquests.16 Expansion of the empire stopped abruptly; whether Ashoka’s descendants were following his wishes or were simply poor statesmen, they presided over a crumbling domain. One wonders what would have happened to Ashoka’s empire had India developed a power doctrine like Chinese Legalism, rather than Brahmanism, Jainism, or Buddhism—but it if had, it wouldn’t be India. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3613-3618
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 11:56:06 AM
It is not that democracy in its modern institutional manifestations is deeply rooted in ancient Indian practices, as observers like Amartya Sen have suggested.26 Rather, the course of Indian political development demonstrates that there was never the social basis for the development of a tyrannical state that could concentrate power so effectively that it could aspire to reach deeply into society and change its fundamental social institutions. The type of despotic government that arose in China or in Russia, a system that divested the whole society, beginning with its elites, of property and personal rights, has never existed on Indian soil—not under an indigenous Hindu government, not under the Moghuls, and not under the British.27 This led to the paradoxical situation that protests against social injustice, of which there were a huge number, were typically never aimed against India’s ruling political authorities, as was the case in Europe and in China. Rather, they were aimed at the social order dominated by the Brahmin class, and often expressed themselves as dissident religious movements like Jainism or Buddhism that rejected the metaphysical foundations of the worldly order. The political authorities were simply regarded as too distant and too irrelevant to daily life to matter. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3704-3714
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 12:03:20 PM
Indians experienced a kind of tyranny as well, not so much political tyranny in the Chinese style as what I earlier labeled the “tyranny of cousins.” Individual freedom in India has been limited much more by things like kinship ties, caste rules, religious obligations, and customary practices. But in some sense, it was the tyranny of cousins that allowed Indians to resist the tyranny of tyrants. Strong social organization at the level of society helped to balance and keep in check strong organization at the level of the state. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3726-3729
, clipped on Thursday, April 26, 2018 12:05:57 PM
In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one's knowledge is less secure than your own. Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 1476-1476
, clipped on Friday, April 27, 2018 12:49:25 AM
hear sounds we couldn't hear, able to sense changes in the flow of Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 1937-1938
, clipped on Sunday, April 29, 2018 1:04:56 AM
"I feel they're working on the superstitious part of my nature. Every advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared." "Scared of what?" "The sky, the earth, I don't know." "The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear." Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 2037-2039
, clipped on Sunday, April 29, 2018 1:15:08 AM
The institution of military slavery in the Ottoman Empire was extremely peculiar in many respects. Since no Muslim could be legally enslaved, no Muslim inhabitant of the empire could aspire to enter high government service. As in China, both the military and the civilian bureaucracy were highly meritocratic, with systematic procedures in place for recruiting and promoting the best possible soldiers and officials. But unlike the Chinese bureaucracy, it was open only to foreigners, who were ethnically different from the society they governed. These slave-soldiers and bureaucrats grew up in an official bubble, bonding with their masters and with each other, but otherwise living apart from the society they governed. As is true of many people who work in closed castes, they developed a high degree of internal solidarity and could act as a cohesive group. In later stages of the empire, they could act as kingmakers, deposing and installing sultans of their own choosing. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 3771-3777
, clipped on Sunday, April 29, 2018 1:21:12 AM
The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn't grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I'm the closest they could find, that's all." Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 2131-2134
, clipped on Sunday, April 29, 2018 9:18:49 AM
"He thinks he's happy but it's just a nerve cell in his brain that's getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation." Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 2261-2261
, clipped on Sunday, April 29, 2018 9:48:28 AM
innocence is this?'" "What do you Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 2713-2714
, clipped on Friday, May 4, 2018 7:38:16 AM
"I'm still sad, Winnie, but you've given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before." She turned away, blushing. I said, "You're more than a fair-weather friend—you're a true enemy." She turned exceedingly red. I said, "Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant." I watched her blush. Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 2846-2848
, clipped on Saturday, May 5, 2018 10:14:43 AM
"I'm counting on you to tell me, Jack." "Tell you what?" "You're the only person I know that's educated enough to give me the answer." "The answer to what?" "Were people this dumb before television?" Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 3102-3103
, clipped on Friday, May 11, 2018 10:16:34 PM
dragged. We reached the car. Mink kicked free, involuntarily, Don DeLillo
, White Noise.
loc. 3937-3937
, clipped on Saturday, May 19, 2018 7:02:41 AM
horse grooming). The smallest timars consisted of a village or villages Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 4196-4197
, clipped on Sunday, June 24, 2018 1:53:17 AM
Humans have many genetic remnants of retroviruses that at one time inserted copies of themselves into the human genome. Most do not seem to have any real function, but a few do. For example, both humans and apes have syncytin, derived from a retroviral envelope protein that our ancestors picked up roughly 30 million years ago. It plays a role in the development of the placenta—in particular, the process that leads to the development of a fused cell layer. Anyone who's overly worried about possible Neanderthal ancestry should remember that we're certainly descended from viruses. As usual, the facts don't care about our feelings. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 823-828
, clipped on Sunday, June 24, 2018 9:10:41 AM
adaptive response to the new society. Agriculture began in the Middle East 10,000 years ago and took almost 5,000 years to spread throughout Europe. Amerindians in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys adopted maize agriculture only 1,000 years ago, but the Australian Aborigines never domesticated plants at all. Peoples who have farmed since shortly after the end of the Ice Age (such as the inhabitants of the Middle East) must have adaptedmost thoroughly to agriculture. In areas where agriculture is younger, such as Europe or China, we'd expect to see fewer adaptive changes—except to the extent that the inhabitants were able to pick up genes from older farming peoples. And we'd expect to see fewer adaptive changes still among the Amerindians and sub-Saharan Africans, who had farmed for even shorter times and were genetically isolated from older civilizations by geographical barriers. In groups that had remained foragers, there would presumably be no such adaptive changes—most certainly not in isolated forager populations. Populations that have never farmed or that haven't farmed for long, such as the Australian Aborigines and many Amerindians, have characteristic health problems today when exposed to Western diets. The most severe such problem currently is a high incidence of type 2 diabetes. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 1281-1291
, clipped on Tuesday, June 26, 2018 11:29:21 PM
We must wonder why farming peoples didn't just evolve an aversion to alcohol. It seems as if that would have been a bad strategy, since moderate consumption of traditional, low-proof alcoholic drinks was almost certainly healthful. People who drank wine or beer avoided waterborne pathogens, which were a lethal threat in high-density populations. Alleles that reduced the risk of alcoholism therefore prevailed. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 1323-1326
, clipped on Wednesday, June 27, 2018 8:32:02 AM
In classical times, there was a plant called silphium that grew in a narrow coastal strip of Cyrenaica, modern-day Libya. Its resin was used as a contraceptive and abortifacient. The resin appears to have been very effective, preventing pregnancy with a once-a-month pea-sized dose. Sil- phium eventually became too popular for its own good. Never domesticated, it was overharvested as demand grew. As it became scarcer, the price rose until it was worth its weight in silver, which drove further overharvesting and eventually led to one of the first human-caused extinctions in recorded history. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 1710-1714
, clipped on Thursday, June 28, 2018 7:59:14 AM
A good story can go a long way, as can a good allele. There is a real similarity. A slight contact can transmit an idea, if it falls on fertile ground— if people like the idea and repeat it. In the same way, a long- forgotten Roman transfer of troops may have played a key role in the genetic history of Britain. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 2270-2272
, clipped on Saturday, June 30, 2018 10:02:24 AM
The assumption that more recent expansions are all driven by cultural factors is based on the notion that modern humans everywhere have essentially the same abilities. That's a logical consequence of human evolutionary stasis: If humans have not undergone a significant amount of biological change since the expansion out of Africa, then people everywhere would have essentially the same potentials, and no group would have a biological advantage over its neighbors. But as we never tire of pointing out, there has been significant biological change during that period—tremendous amounts of change, particularly in those populations that have practiced agriculture for a long time. Therefore, the biological equality of human races and ethnic groups is not inevitable: In fact it's about as likely as a fistful of silver dollars all landing on edge when dropped. There are important, well-understood examples of human biological inequality: Some populations can (on average) deal far more effectively with certain situations than others. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 2357-2365
, clipped on Saturday, June 30, 2018 10:29:30 AM
And if infectious disease was so unimportant among Amerindians, selection most likely favored weaker immune systems, because people with weaker immune systems would be better able to avoid autoimmune disorders, in which the immune system misfires and attacks some organ or tissue. Type 1 diabetes, in which the immune system attacks the pancreatic cells that make insulin, and multiple sclerosis, where it attacks the myelin sheaths of the central nervous system, are well- known examples—both are rare among Amerindians. A less vigorous immune system would have been an advantage under those conditions. So, there is every reason to think that the inhabitants of the Americas were not just behind the immunological times: While the Old Worlders were experiencing intense selection for increased resistance to infectious disease, the Amerindians were actually becoming more vulnerable. They were adapted to the existing circumstances, but not to the coming collision with the Old World. Gregory Cochran
, The 10,000 Year Explosion.
loc. 2423-2431
, clipped on Saturday, June 30, 2018 10:41:05 AM
“In a way, prey are lucky. Running for your life instead of running for your dinner.” A weak smile. “Better motivation, right?” Peter Watts
, The Freeze-Frame Revolution.
loc. 340-341
, clipped on Sunday, July 1, 2018 12:48:02 PM
“Sunday. . .” She stopped. “Yeah?” “Just—thanks.” “For?” “For checking in. No one else would’ve even thought about it.” “’Spores. You know.” I shrugged. “We’re designed for solitude.” “Yeah.” She laid a hand on my shoulder. “That’s kind of my point.” Peter Watts
, The Freeze-Frame Revolution.
loc. 391-397
, clipped on Sunday, July 1, 2018 12:51:24 PM
So I skipped off the surface of the sun, let its magnetic macramé rewire my brain, saw time collapse around me. Saw myself—persisting, somehow. I saw that I mattered. The details are fuzzy now. That’s the thing about having your brain rewired; you can’t really remember the experience after your neurons bounce back to normal. You can only remember something else remembering it, something built out of the same parts Peter Watts
, The Freeze-Frame Revolution.
loc. 755-760
, clipped on Sunday, July 1, 2018 1:30:19 PM
So I skipped off the surface of the sun, let its magnetic macramé rewire my brain, saw time collapse around me. Saw myself—persisting, somehow. I saw that I mattered. The details are fuzzy now. That’s the thing about having your brain rewired; you can’t really remember the experience after your neurons bounce back to normal. You can only remember something else remembering it, something built out of the same parts as you but wired up differently. Revelation has a half-life. Peter Watts
, The Freeze-Frame Revolution.
loc. 755-760
, clipped on Sunday, July 1, 2018 1:30:24 PM
I remembered at last: it wasn’t Chimp’s fault, it couldn’t be. You can’t blame someone for the way they’re wired. This machine had been forced to pull the trigger by forces beyond its control. Maybe it was as much a victim as Elon Morales. It put me down. Peter Watts
, The Freeze-Frame Revolution.
loc. 1431-1434
, clipped on Sunday, July 1, 2018 2:26:59 PM
No one outside the Muslim world ever thought that it was legitimate to enslave and then elevate foreigners to high positions in government. The problem wasn’t slavery per se; this institution was considered legitimate in the West, as everyone knows, until well into the nineteenth century. What never occurred to any European or American was to turn their slaves into high government officials. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 4428-4430
, clipped on Tuesday, July 3, 2018 7:09:08 AM
European society was, in other words, individualistic at a very early point, in the sense that individuals and not their families or kin groups could make important decisions about marriage, property, and other personal issues. Individualism in the family is the foundation of all other individualisms. Individualism did not wait for the emergence of a state declaring the legal rights of individuals and using the weight of its coercive power to enforce those rights. Rather, states were formed on top of societies in which individuals already enjoyed substantial freedom from social obligations to kindreds. In Europe, social development preceded political development. Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 4470-4475
, clipped on Tuesday, July 3, 2018 7:14:41 AM
market transactions due to religious or kinship constraints, lack Francis Fukuyama
, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.
loc. 4500-4500
, clipped on Tuesday, July 3, 2018 7:16:04 AM
we tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the tele-photo lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 6-13
, clipped on Wednesday, July 4, 2018 12:31:00 AM
I kept wishing that he would talk about himself, hoping to break through the wall of rhetoric, but he seemed to be one of those autodidacts for whom all things specific and personal present themselves as mine fields to be avoided even at the cost of coherence, for whom safety lies in generalization. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 240-242
, clipped on Wednesday, July 4, 2018 7:49:48 AM
One hears every possible reason for not living in the house except the one that counts: it is the kind of house that has a wet bar in the living room. It is the kind of house that has a refreshment center. It is the kind of house in which one does not live, but there is no way to say this without getting into touchy and evanescent and finally inadmissible questions of taste, and ultimately of class. I have seldom seen a house so evocative of the unspeakable. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 724-727
, clipped on Thursday, July 5, 2018 8:29:38 AM
In short the Getty is a monument to “fine art,” in the old-fashioned didactic sense, which is part of the problem people have with it. The place resists contemporary notions about what art is or should be or ever was. A museum is now supposed to kindle the untrained imagination, but this museum does not. A museum is now supposed to set the natural child in each of us free, but this museum does not. This was art acquired to teach a lesson, and there is also a lesson in the building which houses it: the Getty tells us that the past was perhaps different from the way we like to perceive it. Ancient marbles were not always attractively faded and worn. Ancient marbles once appeared just as they appear here: as strident, opulent evidence of imperial power and acquisition. Ancient murals were not always bleached and mellowed and “tasteful.” Ancient murals once looked as they do here: as if dreamed by a Mafia don. Ancient fountains once worked, and drowned out that very silence we have come to expect and want from the past. Ancient bronze once gleamed ostentatiously. The old world was once discomfitingly new, or even nouveau, as people like to say about the Getty. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 751-759
, clipped on Friday, July 6, 2018 7:39:12 AM
There is one of those peculiar social secrets at work here. On the whole “the critics” distrust great wealth, but “the public” does not. On the whole “the critics” subscribe to the romantic view of man’s possibilities, but “the public” does not. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 777-779
, clipped on Friday, July 6, 2018 7:43:00 AM
It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony. “Those men are our unsung heroes,” a quite charming and intelligent Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 872-875
, clipped on Friday, July 6, 2018 11:50:18 PM
It is a way of talking that tends to preclude further discussion, which may well be its intention: the public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony. “Those men are our unsung heroes,” a quite charming and intelligent woman once said to me at a party in Beverly Hills. She was talking about the California State Legislature. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 872-876
, clipped on Friday, July 6, 2018 11:50:24 PM
Things did change, but in the end it was not they who made things change, and their enthusiasms and debates sometimes seem very close to me in this house. In a way the house suggests the particular vanity of perceiving social life as a problem to be solved by the good will of individuals, but I do not mention that to many of the people who visit me here. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 906-909
, clipped on Saturday, July 7, 2018 7:26:25 AM
There was the belief in business success as a transcendent ideal. There was the faith that if one transforms oneself from an “introvert” into an “extrovert,” if one learns to “speak effectively” and “do a job,” success and its concomitant, spiritual grace, follow naturally. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 955-957
, clipped on Saturday, July 7, 2018 7:34:50 AM
slaves. Suspended on the brink of that voluptuous abyss (a nicety Vladimir Nabokov
, Lolita.
loc. 873-873
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 12:18:49 PM
“The orange blossom would have scarcely withered on the grave,” as a poet might have said. But I am no poet. I am only a very conscientious recorder. Vladimir Nabokov
, Lolita.
loc. 1053-1054
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 4:06:08 PM
That was a very pretty image, the idle ladies sitting in the gazebo and murmuring lasciate ogni speranza, but it depended entirely upon the popular view of the movement as some kind of collective inchoate yearning for “fulfillment,” or “self-expression,” a yearning absolutely devoid of ideas and capable of engendering only the most pro forma benevolent interest. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1109-1111
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 11:22:17 PM
could be very useful to call housework, as Lenin did, “the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work a woman can do,” but it could be useful only as the first step in a political process, only in the “awakening” of a class to its position, useful only as a metaphor: to believe, during the late Sixties and early Seventies in the United States of America, that the words had literal meaning was not only to stall the movement in the personal but to seriously delude oneself. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1167-1170
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 11:30:15 PM
“discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1188-1189
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 11:33:07 PM
But of course something other than an objection to being “discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1187-1189
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 11:33:20 PM
The derogation of assertiveness as “machismo” has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women too delicate to deal at any level with an overtly heterosexual man. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the “terror and revulsion” experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too “tender” for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too “sensitive” for the difficulties of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality. The transient stab of dread and loss which accompanies menstruation simply never happens: we only thought it happened, because a male-chauvinist psychiatrist told us so. No woman need have bad dreams after an abortion: she has only been told she should. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1191-1197
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 11:34:29 PM
“It is the right of the oppressed to organize around their oppression as they see and define it” the movement theorists insist doggedly in an effort to solve the question of these women, to convince themselves that what is going on is still a political process, but the handwriting is already on the wall. These are converts who want not a revolution but “romance,” who believe not in the oppression of women but in their own chances for a new life in exactly the mold of their old life. In certain ways they tell us sadder things about what the culture has done to them than the theorists ever did, and they also tell us, I suspect, that the movement is no longer a cause but a symptom. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1217-1221
, clipped on Sunday, July 8, 2018 11:38:45 PM
I have trouble making certain connections. I have trouble maintaining the basic notion that keeping promises matters in a world where everything I was taught seems beside the point. The point itself seems increasingly obscure. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1389-1390
, clipped on Tuesday, July 10, 2018 7:43:23 AM
A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image, and not only Schofield Barracks but a great deal of Honolulu itself has always belonged for me to James Jones. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1537-1539
, clipped on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 12:19:41 AM
liquid speech patterns of the Army voice. I took a copy of the Tropic Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1592-1592
, clipped on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 7:58:03 AM
liquid speech patterns of the Army voice. I took a copy of the Tropic Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1592-1592
, clipped on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 7:58:15 AM
James Jones had known a great simple truth: the Army was nothing more or less than life itself. I wish I could tell you that on the day in May when James Jones died someone had played a taps for him at Schofield Barracks, but I think this is not the way life goes. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1601-1603
, clipped on Wednesday, July 11, 2018 8:00:14 AM
Some people who write about film seem so temperamentally at odds with what both Fellini and Truffaut have called the “circus” aspect of making film that there is flatly no question of their ever apprehending the social or emotional reality of the process. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1732-1734
, clipped on Thursday, July 12, 2018 9:43:38 PM
“People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made,” Scott Fitzgerald observed in his notes on Hollywood. “But if you actually tell them anything, you find…they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances and vulgarities — tell them pictures have a private grammar, like politics or automobile production or society, and watch the blank look come into their faces.” Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1745-1748
, clipped on Thursday, July 12, 2018 10:06:31 PM
Making judgments on films is in many ways so peculiarly vaporous an occupation that the only question is why, beyond the obvious opportunities for a few lecture fees and a little careerism at a dispiritingly self-limiting level, anyone does it in the first place. A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1750-1754
, clipped on Thursday, July 12, 2018 10:07:27 PM
One thing you will note about shopping-center theory is that you could have thought of it yourself, and a course in it will go a long way toward dispelling the notion that business proceeds from mysteries too recondite for you and me. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 1976-1977
, clipped on Friday, July 13, 2018 4:36:31 PM
I suppose I am talking about just that: the ambiguity of belonging to a generation distrustful of political highs, the historical irrelevancy of growing up convinced that the heart of darkness lay not in some error of social organization but in man’s own blood. If man was bound to err, then any social organization was bound to be in error. It was a premise which still seems to me accurate enough, but one which robbed us early of a certain capacity for surprise. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 2189-2192
, clipped on Friday, July 13, 2018 8:01:34 PM
We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate. Joan Didion
, The White Album.
loc. 2196-2199
, clipped on Friday, July 13, 2018 8:02:36 PM
That the Jester should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our language reflects the close relationship: the word 'witticism' is derived from 'wit' in its original sense of ingenuity, inventiveness.* Jester and savant must both 'live on their wits'; and we shall see that the Jester's riddles provide a useful back-door entry, as it were, into the inner workshop of creative originality. Arthur Koestler
, The Act of Creation.
loc. 170-173
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 7:44:10 AM
In a pre-market economy, when you offer somebody fifty carrots for a roasted antelope leg, your offer says something about how impressed you are with their work hunting down the antelope and how much reward you think that deserves from you. If they’ve dealt generously with you in the past, perhaps you ought to offer them more. This is the only instinctive notion people start with for what a price could mean: a personal interaction between Alice and Bob reflecting past friendships and a balance of social judgments. In contrast, the economic notion of a market price is that for every loaf of bread bought, there is a loaf of bread sold; and therefore actual demand and actual supply are always equal. The market price is the input that makes the decreasing curve for demand as a function of price meet the increasing curve for supply as a function of price. This price is an “is” statement rather than an “ought” statement, an observation and not a wish. Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 269-276
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 8:43:57 AM
Usually when we find trillion-dollar bills lying on the ground in real life, it’s a symptom of (1) a central-command bottleneck that nobody else is allowed to fix, as with the European Central Bank wrecking Europe, or (2) a system with enough moving parts that at least two parts are simultaneously broken, meaning that single actors cannot defy the system. To modify an old aphorism: usually, when things suck, it’s because they suck in a way that’s a Nash equilibrium. Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 436-439
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 2:26:53 PM
In the case of US science, there was a brief period after World War II where there was new funding coming in faster than universities could create new grad students, and scientists had a chance to pursue ideas that they liked. Today Malthus has reasserted himself, and it’s no longer generally feasible for people to achieve career success while going off and just pursuing the research they most enjoy, or just going off and pursuing the research with the largest altruistic benefits. For any actor to do the best thing from an altruistic standpoint, they’d need to ignore all of the system’s internal incentives pointing somewhere else, and there’s no free energy in the system to feed someone who does that. Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 471-476
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 2:31:17 PM
In our world, there are a lot of people screaming, “Pay attention to this thing I’m indignant about over here!” In fact, there are enough people screaming that there’s an inexploitable market in indignation. The dead-babies problem can’t compete in that market; there’s no free energy left for it to eat, and it doesn’t have an optimal indignation profile. There’s no single individual villain. The business about competing omega-3 and omega-6 metabolic pathways is something that only a fraction of people would understand on a visceral level; and even if those people posted it to their Facebook walls, most of their readers wouldn’t understand and repost, so the dead-babies problem has relatively little virality. Being indignant about this particular thing doesn’t signal your moral superiority to anyone else in particular, so it’s not viscerally enjoyable to engage in the indignation. As for adding a further scream, “But wait, this matter really is important!”, that’s the part subject to the lemons problem. Even people who honestly know about a fixable case of dead babies can’t emit a trustworthy request for attention. Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 715-723
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 7:50:16 PM
I’m not sure. I suspect the origin has something to do with status—like, a high-status person can do all things at once, so it’s insulting and lowers status to suggest that an esteemed and respectable Doctor should only practice one surgical operation and get very good at it. And once you yourself have spent twelve years being trained under the current system, you won’t be happy about the proposal to replace it with two years of much more specialized training. Once you’ve been through a painful initiation ritual and rationalized its necessity, you’ll hate to see anyone else going through a less painful one. Not to mention that you won’t be happy about the competition against your own human capital, by a cheaper and better form of human capital—and after the sunk cost in pain and time that you endured to build human capital under the old system… Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 933-939
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 8:10:38 PM
Proportional representation would be a good system for a legislature that needed to repeatedly vote on laws, where different legislators could form different coalitions for each vote. If instead you demand that a majority coalition “form a government” to appoint an executive, then you need to give concessions to some factions, while other factions get frozen out. I’m not necessarily saying that it would be easy to fix all the problems simultaneously. Still, I imagine that a proportionally represented legislature, combined with an executive elected at-large by Condorcet voting, might possibly be less stupid— Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 1220-1225
, clipped on Sunday, July 15, 2018 8:34:47 PM
In my experience, people who don’t viscerally understand Moloch’s toolbox and the ubiquitously broken Nash equilibria of real life and how group insanity can arise from intelligent individuals responding to their own incentives tend to unconsciously translate all assertions about relative system competence into assertions about relative status. If you don’t see systemic competence as rare, or don’t see real-world systemic competence as driven by rare instances of correctly aligned incentives, all that’s left is status. All good and bad output is just driven by good and bad individual people, and to suggest that you’ll have better output is to assert that you’re individually smarter than everyone else. (This is what status hierarchy feels like from the inside: to perform better is to be better.) Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 1569-1575
, clipped on Monday, July 16, 2018 12:20:54 AM
In situations that are drawn from a barrel of causally similar situations, where human optimism runs rampant and unforeseen troubles are common, the outside view beats the inside view. But in novel situations where causal mechanisms differ, the outside view fails—there may not be relevantly similar cases, or it may be ambiguous which similar-looking cases are the right ones to look at. Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 1869-1872
, clipped on Monday, July 16, 2018 8:28:59 PM
Better, I think, to not worry quite so much about how lowly or impressive you are. Better to meditate on the details of what you can do, what there is to be done, and how one might do it. Eliezer Yudkowsky
, Inadequate Equilibria: Where and How Civilizations Get Stuck.
loc. 2431-2432
, clipped on Monday, July 16, 2018 10:58:49 PM
Brodeen wasn’t exactly dying to come out of retirement to run a startup in a field in which he had no expertise, so he took a neutral stance and watched as Elizabeth used just the right mix of contrition and charm to gradually win back his three board colleagues. It was an impressive performance, he thought. A much older and more experienced CEO skilled in the art of corporate infighting would have been hard-pressed to turn the situation around like she had. He was reminded of an old saying: “When you strike at the king, you must kill him.” Todd Surdey and Michael Esquivel had struck at the king, or rather the queen. But she’d survived. John Carreyrou
, Bad Blood.
loc. 845-849
, clipped on Tuesday, July 17, 2018 11:15:50 PM
acquaintance made me doubt that practitioners of the natural sciences Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 566-567
, clipped on Wednesday, July 18, 2018 10:23:09 PM
The conversation eventually drifted back to the here and now and to Theranos. Tony, who like Ian no longer had Elizabeth’s favor and was being excluded from the development of the miniLab, floated the notion that perhaps the company was just a vehicle for Elizabeth and Sunny’s romance and that none of the work they did really mattered. Ian nodded. “It’s a folie à deux,” he said. Tony didn’t know any French, so he left to go look up the expression in the dictionary. The definition he found struck him as apt: “The presence of the same or similar delusional ideas in two persons closely associated with one another.” John Carreyrou
, Bad Blood.
loc. 2287-2292
, clipped on Thursday, July 19, 2018 9:24:10 AM
During the visit, she’d raised my story, telling him the information I had gathered was false and would do great damage to Theranos if it was published. Murdoch had demurred, saying he trusted the paper’s editors to handle the matter fairly. John Carreyrou
, Bad Blood.
loc. 4223-4224
, clipped on Thursday, July 19, 2018 11:44:05 AM
She brought up my story with renewed urgency, hoping Murdoch would offer to kill it. Once again, despite the substantial investment he had at stake, he declined to intervene. John Carreyrou
, Bad Blood.
loc. 4227-4228
, clipped on Thursday, July 19, 2018 11:44:25 AM
The odds that Holmes could pull off this latest Houdini act while under criminal investigation were very long, but watching her confidently walk the audience through her sleek slide show helped crystallize for me how she’d gotten this far: she was an amazing saleswoman. She never once stumbled or lost her train of thought. She wielded both engineering and laboratory lingo effortlessly and she showed seemingly heartfelt emotion when she spoke of sparing babies in the NICU from blood transfusions. Like her idol Steve Jobs, she emitted a reality distortion field that forced people to momentarily suspend disbelief. John Carreyrou
, Bad Blood.
loc. 4562-4566
, clipped on Thursday, July 19, 2018 12:10:03 PM
The problem is that if you have grown up in the type of place that is excited to be getting its first motel, the type of place that is only dimly (if, indeed, at all) aware of the very existence of the Yemen, you want to study dialects of the Yemen if you can because you think you may well not get another chance. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 363-365
, clipped on Saturday, July 21, 2018 3:40:43 PM
There are people who think contraception is immoral because the object of copulation is procreation. In a similar way there are people who think the only reason to read a book is to write a book; people should call up books from the dust and the dark and write thousands of words to be sent down to the dust and the dark which can be called up so that other people can send further thousands of words to join them in the dust and the dark. Sometimes a book can be called from the dust and the dark to produce a book which can be bought in shops, and perhaps it is interesting, but the people who buy it and read it because it is interesting are not serious people, if they were serious they would not care about the interest they would be writing thousands of words to consign to the dust and the dark. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 384-390
, clipped on Saturday, July 21, 2018 3:43:40 PM
but the fact is that a clever man so seldom needs to think What’s a syllabary? A syllabary is a set of phonetic symbols each representing a syllable he gets out of the habit. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 659-661
, clipped on Saturday, July 21, 2018 6:03:26 PM
You know, Chris … I have a definition of success, and what success is to me is when an individual finds that thing which fulfills himself, when he finds that thing that completes him and when, in doing it, he finds a way to serve his fellow man. When he finds that he is a successful person. It doesn’t make any difference whether you are a ditch-digger or a librarian or someone who works at the filling station or the President of the United States or whatever, if you’re doing what you want to do and in some way bringing value to the life of others, then you’re a successful human being. It so happens that in my area, which is entertainment, that success brings with it a lot of other things, but all of those other things, the money, the fame, the conveniences, the ability to travel and see the rest of the world, all of those are just icing on the cake and the cake is the same for everybody. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 835-843
, clipped on Saturday, July 21, 2018 6:23:29 PM
would hear again his breathtaken boyish admiration for lovely stupidity his unswerving fidelity to the precept that ought implies cant and I just couldn’t. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 1175-1176
, clipped on Saturday, July 21, 2018 7:29:39 PM
I got home and I thought I should stop leading so aimless an existence. It is harder than you might think to stop leading an existence, & if you can’t do that the only thing you can do is try to introduce an element of purposefulness. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 2055-2057
, clipped on Saturday, July 21, 2018 9:43:47 PM
I said, It’s not fair, nobody else has to wait until they’re old enough to know who their father is. She said, We should not elevate the fortuitous to the desirable. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 2826-2828
, clipped on Sunday, July 22, 2018 3:46:49 AM
‘Although the capacity to think vastly expands human capabilities, if put to faulty use, it can also serve as a major source of personal distress. Many human dysfunctions and torments stem from problems of thought. This is because, in their thoughts, people often dwell on painful pasts and on perturbing futures of their own invention. They burden themselves with stressful arousal through anxiety-provoking rumination. They debilitate their own efforts by self-doubting and other self-defeating ideation. They constrain and impoverish their lives through phobic thinking.’ Sibylla said I should not just quote things uncritically, the writer seemed to assume there was no such thing as an unsolicited memory, an assumption for which there seemed to be no evidence whatsoever. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 3102-3108
, clipped on Sunday, July 22, 2018 2:30:46 PM
‘I think what it’s really saying is that you can’t understand something until you go through it. You think you know what something is about and that’s why you do it but then when you do it you realise it’s about something else. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 3179-3180
, clipped on Sunday, July 22, 2018 2:35:41 PM
There is a strange taboo in our society against ending something merely because it is not pleasant—life, love, a conversation, you name it, the etiquette is that you must begin in ignorance & persevere in the face of knowledge, & though I naturally believe that this is profoundly wrong it’s not nice to go around constantly offending people. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 3413-3415
, clipped on Sunday, July 22, 2018 2:49:25 PM
All the interesting questions require a minimum of three hours apiece to answer and the rest are so stupid it is impossible to say anything intelligent about them, how can you make an intelligent reply to a stupid question? Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 4295-4296
, clipped on Sunday, July 22, 2018 6:48:40 PM
Life is such a chancy business, you may lose everything you have at any moment—if a stroke of luck can rob you of whatever it is you live by, where does that leave you? Easy Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 6375-6376
, clipped on Monday, July 23, 2018 8:58:44 PM
People who generalise about people are dismissed as superficial. It’s only when you’ve known large numbers of people that you can spot the unusual ones—when you look at each one as if you’d never seen one before, they all look alike. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 6615-6617
, clipped on Monday, July 23, 2018 9:29:12 PM
What if a person was doing something terrible because everybody else did it or anyway some people did it, and then they stopped even though everybody else was doing it and it was dangerous to stop? Wouldn’t that be a dazzling act of goodness? Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 7130-7132
, clipped on Monday, July 23, 2018 10:13:22 PM
You don’t understand. It’s not a question of what’s fair to expect. Some people do what they do because everybody does it and it doesn’t make them sick that that’s what everybody does it makes them feel trapped once or twice but better most of the time. If somebody says the magic words they wake up for a little while and go to sleep again. You think I should stop feeling sick if somebody does something because they hear the magic words, but it’s not a question of should, it’s a question of what happens. It doesn’t. That is it wouldn’t. It wouldn’t and that’s why I can’t say it any more, I just look at people. Sometimes I look at them thinking What are you waiting for and sometimes I look at them and say What are you waiting for. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 7155-7161
, clipped on Monday, July 23, 2018 10:15:29 PM
Comment vivre sans inconnu devant soi. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 7253-7254
, clipped on Monday, July 23, 2018 10:22:07 PM
For someone who believes in the importance of rational argument Sib avoids the issue 9 times out of 10. Dewitt, Helen
, The Last Samurai.
loc. 7265-7266
, clipped on Monday, July 23, 2018 10:23:30 PM
As long as physicists developed theories to explain existing or upcoming experiments, success meant getting the right numbers with the least amount of effort. But the more observations our theories could describe, the more difficult it became to test a proposed improvement. It took twenty-five years from the prediction of the neutrino to its detection, almost fifty years to confirm the Higgs boson, a hundred years to directly detect gravitational waves. Now the time it takes to test a new fundamental law of nature can be longer than a scientist’s full career. This forces theorists to draw upon criteria other than empirical adequacy to decide which research avenues to pursue. Aesthetic appeal is one of them. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 232-237
, clipped on Wednesday, July 25, 2018 7:41:59 AM
But regardless of what else might be discovered at higher energies, that the LHC so far hasn’t found any new elementary particles means that the correct theory is, by physicists’ standards, unnatural. We have indeed maneuvered ourselves into an oxymoronic situation in which, according to our own beauty requirements, nature itself is unnatural. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 326-328
, clipped on Wednesday, July 25, 2018 8:04:01 AM
we don’t like small numbers, so we invented a way to do without them, and if that’s right, then we should see new particles. This isn’t a prediction, it’s a wish. And yet these arguments have become so common that particle physicists use them without hesitation. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 680-682
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 7:07:24 AM
What I learn, however, is that Karl Popper’s idea that scientific theories must be falsifiable has long been an outdated philosophy. I am glad to hear this, as it’s a philosophy that nobody in science ever could have used, other than as a rhetorical device. It is rarely possible to actually falsify an idea, since ideas can always be modified or extended to match incoming evidence. Rather than falsifying theories, therefore, we “implausify” them: a continuously adapted theory becomes increasingly difficult and arcane—not to say ugly—and eventually practitioners lose interest. How much it takes to implausify an idea, however, depends on one’s tolerance for repeatedly making a theory fit conflicting evidence. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 704-709
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 7:11:23 AM
This isn’t to say that what happens at short distances doesn’t have any effect at all on what happens at larger distances; it’s just that the details don’t matter much. Large things are made of smaller things, and the laws for the larger things follow from the laws for the smaller things. The surprise is that the laws for the large things are so simple. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 753-755
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 7:14:56 AM
Inevitably, however, the aim of such books is persuasive and pedagogic; a concept of science drawn from them is no more likely to fit the enterprise that produced them than an image of a national culture drawn from a tourist brochure or a language text. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 640-642
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 9:02:53 PM
range of admissible scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 694-696
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 9:14:04 PM
Normal science, the activity in which most scientists inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community’s willingness to defend that assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 709-712
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 11:15:00 PM
On other occasions a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails to perform in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot, despite repeated effort, be aligned with professional expectation. In these and other ways besides, normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it does—when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific practice—then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 715-721
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 11:15:58 PM
Ultimately it has that effect, but not until the professional community has re-evaluated traditional experimental procedures, altered its conception of entities with which it has long been familiar, and, in the process, shifted the network of theory through which it deals with the world. Scientific fact and theory are not categorically separable, except perhaps within a single tradition of normal-scientific practice. That is why the unexpected discovery is not simply factual in its import and why the scientist’s world is qualitatively transformed as well as quantitatively enriched by fundamental novelties of either fact or theory. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 742-747
, clipped on Friday, July 27, 2018 11:19:42 PM
Those men were scientists. Yet anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude that, though the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery and invention. It is not, however, the pattern of development that physical optics acquired after Newton and that other natural sciences make familiar Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 828-835
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 7:45:56 AM
Those men were scientists. Yet anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude that, though the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery and invention. It is not, however, the pattern of development that physical optics acquired after Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 828-834
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 7:46:05 AM
Those men were scientists. Yet anyone examining a survey of physical optics before Newton may well conclude that, though the field’s practitioners were scientists, the net result of their activity was something less than science. Being able to take no common body of belief for granted, each writer on physical optics felt forced to build his field anew from its foundations. In doing so, his choice of supporting observation and experiment was relatively free, for there was no standard set of methods or of phenomena that every optical writer felt forced to employ and explain. Under these circumstances, the dialogue of the resulting books was often directed as much to the members of other schools as it was to nature. That pattern is not unfamiliar in a number of creative fields today, nor is it incompatible with significant discovery and invention. It is not, however, the pattern of development that physical optics acquired after Newton and that other natural sciences make familiar today. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 828-835
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 7:46:08 AM
The resulting pool of facts contains those accessible to casual observation and experiment together with some of the more esoteric data retrievable from established crafts like medicine, calendar making, and metallurgy. Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that could not have been Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 865-867
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 7:55:03 AM
The resulting pool of facts contains those accessible to casual observation and experiment together with some of the more esoteric data retrievable from established crafts like medicine, calendar making, and metallurgy. Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that could not have been Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 865-867
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 7:55:15 AM
The resulting pool of facts contains those accessible to casual observation and experiment together with some of the more esoteric data retrievable from established crafts like medicine, calendar making, and metallurgy. Because the crafts are one readily accessible source of facts that could not have been casually discovered, technology has often played a vital role in the emergence of new sciences. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 865-868
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 7:55:28 AM
Dramatics, Dance, Debating and Dating. We are confronted by certain facts Vladimir Nabokov
, Lolita.
loc. 2643-2643
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 8:35:29 AM
We are still groping perhaps, but we grope intelligently, like a gynecologist feeling a tumor. Vladimir Nabokov
, Lolita.
loc. 2650-2651
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 8:36:45 AM
mon pauvre ami, je ne vous ai jamais revu et quoiqu’il y ait bien peu de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permettez-moi de vous dire que je vous serre la main bien cordialement, et que toutes mes fillettes vous saluent). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table, consuming a wedge of pie, Vladimir Nabokov
, Lolita.
loc. 3039-3040
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 12:10:50 PM
The success of a paradigm—whether Aristotle’s analysis of motion, Ptolemy’s computations of planetary position, Lavoisier’s application of the balance, or Maxwell’s mathematization of the electromagnetic field—is at the start largely a promise of success discoverable in selected and still incomplete examples. Normal science consists in the actualization of that promise, an actualization achieved by extending the knowledge of those facts that the paradigm displays as particularly revealing, by increasing the extent of the match between those facts and the paradigm’s predictions, and by further articulation of the paradigm itself. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 971-975
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 2:40:08 PM
There are, I think, only three normal foci for factual scientific investigation, and they are neither always nor permanently distinct. First is that class of facts that the paradigm has shown to be particularly revealing of the nature of things. By employing them in solving problems, the paradigm has made them worth determining both with more precision and in a larger variety of situations. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 995-998
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 2:42:55 PM
The existence of the paradigm sets the problem to be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without the Principia, for example, measurements made with the Atwood machine would have meant nothing at Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1020-1021
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 2:47:33 PM
The existence of the paradigm sets the problem to be solved; often the paradigm theory is implicated directly in the design of apparatus able to solve the problem. Without the Principia, for example, measurements made with the Atwood machine would have meant nothing at all. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1020-1022
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 2:47:39 PM
Perhaps it is not apparent that a paradigm is prerequisite to the discovery of laws like these. We often hear that they are found by examining measurements undertaken for their own sake and without theoretical commitment. But history offers no support for so excessively Baconian a method. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1036-1038
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 2:49:06 PM
A paradigm can, for that matter, even insulate the community from those socially important problems that are not reducible to the puzzle form, because they cannot be stated in terms of the conceptual and instrumental tools the paradigm supplies. Such problems can be a distraction, a lesson brilliantly illustrated by several facets of seventeenth-century Baconianism and by some of the contemporary social sciences. One of the reasons why normal science seems to progress so rapidly is that its practitioners concentrate on problems that only their own lack of ingenuity should keep them from solving. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1171-1175
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 4:32:48 PM
The scientific enterprise as a whole does from time to time prove useful, open up new territory, display order, and test long-accepted belief. Nevertheless, the individual engaged on a normal research problem is almost never doing any one of these things. Once engaged, his motivation is of a rather different sort. What then challenges him is the conviction that, if only he is skilful enough, he will succeed in solving a puzzle that no one before has solved or solved so well. Many of the greatest scientific minds have devoted all of their professional attention to demanding puzzles of this sort. On most occasions any particular field of specialization offers nothing else to do, a fact that makes it no less fascinating to the proper sort of addict. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1180-1185
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 4:34:05 PM
What has been said so far may have seemed to imply that normal science is a single monolithic and unified enterprise that must stand or fall with any one of its paradigms as well as with all of them together. But science is obviously seldom or never like that. Often, viewing all fields together, it seems instead a rather ramshackle structure with little coherence among its various parts. Nothing said to this point should, however, conflict with that very familiar observation. On the contrary, substituting paradigms for rules should make the diversity of scientific fields and specialties easier to understand. Explicit rules, when they exist, are usually common to a very broad scientific group, but paradigms need not be. The practitioners of widely separated fields, say astronomy and taxonomic botany, are educated by exposure to quite different achievements described in very different books. And even men who, being in the same or in closely related fields, begin by studying many of the same books and achievements may acquire rather different paradigms in the course of professional specialization. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1349-1357
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 4:57:11 PM
Normal science does not aim at novelties of fact or theory and, when successful, finds none. New and unsuspected phenomena are, however, repeatedly uncovered by scientific research, and radical new theories have again and again been invented by scientists. History even suggests that the scientific enterprise has developed a uniquely powerful technique for producing surprises of this sort. If this characteristic of science is to be reconciled with what has already been said, then research under a paradigm must be a particularly effective way of inducing paradigm change. That is what fundamental novelties of fact and theory do. Produced inadvertently by a game played under one set of rules, their assimilation requires the elaboration of another set. After they have become parts of science, the enterprise, at least of those specialists in whose particular field the novelties lie, is never quite the same again. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1382-1388
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 4:59:58 PM
misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well. Ignoring Scheele, we can safely say that oxygen had not been discovered before 1774, and we would probably also say that it had been discovered by 1777 or shortly thereafter. But within those limits or others like them, any attempt to date the discovery must inevitably be arbitrary because discovering a new sort of phenomenon is necessarily a complex event, one which involves recognizing both that something is and what it is. Note, for example, that if oxygen were dephlogisticated air for us, we should insist without hesitation that Priestley had discovered it, though we would still not know quite when. But if both observation and conceptualization, fact and assimilation to theory, are inseparably linked in discovery, then discovery is a process and must take time. Only when all the relevant conceptual categories are prepared in advance, in which case the phenomenon would not be of a new sort, can discovering that and discovering what occur effortlessly, together, and in an instant. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1429-1438
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 5:06:28 PM
In the development of any science, the first received paradigm is usually felt to account quite successfully for most of the observations and experiments easily accessible to that science’s practitioners. Further development, therefore, ordinarily calls for the construction of elaborate equipment, the development of an esoteric vocabulary and skills, and a refinement of concepts that increasingly lessens their resemblance to their usual common-sense prototypes. That professionalization leads, on the one hand, to an immense restriction of the scientist’s vision and to a considerable resistance to paradigm change. The science has become increasingly rigid. On the other hand, within those areas to which the paradigm directs the attention of the group, normal science leads to a detail of information and to a precision of the observation-theory match that could be achieved in no other way. Furthermore, that detail and precision-of-match have a value that transcends their not always very high intrinsic interest. Without the special apparatus that is constructed mainly for anticipated functions, the results that lead ultimately to novelty could not occur. And even when the apparatus exists, novelty ordinarily emerges only for the man who, knowing with precision what he should expect, is able to recognize that something has gone wrong. Anomaly appears only against the background provided by the paradigm. The more precise and far-reaching that paradigm is, the more sensitive an indicator it provides of anomaly and hence of an occasion for paradigm change. In the normal mode of discovery, even resistance to change has a use that will be explored more fully in the next section. By ensuring that the paradigm will not be too easily surrendered, resistance guarantees that scientists will not be lightly distracted and that the anomalies that lead to paradigm change will penetrate existing knowledge to the core. The very fact that a significant scientific novelty so often emerges simultaneously from several laboratories is an index both to the strongly traditional nature of normal science and to the completeness with which that traditional pursuit prepares the way for its own change. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1565-1580
, clipped on Saturday, July 28, 2018 5:19:32 PM
Philosophers of science have repeatedly demonstrated that more than one theoretical construction can always be placed upon a given collection of data. History of science indicates that, particularly in the early developmental stages of a new paradigm, it is not even very difficult to invent such alternates. But that invention of alternates is just what scientists seldom undertake except during the pre-paradigm stage of their science’s development and at very special occasions during its subsequent evolution. So long as the tools a paradigm supplies continue to prove capable of solving the problems it defines, science moves fastest and penetrates most deeply through confident employment of those tools. The reason is clear. As in manufacture so in science—retooling is an extravagance to be reserved for the occasion that demands it. The significance of crises is the indication they provide that an occasion for retooling has arrived. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1738-1745
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 12:36:29 AM
occasional proposals for a modification of Newton’s inverse square law. But no one took these proposals very seriously, and in practice this patience with a major anomaly proved justified. Clairaut in 1750 Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1814-1816
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 7:37:43 AM
The scientist who pauses to examine every anomaly he notes will seldom get significant work done. We therefore have to ask what it is that makes an anomaly seem worth concerted scrutiny, and to that question there is probably no fully general answer. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1825-1827
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 7:38:29 AM
All crises begin with the blurring of a paradigm and the consequent loosening of the rules for normal research. In this respect research during crisis very much resembles research during the pre-paradigm period, except that in the former the locus of difference is both smaller and more clearly defined. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1859-1861
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 7:43:34 AM
Almost always the men who achieve these fundamental inventions of a new paradigm have been either very young or very new to the field whose paradigm they change.15 And perhaps that point need not have been made explicit, for obviously these are the men who, being little committed by prior practice to the traditional rules of normal science, are particularly likely to see that those rules no longer define a playable game and to conceive another set that can replace them. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 1947-1951
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 11:26:37 AM
After the pre-paradigm period the assimilation of all new theories and of almost all new sorts of phenomena has in fact demanded the destruction of a prior paradigm and a consequent conflict between competing schools of scientific thought. Cumulative acquisition of unanticipated novelties proves to be an almost non-existent exception to the rule of scientific development. The man who takes historic fact seriously must suspect that science does not tend toward the ideal that our image of its cumulativeness has suggested. Perhaps it is another sort of enterprise. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2032-2036
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 9:58:59 PM
At least for scientists, most of the apparent differences between a discarded scientific theory and its successor are real. Though an out-of-date theory can always be viewed as a special case of its up-to-date successor, it must be transformed for the purpose. And the transformation is one that can be undertaken only with the advantages of hindsight, the explicit guidance of the more recent theory. Furthermore, even if that transformation were a legitimate device to employ in interpreting the older theory, the result of its application would be a theory so restricted that it could only restate what was already known. Because of its economy, that restatement would have utility, but it could not suffice for the guidance of research. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2140-2145
, clipped on Sunday, July 29, 2018 10:12:01 PM
She would mail her vulnerability in trite brashness and boredom, whereas I, using for my desperately detached comments an artificial tone of voice that set my own last teeth on edge, provoked my audience to such outbursts of rudeness as made any further conversation impossible, oh my poor, bruised child. Vladimir Nabokov
, Lolita.
loc. 4298-4300
, clipped on Wednesday, August 1, 2018 11:25:01 PM
I don’t know what it was, but it had alcohol in it, so I decided I’d finish it with another cigarette before pushing on to the next hotel along. When I looked up I immediately noticed that someone else had entered the restaurant and was sitting about six tables away, gazing benignly at the menu. For a long time I just stared at him, my cigarette burning closer and closer to my fingers. It was Alkland. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 1133-1136
, clipped on Saturday, August 4, 2018 6:40:36 AM
Every face says something: the deal with mine is that though you might not like what it’s saying you have to admire the strength of its convictions. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 1164-1165
, clipped on Saturday, August 4, 2018 6:42:50 AM
But is sensory experience fixed and neutral? Are theories simply man-made interpretations of given data? The epistemological viewpoint that has most often guided Western philosophy for three centuries dictates an immediate and unequivocal, Yes! In the absence of a developed alternative, I find it impossible to relinquish entirely that viewpoint. Yet it no longer functions effectively, and the attempts to make it do so through the introduction of a neutral language of observations now seem to me hopeless. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2487-2490
, clipped on Saturday, August 4, 2018 10:44:04 PM
All of this may seem more reasonable if we again remember that neither scientists nor laymen learn to see the world piecemeal or item by item. Except when all the conceptual and manipulative categories are prepared in advance—e.g., for the discovery of an additional transuranic element or for catching sight of a new house—both scientists and laymen sort out whole areas together from the flux of experience. The child who transfers the word ‘mama’ from all humans to all females and then to his mother is not just learning what ‘mama’ means or who his mother is. Simultaneously he is learning some of the differences between males and females as well as something about the ways in which all but one female will behave toward him. His reactions, expectations, and beliefs—indeed, much of his perceived world—change accordingly. By the same token, the Copernicans who denied its traditional title ‘planet’ to the sun were not only learning what ‘planet’ meant or what the sun was. Instead, they were changing the meaning of ‘planet’ so that it could continue to make useful distinctions in a world where all celestial bodies, not just the sun, were seen differently from the way they had been seen before. The same point could be made about any of our earlier examples. To see oxygen instead of dephlogisticated air, the condenser instead of the Leyden jar, or the pendulum instead of constrained fall, was only one part of an integrated shift in the scientist’s vision of a great many related chemical, electrical, or dynamical phenomena. Paradigms determine large areas of experience at the same time. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2523-2534
, clipped on Monday, August 6, 2018 4:01:49 PM
so busy Doing Things that he’d never actually done anything at all. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 1820-1820
, clipped on Monday, August 6, 2018 10:22:51 PM
Textbooks thus begin by truncating the scientist’s sense of his discipline’s history and then proceed to supply a substitute for what they have eliminated. Characteristically, textbooks of science contain just a bit of history, either in an introductory chapter or, more often, in scattered references to the great heroes of an earlier age. From such references both students and professionals come to feel like participants in a long-standing historical tradition. Yet the textbook-derived tradition in which scientists come to sense their participation is one that, in fact, never existed. For reasons that are both obvious and highly functional, science textbooks (and too many of the older histories of science) refer only to that part of the work of past scientists that can easily be viewed as contributions to the statement and solution of the texts’ paradigm problems. Partly by selection and partly by distortion, the scientists of earlier ages are implicitly represented as having worked upon the same set of fixed problems and in accordance with the same set of fixed canons that the most recent revolution in scientific theory and method has made seem scientific. No wonder that textbooks and the historical tradition they imply have to be rewritten after each scientific revolution. And no wonder that, as they are rewritten, science once again comes to seem largely cumulative. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2660-2669
, clipped on Monday, August 6, 2018 10:37:41 PM
Nothing that’s important, really important, looks impressive, because it only means something to the person that does it. Staying alive, for example, not dying: it looks so easy, but sometimes it’s almost too difficult to be borne. I thought about Ji, and Shelby, and Snedd. Alone, Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 2289-2291
, clipped on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 1:05:08 PM
Nothing that’s important, really important, looks impressive, because it only means something to the person that does it. Staying alive, for example, not dying: it looks so easy, but sometimes it’s almost too difficult to be borne. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 2289-2291
, clipped on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 1:05:16 PM
Life’s like that: it’s linear and it twists and turns and you just have to follow it and see what happens. There are no cross-cuts, no helpful hints, no subtextual clues. Things just happen, and all you can do is try to get the hell out of their way.’ Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 2817-2819
, clipped on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 1:54:45 PM
How many times have you tried to talk to someone about something that matters to you, tried to get them to see it the way you do? And how many of those times have ended with you feeling bitter, resenting them for making you feel like your pain doesn’t have any substance after all? Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 2931-2933
, clipped on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 2:03:36 PM
Everyone’s alone in their world, because everybody’s life is different. You can send people letters, and show them photos, but they can never come to visit where you live. Unless you love them. And then they can burn it down. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 2939-2941
, clipped on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 2:05:06 PM
The mind is like a pool of water, and rain falls as you age. The water gets deeper, and looks so still: occasionally some stray thought or impulse betrays its depths, but seldom. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 3120-3122
, clipped on Tuesday, August 7, 2018 2:18:34 PM
What do you think the important things in your life are about, the things that make you happy? Like loving someone, loving them so much that you reach out your arms to hold and be held. Like eating good food, and savouring every mouthful. Those aren’t biological imperatives. You don’t have to love to fuck, and you can eat anything that isn’t made of metal. Biological imperatives are yesterday’s cattle prods, were obsolete once we stopped climbing trees and learnt how to swivel gravity round instead. Nature knows we’re out of its hands now, and leaves us pretty well alone. It potters around with the bugs and plants, contenting itself with flicking a virus across every now and then, just to remind us it’s still around. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 3672-3677
, clipped on Wednesday, August 8, 2018 11:20:35 PM
You love because you want to need someone the way you did when you were a child, and have them need you too. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 3677-3678
, clipped on Wednesday, August 8, 2018 11:22:39 PM
experienced a terrible dismay, felt irrevocably alone and distraught. That feeling has never left me. It’s always there, deep under the surface banter and snappy thoughts. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 3782-3784
, clipped on Thursday, August 9, 2018 7:22:31 AM
dead, and no birds sang there. I cut my way into the high grass, reeling Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4019-4020
, clipped on Thursday, August 9, 2018 10:35:44 PM
All I wanted was something different. I found it. And I lost everything else, absolutely everything, apart from what I really wanted to lose. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4044-4045
, clipped on Thursday, August 9, 2018 10:39:35 PM
The more you get to know someone, the more there is to dislike. If you get to know them well enough, you hate them. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4191-4192
, clipped on Friday, August 10, 2018 7:48:07 AM
age. At the top the cat sat down again, looking up at the door. We stood still for a moment Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4422-4422
, clipped on Saturday, August 11, 2018 12:07:18 AM
I was just a hurt little boy, wandering round looking for more excuses to feel sorry for myself. If you know someone well you learn to hate them, and I knew myself far too well. I’d looked inside, pulled myself apart and run hunting through the shreds hoping to find something left in there that I could hold onto, and there was nothing. I wasn’t there any more. All that was left was memories, and the space between was filled with bitter sludge. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4600-4604
, clipped on Saturday, August 11, 2018 8:19:27 AM
Anyone can catalogue the bad times, but how do you tell the good? I can tell you these things but I can’t make you see them. I can send you a postcard, but you can’t come to stay. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4814-4815
, clipped on Saturday, August 11, 2018 8:41:46 AM
When you don’t know what you want you clutch at everything, thinking that because it’s new it will be better, and not realising that a nobody won’t be happy with anything. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 4859-4861
, clipped on Saturday, August 11, 2018 9:11:33 AM
Everything you’ve done, everything you’ve seen, everything you’ve become, remains. You never can go back, only forward, and if you don’t bring the whole of yourself with you, you’ll never see the sun again. Smith, Michael Marshall
, Only Forward (Voyager Classics).
loc. 5076-5077
, clipped on Saturday, August 11, 2018 9:40:38 AM
If, as I have already urged, there can be no scientifically or empirically neutral system of language or concepts, then the proposed construction of alternate tests and theories must proceed from within one or another paradigm-based tradition. Thus restricted it would have no access to all possible experiences or to all possible theories. As a result, probabilistic theories disguise the verification situation as much as they illuminate Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2780-2783
, clipped on Friday, August 17, 2018 7:33:09 AM
More is involved, however, than the incommensurability of standards. Since new paradigms are born from old ones, they ordinarily incorporate much of the vocabulary and apparatus, both conceptual and manipulative, that the traditional paradigm had previously employed. But they seldom employ these borrowed elements in quite the traditional way. Within the new paradigm, old terms, concepts, and experiments fall into new relationships one with the other. The inevitable result is what we must call, though the term is not quite right, a misunderstanding between the two competing schools Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2829-2833
, clipped on Friday, August 17, 2018 7:46:30 AM
Inevitably, at times of revolution, that assurance seems stubborn and pigheaded as indeed it sometimes becomes. But it is also something more. That same assurance is what makes normal or puzzle-solving science possible. And it is only through normal science that the professional community of scientists succeeds, first, in exploiting the potential scope and precision of the older paradigm and, then, in isolating the difficulty through the study of which a new paradigm may emerge. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2872-2876
, clipped on Friday, August 17, 2018 7:51:17 AM
counterargument can sometimes be very close indeed. And outside that area the balance will often decisively favor the tradition. Copernicus destroyed a time-honored explanation of terrestrial motion without replacing it; Newton did the same for an older explanation of gravity, Lavoisier for the common properties of metals, and so on. In short, if a new candidate for paradigm had to be judged from the start by hard-headed people who examined only relative problem-solving ability, the sciences would experience very few major revolutions. Add the counterarguments generated by what we previously called the incommensurability of paradigms, and the sciences might experience no revolutions at all. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 2952-2957
, clipped on Friday, August 17, 2018 8:02:28 AM
Some of these are consequences of the unparalleled insulation of mature scientific communities from the demands of the laity and of everyday life. That insulation has never been complete—we are now discussing matters of degree. Nevertheless, there are no other professional communities in which individual creative work is so exclusively addressed to and evaluated by other members of the profession. The most esoteric of poets or the most abstract of theologians is far more concerned than the scientist with lay approbation of his creative work, though he may be even less concerned with approbation in general. That difference proves consequential. Just because he is working only for an audience of colleagues, an audience that shares his own values and beliefs, the scientist can take a single set of standards for granted. He need not worry about what some other group or school will think and can therefore dispose of one problem and get on to the next more quickly than those who work for a more heterodox group. Even more important, the insulation of the scientific community from society permits the individual scientist to concentrate his attention upon problems that he has good reason to believe he will be able to solve. Unlike the engineer, and many doctors, and most theologians, the scientist need not choose problems because they urgently need solution and without regard for the tools available to solve them. In this respect, also, the contrast between natural scientists and many social scientists proves instructive. The latter often tend, as the former almost never do, to defend their choice of a research problem—e.g., the effects of racial discrimination or the causes of the business cycle—chiefly in terms of the social importance of achieving a solution. Which group would one then expect to solve problems at a more rapid rate? Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3051-3064
, clipped on Saturday, August 18, 2018 8:34:47 PM
And then he looked down at his feet and caught a glimpse of his messed up year’s-salary shoes, and he hated this stupid, ugly and above all cheap place, and his pencilneckhood rolled back as he found that part of himself which was indifferent, and he slipped gently into the warm water of not giving a damn. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 321-323
, clipped on Tuesday, August 21, 2018 10:20:20 PM
If Assumption Soames’s nickname sounds sophisticated for our infant wit, the reason is that it originates among the teachers, a flea-bitten and secular motley of brilliant minds culled from institutions too prissy to put up with their foibles. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 473-475
, clipped on Sunday, August 26, 2018 11:36:14 AM
Old Man Lubitsch explains that this is normal in what is called politics, which is essentially the business of countries and big groups of people trying to make everyone see things their way. Since no one ever does, very little is achieved and practitioners are voted out and others voted in who reverse the process, so government (as Old Man Lubitsch explains it) is not so much a journey as a series of emergency stops and arguments over which way up to hold the map. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 513-516
, clipped on Sunday, August 26, 2018 11:41:59 AM
An elder stranger, without irony, treats me as a being of equal worth—if of lesser experience and discernment in the matter of timepieces. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 727-728
, clipped on Sunday, August 26, 2018 12:03:27 PM
Old Man Lubitsch has long ago explained that the Queen is an asset, cherished and nurtured but not obeyed, and that the hives are a functioning biological machine. He cannot decide if they represent an eerie social harmony or a grim nightmare of mechanistic sub-servience to a purposeless and endlessly repeating pattern. In the heat, he muses on this imponderable aloud, until Ma Lubitsch pronounces it unsuitable conversation to go with lemonade, and her husband gratefully abandons political philosophy for citrusy relief. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 872-876
, clipped on Monday, August 27, 2018 11:27:14 PM
but she is monumentally boring, or perhaps I am, and we part chastely and with a measure of relief. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 913-913
, clipped on Thursday, August 30, 2018 12:30:13 AM
Almost, she is drawn in black and white, and this colouration is so strange that it distracts you from her face, which is strong, perhaps a little too broad, with features which lack the perfect symmetry of the beautiful or the mediocrity of pretty, so that she is striking, maybe attractive, but definitely unique. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 1090-1092
, clipped on Thursday, August 30, 2018 10:34:01 PM
that I’m a very good liar and that is the only way I can make sure to be allowed to teach you the stuff you need to know. People don’t want children to know what they need to know. They want their kids to know what they ought to need to know. If you’re a teacher you’re in a constant battle with mildly deluded adults who think the world will get better if you imagine it is better. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 1207-1209
, clipped on Thursday, August 30, 2018 10:49:14 PM
“Everything we are learning about nature is amazing.” Nima’s voice breaks into my thoughts. “If you have new particles, you have more clues. If you don’t, you have still clues. It’s a sign of the narcissism of our times that people use this language. In better times you wouldn’t have been allowed to use this language in polite company. Who cares about your feelings? Who cares if you spent forty years of your life on this? Nobody promised a rose garden. This is a risky business. You want certainty, you do something else with your life. People spent centuries barking up the wrong tree. That’s life.” Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 1316-1320
, clipped on Saturday, September 1, 2018 1:52:07 AM
The origin of the multiverse fad, therefore, is that some physicists are no longer content with a theory that describes observation. In trying to outdo themselves, they get rid of too many assumptions, and then they conclude we live in a multiverse because they can’t explain anything anymore. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 1696-1698
, clipped on Sunday, September 2, 2018 1:34:24 AM
The multiverse has gained in popularity while naturalness has come under stress, and physicists now pitch one as the other’s alternative. If we can’t find a natural explanation for a number, so the argument goes, then there isn’t any. Just choosing a parameter is too ugly. Therefore, if the parameter is not natural, then it can take on any value, and for every possible value there’s a universe. This leads to the bizarre conclusion that if we don’t see supersymmetric particles at the LHC, then we live in a multiverse. I can’t believe what this once-venerable profession has become. Theoretical physicists used to explain what was observed. Now they try to explain why they can’t explain what was not observed. And they’re not even good at that. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 1715-1720
, clipped on Sunday, September 2, 2018 1:36:32 AM
Mythological beasts aside, the important and relevant point is that sense and reference can be quite independent of one another, can be wildly at variance, with the result that things you thought you knew from front to back and top to toe turn out to be different from how you understood them. At some point, for example, someone woke up, looked at the Morning Star, thought about the Evening Star and then looked through their telescope and saw what was actually there and realised that Phosphorus and Hesperus are both the planet Venus. Two incorrect senses with the same actual reference! What a day that must have been! Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 1853-1857
, clipped on Sunday, September 2, 2018 11:00:27 AM
At which point I nearly burst into tears, but manage instead a manly nod which is intended to convey that none of this is now or has ever been my fault, and yet I carry the cross without complaint or expectation of redress. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2041-2043
, clipped on Sunday, September 2, 2018 11:30:01 AM
nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.” Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2088-2089
, clipped on Sunday, September 2, 2018 11:34:49 AM
“Garbage in, garbage out. Or rather more felicitously: the tree of nonsense is watered with error, and from its branches swing the pumpkins of disaster.” Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2088-2089
, clipped on Sunday, September 2, 2018 11:34:56 AM
I suspect they would be rendered placid and wide-eyed with wonder by the soft reassuring gleam of this walkway. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2188-2188
, clipped on Monday, September 3, 2018 1:18:38 AM
Modern war is distinguished by the fact that all the participants are ostensibly unwilling. We are swept towards one another like colonies of heavily armed penguins on an ice floe. Every speech on the subject given by any involved party begins by deploring even the idea of war. A war here would not be legal or useful. It is not necessary or appropriate. It must be avoided. Immediately following this proud declamation comes a series of circumlocutions, circumventions and rhetoricocircumambulations which make it clear that we will go to war, but not really, because we don’t want to and aren’t allowed to, so what we’re doing is in fact some kind of hyper-violent peace in which people will die. We are going to un-war. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2478-2483
, clipped on Tuesday, September 4, 2018 12:04:48 AM
“What changes very often is not physical theories, but our conception of what they mean, why they should be true. So I don’t think you overthrow everything, although you may overthrow previous aesthetic judgements. And what survives are the theories that the previous aesthetic judgements gave rise to. If they are successful—which they may not Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 2061-2064
, clipped on Tuesday, September 4, 2018 10:11:03 PM
see the difference: the bosons happily collide and the fermions don’t. This is a pure Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 2086-2086
, clipped on Tuesday, September 4, 2018 10:14:25 PM
There’s a lesson to be learned here, I think: if you pile up enough of it, even shit can look beautiful. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 2670-2671
, clipped on Thursday, September 6, 2018 9:17:35 PM
String theorists’ continuous adaptation to conflicting evidence has become so entertaining that many departments of physics keep a few string theorists around because the public likes to hear about their heroic attempts to explain everything. Freeman Dyson’s interpretation of the subject’s popularity is that “string theory is attractive because it offers jobs. And why are so many jobs offered in string theory? Because string theory is cheap. If you are the chairperson of a physics department in a remote place without much money, you cannot afford to build a modern laboratory to do experimental physics, but you can afford to hire a couple of string theorists. So you offer a couple of jobs in string theory and you have a modern physics department.” Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 2729-2734
, clipped on Thursday, September 6, 2018 9:59:16 PM
They now claim their methods are useful for understanding the behavior of certain “strange” metals, but even string theorist Joseph Conlon likened the use of string theory for the description of such materials to the use of a map of the Alps for traveling in the Himalayas. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 2727-2729
, clipped on Thursday, September 6, 2018 9:59:23 PM
The other difference between the marketplace of consumer goods and the marketplace of ideas is that the value of a good is determined by the market, whereas the value of a scientific explanation is eventually determined by its use to describe observations—it’s just that this value is often unknown when researchers must decide what to spend time on. Science, therefore, isn’t a marketplace that creates its own value; rather, it’s a forecasting platform to identify an external value. The function of the scientific community and its institutions is to select the most promising ideas and support them. This means, however, that in science, marketing prevents the system from working properly because it distorts relevant information. If everything is groundbreaking and novel, nothing Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 3073-3079
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:57:02 AM
The other difference between the marketplace of consumer goods and the marketplace of ideas is that the value of a good is determined by the market, whereas the value of a scientific explanation is eventually determined by its use to describe observations—it’s just that this value is often unknown when researchers must decide what to spend time on. Science, therefore, isn’t a marketplace that creates its own value; rather, it’s a forecasting platform to identify an external value. The function of the scientific community and its institutions is to select the most promising ideas and support them. This means, however, that in science, marketing prevents the system from working properly because it distorts relevant information. If everything is groundbreaking and novel, nothing is. The need to assess which ideas are worth Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 3073-3079
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:57:09 AM
The other difference between the marketplace of consumer goods and the marketplace of ideas is that the value of a good is determined by the market, whereas the value of a scientific explanation is eventually determined by its use to describe observations—it’s just that this value is often unknown when researchers must decide what to spend time on. Science, therefore, isn’t a marketplace that creates its own value; rather, it’s a forecasting platform to identify an external value. The function of the scientific community and its institutions is to select the most promising ideas and support them. This means, however, that in science, marketing prevents the system from working properly because it distorts relevant information. If everything is groundbreaking and novel, nothing is. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 3073-3079
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:57:16 AM
But during my travels it has become clear to me that I am not missing a justification for why my colleagues rely on beauty. There just isn’t any. As much as I want to believe that the laws of nature are beautiful, I don’t think our sense of beauty is a good guide; in contrast, it has distracted us from other, more pressing questions. Like the one that Steven Weinberg pointed out: that we do not understand the emergence of the macroscopic world. Or, as Xiao-Gang Wen reminded me, that we do not understand quantum field theory. Or, as the issue of the multiverse and naturalness shows, that we do not understand what it means for a law of nature to be probable. And so I tell Katie that, yes, I think nature has more beauty in store for us. But beauty, like happiness, can’t be found by complaining about its absence. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 3279-3285
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 2:17:17 AM
During experiments, the LHC creates about a billion proton-proton collisions per second. That’s too much data to store even for CERN’s computing capacity. Hence the events are filtered in real time and discarded unless an algorithm marks them as interesting. From a billion events, this “trigger mechanism” keeps only one hundred to two hundred selected ones.27 We trust the experimentalists to do the right thing. We have to trust them, because not every scientist can scrutinize every detail of everybody else’s work. It’s not possible—we’d never get anything done. Without mutual trust, science cannot work. That CERN has spent the last ten years deleting data that hold the key to new fundamental physics is what I would call the nightmare scenario. Hossenfelder, Sabine
, Lost in Math.
loc. 3397-3403
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 9:11:59 AM
Though the example of taxonomy suggests that normal science can proceed with few such expressions, the power of a science seems quite generally to increase with the number of symbolic generalizations its practitioners have at their disposal. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3343-3345
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 10:43:51 AM
Probably that situation is typical. I currently suspect that all revolutions involve, among other things, the abandonment of generalizations the force of which had previously been in some part that of tautologies. Did Einstein show that simultaneity was relative or did he alter the notion of simultaneity itself? Were those who heard paradox in the phrase ‘relativity of simultaneity’ simply wrong? Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3355-3358
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 10:47:02 AM
Probably the most deeply held values concern predictions: they should be accurate; quantitative predictions are preferable to qualitative ones; whatever the margin of permissible error, it should be consistently satisfied in a given field; and so on. There are also, however, values to be used in judging whole theories: they must, first and foremost, permit puzzle-formulation and solution; where possible they should be simple, self-consistent, and plausible, compatible, that is, with other theories currently deployed. (I now think it a weakness of my original text that so little attention is given to such values as internal and external consistency in considering sources of crisis and factors in theory choice.) Other sorts of values exist as well—for example, science should (or need not) be socially useful—but the preceding should indicate what I have in mind. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3373-3379
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 10:51:51 AM
Second, individual variability in the application of shared values may serve functions essential to science. The points at which values must be applied are invariably also those at which risks must be taken. Most anomalies are resolved by normal means; most proposals for new theories do prove to be wrong. If all members of a community responded to each anomaly as a source of crisis or embraced each new theory advanced by a colleague, science would cease. If, on the other hand, no one reacted to anomalies or to brand-new theories in high-risk ways, there would be few or no revolutions. In matters like these the resort to shared values rather than to shared rules governing individual choice may be the community’s way of distributing risk and assuring the long-term success of its enterprise. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3396-3402
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:04:50 AM
I have repeatedly acted as though we did perceive theoretical entities like currents, electrons, and fields, as though we learned to do so from examination of exemplars, and as though in these cases too it would be wrong to replace talk of seeing with talk of criteria and interpretation. The metaphor that transfers ‘seeing’ to contexts like these is scarcely a sufficient basis for such claims. In the long run it will need to be eliminated in favor of a more literal mode of discourse. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3561-3564
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:27:14 AM
Or consider the scientist inspecting an ammeter to determine the number against which the needle has settled. His sensation probably is the same as the layman’s, particularly if the latter has read other sorts of meters before. But he has seen the meter (again often literally) in the context of the entire circuit, and he knows something about its internal structure. For him the needle’s position is a criterion, but only of the value of the current. To interpret it he need determine only on which scale the meter is to be read. For the layman, on the other hand, the needle’s position is not a criterion of anything except itself. To interpret it, he must examine the whole layout of wires, internal and external, experiment with batteries and magnets, and so on. In the metaphorical no less than in the literal use of ‘seeing,’ interpretation begins where perception ends. The two processes are not the same, and what perception leaves for interpretation to complete depends drastically on the nature and amount of prior experience and training. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3575-3582
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:29:15 AM
What one must understand, however, is the manner in which a particular set of shared values interacts with the particular experiences shared by a community of specialists to ensure that most members of the group will ultimately find one set of arguments rather than another decisive. That process is persuasion, but it presents a deeper problem. Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints. How can they even hope to talk together much less to be persuasive. Even a preliminary answer to that question demands further specification Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3611-3616
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:36:00 AM
What one must understand, however, is the manner in which a particular set of shared values interacts with the particular experiences shared by a community of specialists to ensure that most members of the group will ultimately find one set of arguments rather than another decisive. That process is persuasion, but it presents a deeper problem. Two men who perceive the same situation differently but nevertheless employ the same vocabulary in its discussion must be using words differently. They speak, that is, from what I have called incommensurable viewpoints. How can they even hope to talk together much less to be persuasive Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3611-3615
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:36:06 AM
That being the case, a second aspect of translation, long familiar to both historians and linguists, becomes crucially important. To translate a theory or worldview into one’s own language is not to make it one’s own. For that one must go native, discover that one is thinking and working in, not simply translating out of, a language that was previously foreign. That transition is not, however, one that an individual may make or refrain from making by deliberation and choice, however good his reasons for wishing to do so. Instead, at some point in the process of learning to translate, he finds that the transition has occurred, that he has slipped into the new language without a decision having been made. Or else, like many of those who first encountered, say, relativity or quantum mechanics in their middle years, he finds himself fully persuaded of the new view but nevertheless unable to internalize it and be at home in the world it helps to shape. Intellectually such a man has made his choice, but the conversion required if it is to be effective eludes him. He may use the new theory nonetheless, but he will do so as a foreigner in a foreign environment, an alternative available to him only because there are natives already there. His work is parasitic on theirs, for he lacks the constellation of mental sets which future members of the community will acquire through education. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3670-3680
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:44:05 AM
If they can, then scientific development is, like biological, a unidirectional and irreversible process. Later scientific theories are better than earlier ones for solving puzzles in the often quite different environments to which they are applied. That is not a relativist’s position, and it displays the sense in which I am a convinced believer in scientific progress. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3702-3705
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:48:15 AM
Perhaps there is some other way of salvaging the notion of ‘truth’ for application to whole theories, but this one will not do. There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like ‘really there’; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its “real” counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as a historian, I am impressed with the implausability of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton’s mechanics improves on Aristotle’s and that Einstein’s improves on Newton’s as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development. On the contrary, in some important respects, though by no means in all, Einstein’s general theory of relativity is closer to Aristotle’s than either of them is to Newton’s. Though the temptation to describe that position as relativistic is understandable, the description seems to me wrong. Conversely, if the position be relativism, I cannot see that the relativist loses anything needed to account for the nature and development of the sciences. Kuhn, Thomas S.
, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
loc. 3711-3718
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:49:31 AM
Trent hits me from one side and we fall together into the wall of a dismembered Laundromat. He counts. One. Two. Three . . . and a cloud of razors whispers by, a mist of broken glass which rakes the ground and tinkles off the awning struts and rips the fabric apart without slowing down, and the deflected splinters, some the size of fishfood and some like sideplates, drop around us from above. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2653-2656
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:37:10 PM
“Oh gosh, this conversation has a rather obvious sexual subtext. Did you know banknotes were designed by pointillistes? I mention it because you seem to have some talent in that direction.” Someone is talking, and he sounds a great deal like me, but I wouldn’t say something that crass unless I was medicated, which of course I am, because they are taking the friendly shrapnel out of my arm in an hour, and I am full to the gills with happy juice. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2735-2738
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:45:17 PM
And she kisses me. It is not a sexual kiss, in the sense that she does not fling herself flat upon me and press herself against me and ravish my mouth with her slender, fascinating lips. It is however unquestionably and utterly an erotic kiss, above and beyond that I have lacked female company for seven months and can now, when I am not in agony, get turned on by the elegant lines of wooden chair legs and the sound of a floorboard sighing. It is erotic in the sense also that it is a thing of love, or the promise of love, or the offer of the possibility of love, and I am not aware of having done anything to deserve this. It is wonderful. And then it stops. She surveys the impact zone and seems pleased. I boggle at her (suavely, of course, not like a gaffed salmon being given the kiss of life by a mermaid, not at all), and she turns smartly and walks out. I fall asleep smiling, for the first time since I came to Addeh Katir. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2741-2747
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:47:01 PM
That there is no lawful or social impediment to my making an honest woman of Nurse Leah, who is obviously his friend, but that I realise that the ravings of a post-operative idiot are not the basis for a sound marriage, which is a thing to be embarked upon solemnly and with due thought to the consequences and on the understanding that to love is an action, a verb, a thing of choice, and this can be promised and delivered where in love is a more tenuous and fragile thing which may come and go with the wind and the seasons. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2773-2777
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 1:49:26 PM
This proximity is making me extremely horny, and it gets no better when she leans back and stretches because she is cramped (or possibly because she, better even than Gonzo, knows the value of casual contact and accidental rubbings and touches, and she is well aware that her rear sliding over my thighs and her pale neck right there in front of me are causing an involuntary, embarrassing and deeply enjoyable physical reaction in my groin, to wit, a boner of truly splendid solidity which would be visible if she turned so much as a quarter circle and looked down, which she does not do, even when a gorgeous rose light paints the hills on that side of the car and she has to crane her neck to see it). Behind us a big guy named Jim is driving another monster RV, this one fitted with a fifty-calibre machine gun, and behind the fifty-cal is a beefy, muscle-bound woman called Annabel by Gonzo and Ox by everyone else, and she appears to be speaking or yelling into the teeth of the wind. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 2836-2843
, clipped on Saturday, September 8, 2018 11:49:16 PM
I’ve known this whole un-war business was stupid for a while. I’ve never liked it, but I haven’t hated it until now. I am wondering whether Rao Tsur and his wife will greet annihilation with the same wit they showed in the marketplace; whether Mrs. Tsur will beg Jim Hepsobah to take her youngest son on his lap when there is no more space; whether she will stand like a pillar and hold her children while we depart; whether she will fling herself on us in a rage, or watch us struggle to save who we can with the eerie, patient understanding of imminent death; whether Rao will seek to reach an accommodation for the safety of his family, or whether we will see something darker and more horrible as he abandons them. Perhaps his love is a weak thing. Perhaps he does mean to exchange her for a younger model, or perhaps he simply values his own life over hers. Perhaps he will default, demand passage for himself alone, even try to bribe us. I think, if he does that, that I will kill him. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 3040-3047
, clipped on Sunday, September 9, 2018 10:46:26 AM
Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 66-69
, clipped on Saturday, September 15, 2018 12:25:51 PM
Accuracy is, in every case, advantageous to beauty, and just reasoning to delicate sentiment. In vain would we exalt the one by depreciating the other. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 82-83
, clipped on Saturday, September 15, 2018 12:32:26 PM
But though our thought seems to possess this unbounded liberty, we shall find, upon a nearer examination, that it is really confined within very narrow limits, and that all this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 191-193
, clipped on Saturday, September 15, 2018 12:45:25 PM
our ideas or more feeble perceptions are copies of our impressions or more lively ones. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 197-198
, clipped on Saturday, September 15, 2018 12:45:29 PM
All ideas, especially abstract ones, are naturally faint and obscure: the mind has but a slender hold of them: they are apt to be confounded with other resembling ideas; and when we have often employed any term, though without a distinct meaning, we are apt to imagine it has a determinate idea annexed to it. On the contrary, all impressions, that is, all sensations, either outward or inward, are strong and vivid: the limits between them are more exactly determined: nor is it easy to fall into any error or mistake with regard to them. When we entertain, therefore, any suspicion that a philosophical term is employed without any meaning or idea (as is but too frequent), we need but enquire, from what impression is that supposed idea derived? And if it be impossible to assign any, this will serve to confirm our suspicion. By bringing ideas into so clear a light we may reasonably hope to remove all dispute, which may arise, concerning their nature and reality. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 230-237
, clipped on Saturday, September 15, 2018 12:54:55 PM
To me, there appear to be only three principles of connexion among ideas, namely, Resemblance, Contiguity in time or place, and Cause or Effect. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 250-251
, clipped on Saturday, September 15, 2018 12:56:11 PM
Custom, then, is the great guide of human life. It is that principle alone which renders our experience useful to us, and makes us expect, for the future, a similar train of events with those which have appeared in the past. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 510-511
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:29:23 AM
For wherever the repetition of any particular act or operation produces a propensity to renew the same act or operation, without being impelled by any reasoning or process of the understanding, we always say, that this propensity is the effect of Custom. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 497-499
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 7:36:11 AM
shall add, for a further confirmation of the foregoing theory, that, as this operation of the mind, by which we infer like effects from like causes, and vice versa, is so essential to the subsistence of all human creatures, it is not probable, that it could be trusted to the fallacious deductions of our reason, which is slow in its operations; appears not, in any degree, during the first years of infancy; and at best is, in every age and period of human life, extremely liable to error and mistake. It is more conformable to the ordinary wisdom of nature to secure so necessary an act of the mind, by some instinct or mechanical tendency, which may be infallible in its operations, may discover itself at the first appearance of life and thought, and may be independent of all the laboured deductions of the understanding. As nature has taught us the use of our limbs, without giving us the knowledge of the muscles and nerves, by which they are actuated; so has she implanted in us an instinct, which carries forward the thought in a correspondent course to that which she has established among external objects; though we are ignorant of those powers and forces, on which this regular course and succession of objects totally depends. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 640-648
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 7:57:51 AM
I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked: “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.” He was disgusted: “You don’t know what a dog that has been run over feels like[4].” Now who knows what really happened? It seems extraordinary, almost unbelievable, that anyone could object seriously to what Pascal reports herself as having said. That characterization of her feelings—so innocently close to the utterly commonplace “sick as a dog”—is simply not provocative enough to arouse any response as lively or intense as disgust. If Pascal’s simile is offensive, then what figurative or allusive uses of language would not be? So perhaps it did not really happen quite as Pascal says. Perhaps Wittgenstein was trying to make a small joke, and it misfired. He was only pretending to bawl Pascal out, just for the fun of a little hyperbole; and she got the tone and the intention wrong. She thought he was disgusted by her remark, when in fact he was only trying to cheer her up with some playfully exaggerated mock criticism or joshing. In that case the incident is not incredible or bizarre after all. Harry Frankfurt
, On bullshit.
loc. 124-133
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:36:14 PM
This resemblance between bull sessions and bullshit is suggested also by the term shooting the bull, which refers to the sort of conversation that characterizes bull sessions and in which the term shooting is very likely a cleaned-up rendition of shitting. The very term bull session is, indeed, quite probably a sanitized version of bullshit session. Harry Frankfurt
, On bullshit.
loc. 194-197
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:41:30 PM
The statements made in a bull session differ from bullshit in that there is no pretense that this connection is being sustained. They are like bullshit by virtue of the fact that they are in some degree unconstrained by a concern with truth. Harry Frankfurt
, On bullshit.
loc. 192-194
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:41:43 PM
For the essence of bullshit is not that it is false but that it is phony. In order to appreciate this distinction, one must recognize that a fake or a phony need not be in any respect (apart from authenticity itself) inferior to the real thing. What is not genuine need not also be defective in some other way. It may be, after all, an exact copy. What is wrong with a counterfeit is not what it is like, but how it was made. This points to a similar and fundamental aspect of the essential nature of bullshit: although it is produced without concern with the truth, it need not be false. The bullshitter is faking things. But this does not mean that he necessarily gets them wrong. Harry Frankfurt
, On bullshit.
loc. 240-245
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:44:03 PM
It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose. Harry Frankfurt
, On bullshit.
loc. 283-289
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:47:46 PM
Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial—notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit. Harry Frankfurt
, On bullshit.
loc. 340-342
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 2:50:40 PM
Thus, the three common explanations for our species’ ecological success are (1) generalized intelligence or mental processing power, (2) specialized mental abilities evolved for survival in the hunter-gatherer environments of our evolutionary past, and/or (3) cooperative instincts or social intelligence that permit high levels of cooperation. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 388-390
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 11:01:40 PM
However, as I’ll show, none of these approaches can explain our ecological dominance or our species’ uniqueness without first recognizing the intense reliance we have on a large body of locally adaptive, culturally transmitted information that no single individual, or even group, is smart enough to figure out in a lifetime. To understand both human nature and our ecological dominance, we first need to explore how cultural evolution gives rise to complex repertoires of adaptive practices, beliefs, and motivations. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 391-395
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 11:02:00 PM
Like natural selection, our cultural learning abilities give rise to “dumb” processes that can, operating over generations, produce practices that are smarter than any individual or even group. Much of our seeming intelligence actually comes not from raw brainpower or a plethora of instincts, but rather from the accumulated repertoire of mental tools (e.g., integers), skills (differentiating right from left), concepts (fly wheels), and categories (basic color terms) that we inherit culturally from earlier generations. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 400-404
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 11:03:04 PM
when compared to other apes, humans are prolific, spontaneous, and automatic imitators, even willing to copy seemingly unnecessary or purely stylistic steps. When demonstrations include “extra” or “wasteful” steps, chimpanzee social learning emerges as superior to that of humans because we end up acquiring wasteful or inefficient elements whereas chimps filter these out. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 451-453
, clipped on Sunday, September 16, 2018 11:08:58 PM
George Copsen sits where he always sits. He wears the same plastic smile. In his hands is his service sidearm. Very little has changed about him, except that he is dead. He has ended his own life quite neatly, efficiently and somehow gently, as if apologising for making a mess. There is actually not very much mess, all things considered. He is still warm, but sort of like coffee from an hour ago, rather than in any way which might suggest that he lingers. He smells of pepper. I look at him and back across the compound. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 3408-3411
, clipped on Tuesday, September 18, 2018 1:42:34 AM
Her eyes look completely ordinary, which is what eyes do, but the face in which they rest, the network of small muscles which are used, voluntarily and otherwise, to produce expressions and communicate mood, is broadcasting that she’s dangerously psychotic. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 3604-3606
, clipped on Wednesday, September 19, 2018 7:59:47 AM
Most people, when they pray, have a notion of where the words are going. They have in mind God the Bearded, God the Robed, God the Absent Father sitting on a cloud going through his postbag. My prayer is in a blank envelope, left sitting at a bus stop. Anyone who is interested can pick it up and open it. Anyone, in fact, who wants to be God—to me, at least—can slip their thumb between the flap and the body of the envelope and crack the seal, and discover my one, solemn wish: Dear Lord, I want to go home. All they have to do, to get into my personal pantheon, is deliver the appropriate miracle. In the meantime, though, I’m working on the basis that the letter will sit there and get brushed off the back of the bench and into the gutter, and then a rainstorm will wash it into the sewer system where it will get sodden and mouldy, and the ink will fade and the paper turn to sludge, and my prayer will just fade away unread, as they mostly seem to. So I rest my left hand against the wall, thumb outwards Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 3795-3802
, clipped on Wednesday, September 19, 2018 8:29:32 AM
The chief obstacle, therefore, to our improvement in the moral or metaphysical sciences is the obscurity of the ideas, and ambiguity of the terms. The principal difficulty in the mathematics is the length of inferences and compass of thought, requisite to the forming of any conclusion. And, perhaps, our progress in natural philosophy is chiefly retarded by the want of proper experiments and phaenomena, which are often discovered by chance, and cannot always be found, when requisite, even by the most diligent and prudent enquiry. As moral philosophy seems hitherto to have received less improvement than either geometry or physics, we may conclude, that, if there be any difference in this respect among these sciences, the difficulties, which obstruct the progress of the former, require superior care and capacity to be surmounted. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 705-711
, clipped on Saturday, September 22, 2018 10:22:43 AM
When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only that they have acquired a connexion in our thought, and give rise to this inference, by which they become proofs of each other's existence: A conclusion which is somewhat extraordinary, but which seems founded on sufficient evidence. Nor will its evidence be weakened by any general diffidence of the understanding, or sceptical suspicion concerning every conclusion which is new and extraordinary. No conclusions can be more agreeable to scepticism than such as make discoveries concerning the weakness and narrow limits of human reason and capacity. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 888-892
, clipped on Saturday, September 22, 2018 11:27:41 AM
In all abstract reasonings there is one point of view which, if we can happily hit, we shall go farther towards illustrating the subject than by all the eloquence and copious expression in the world. This point of view we should endeavour to reach, and reserve the flowers of rhetoric for subjects which are more adapted to them. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 922-924
, clipped on Saturday, September 22, 2018 11:30:00 AM
Human beings can get used to just about anything, given time. They can get to the point where not living on the brink of being converted to fusing plasma at any time in an argument over economic theory and practice is a bad thing, a scary, uncomfortable, unimaginably dangerous thing. This is the gift of focus, or wilful denial, and it is something boys are particularly good at. Girls—at least where I grew up—tend to be more emotionally balanced and sane, and therefore find the kind of all-excluding concentration you need to care about dinosaurs, taxonomy, philately and geopolitical schemes a bit worrying and sad. Girls can grasp the bigger picture (i.e., it might be better not to destroy the world over this), where boys have a perfect grip on the fine print (i.e., this insidious idea is antithetical to our existence and cannot be allowed to flourish alongside our peace-loving, free society). Note carefully how it is probably better to let the girls deal with weapons of mass destruction. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 4299-4305
, clipped on Saturday, September 22, 2018 9:02:51 PM
Huster was technically some species of ambassador, but it was never clear for whom or to whom—“us,” I suppose, and no one really bothered to ask who that was and who it might not be. He was just the right man in the right place, and that was so obvious that no one argued about Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 4689-4691
, clipped on Sunday, September 23, 2018 12:05:39 AM
So I asked again, what is Jorgmund? Not the Pipe. The Pipe is an object which brings relief. But Jorgmund is not only that. Is it a government? A company?” He shrugs again. “It is both. And what is its purpose? You might say ‘to reclaim the world,’ but that is our purpose. Jorgmund is a machine for laying, maintaining and defending the Pipe. That is its only task. Its only priority. In fact, that is the only thing it can see. It is blind to us. It does not even know that we exist, except in so far as we impinge upon that purpose. If the Pipe could be constructed by monkeys and guarded by dogs, Jorgmund would be content with that. More content, actually, because it would be cheaper. Humans are simply not of interest to Jorgmund. We are gears. Jorgmund sees the world, and the Pipe, and anything which gets in the way. Nothing else.” Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 4746-4752
, clipped on Sunday, September 23, 2018 12:11:11 AM
We push through the undergrowth, all of us feeling that we are undressing someone we shouldn’t be. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 4824-4825
, clipped on Sunday, September 23, 2018 10:18:14 AM
It is the handwriting of someone who has learned the Roman alphabet as a second script, and as a consequence makes his words reverently, like a visitor in a house with a pale carpet. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 5065-5066
, clipped on Sunday, September 23, 2018 10:51:00 AM
But her favourite was an elephant head with bent tusks made of hempcloth. On its face was a sad little smile, as if it missed the taffeta savannah and the rolling burlap grasses of home. We never asked what they meant to her, because some things were private, however weird and unsettling it was to see her set them out in a little head-huddle over her bed. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 5096-5098
, clipped on Sunday, September 23, 2018 10:55:02 AM
They are sort of anti-Nietzschean clowns, who restore the ordinary simply by existing; a gentle remedy for the insidious forgetting which afflicts us. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 5868-5869
, clipped on Tuesday, September 25, 2018 10:33:08 PM
We all carry a multitude of ghosts around with us: impressions of other people, strong or weak, deep from long acquaintance or shallow with brevity. Those ghosts are maps, updated with each encounter, made detailed, judged, liked or disliked. They are, if you ask a philosopher, all we can ever really know of the other people in the world. It’s usually best not to ask philosophers anything, precisely because they have the habit of what in the Persian language is called sanud: the profitless consideration of unsettling yet inconsequential things. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 5948-5952
, clipped on Tuesday, September 25, 2018 10:42:36 PM
The night is cool. An indecisive moon is hanging above the circus tent while a murmur of approbation filters out through the canvas backdrops. I sit on a stump and stand up again, then sit. Then I stand up. We like to believe we are complex creatures, but sometimes we just get perfectly balanced between conflicting drives, and we dither. Up, down. Up, down. I’m a dog caught between a piece of steak and a comfortable chair. It’s tearing me apart. Up, down. Down. Hmm, no. Up. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 5959-5962
, clipped on Tuesday, September 25, 2018 10:43:59 PM
I feel a vertiginous, cliff-edge lurch: the strange, inverted desire to do the worst imaginable thing. In the case of a cliff, of course, it’s to jump Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 6260-6261
, clipped on Saturday, September 29, 2018 7:52:51 AM
Gonzo’s father told his son to grieve without reservation or embarrassment until he could grieve solemnly and inwardly, and then finally to hang up his tears and wear them only occasionally, as befits the true men of the heart. Grief is not a thing to be ashamed of or suppressed, he told Gonzo. Nor yet is it a thing to cherish. Feel it, inhabit it and leave it behind. It is right, but it is not the end. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 6433-6435
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 8:09:07 AM
Gonzo’s father has not aged so much as he has acquired topography. His skin is folded, refolded, counterfolded, until it is almost smooth. Deep subduction lines have appeared around his mouth and eyes. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 6523-6524
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 8:20:14 AM
“And he . . . he is afraid of her kindness, that it will break something in him, some resolve. He is afraid to be loved, because he is unworthy. He is too ashamed. But also he is angry. So angry, because he is hurt in some way which he thinks is unfair, and he is like a child, he does not know why. And this new job will make it all better. It will make him good again. Make him clean. Make the bad thing go away.” Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 6580-6583
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 8:27:42 AM
Ma Lubitsch understands the mathematics of love. Love is merciless. Love does not count costs, only value. I came here because of a relationship I remembered with two people I had never met. I did not expect them to acknowledge me, to return my affection. I did not expect to find, in this house, family and its attendant responsibilities, but I have. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 6651-6653
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 8:37:45 AM
Something happens to my mouth then. It twists and opens, and my eyes make water, and from my throat and belly come deep, raw noises. It’s like crying, the way wine is like water. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 6811-6812
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 8:54:17 AM
In consequence of her father’s diktat against the sandpit, Elisabeth came to question his wisdom as it emerged from his mouth and concluded that, although Evander Soames was a very intelligent man, he was not always forthcoming with balanced argument, but rather preferred to deploy his intellect in pursuit of his own goals (she expressed this at the time as “Daddy makes things up which are true but not how he says they are,” which is as accurate a summation of academic hairsplitting as you could wish for). Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 7265-7268
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 10:47:46 PM
Elisabeth mourned him as young children mourn: deeply, sporadically and without the awful sense of her own mortality which such death implies to adults. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 7269-7270
, clipped on Sunday, September 30, 2018 10:48:12 PM
Deserts do change, of course. They go through subtle alterations, become more arid or more lush, favour one sly, pink-eared animal or another. It’s just very hard to tell. Deserts are like a nearly bald man having a haircut. The difference is absolutely crucial from within, but to the rest of us it’s still a dusty scrubland with little in the way of plant life. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 7834-7836
, clipped on Monday, October 1, 2018 12:35:09 AM
You don’t make strategy so that there’s one path to victory; you make it so that as many paths as possible lead to something which isn’t loss. At least you do unless you want to die. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 7982-7983
, clipped on Monday, October 1, 2018 12:48:08 AM
Baptiste Vasille shrugs. It’s very much a French shrug. It says “Well, what did you expect?” and it says it in a way which suggests the world is essentially English, and hence a bit awkward Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 8138-8140
, clipped on Monday, October 1, 2018 1:03:33 AM
Baptiste Vasille shrugs. It’s very much a French shrug. It says “Well, what did you expect?” and it says it in a way which suggests the world is essentially English, and hence a bit awkward and silly. Nick Harkaway
, The Gone-Away World.
loc. 8138-8140
, clipped on Monday, October 1, 2018 1:03:39 AM
These are questions about who we should learn from, and what we should attend to and infer, as well as when input from cultural learning should overrule our own direct experience or instincts. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 790-791
, clipped on Tuesday, October 2, 2018 9:29:28 AM
only Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.
loc. 155-155
, clipped on Tuesday, October 9, 2018 10:16:22 PM
usually it plays a similar role. For example, scientists often demand hypotheses Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.
loc. 154-154
, clipped on Tuesday, October 9, 2018 10:16:24 PM
One of the reasons that objectives aren’t often questioned is that they work perfectly well for more modest pursuits. If a manufacturer decided to increase efficiency by 5 %, no one would be shocked if it succeeded. A software company upgrading its product from version 2.0 to version 3.0 is similarly likely to succeed, as happens all the time. Everyday successes like these mislead us into believing that setting objectives works well for almost everything. But as objectives become more ambitious, reaching them becomes less promising—and that’s where the argument becomes most interesting. Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned.
loc. 178-182
, clipped on Wednesday, October 10, 2018 10:33:07 PM
King Enamuel, attacked with a revolutionized army and reduced the Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 466-467
, clipped on Saturday, October 13, 2018 9:06:26 AM
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 639-658
, clipped on Sunday, October 14, 2018 1:23:32 AM
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane, Where dyads tread the fairy fields of Venn, Their indices bedecked from one to n, Commingled in an endless Markov chain! Come, every frustum longs to be a cone, And every vector dreams of matrices. Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze: It whispers of a more ergodic zone. In Riemann, Hilbert or in Banach space Let superscripts and subscripts go their ways Our asymptotes no longer out of phase, We shall encounter, counting, face to face. I'll grant thee random access to my heart, Thou'lt tell me all the constants of thy love; And so we two shall all love's lemmas prove, And in our bound partition never part. For what did Cauchy know, or Christoffel, Or Fourier, or any Boole or Euler, Wielding their compasses, their pens and rulers, Of thy supernal sinusoidal spell? Cancel me not—for what then shall remain? Abscissas, some mantissas, modules, modes, A root or two, a torus and a node: The inverse of my verse, a null domain. Ellipse of bliss, converge, O lips divine! The product of our scalars is defined! Cyberiad draws nigh, and the skew mind Cuts capers like a happy haversine. I see the eigenvalue in thine eye, I hear the tender tensor in thy sigh. Bernoulli would have been content to die, Had he but known such a2 cos 2 φ! Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 639-670
, clipped on Sunday, October 14, 2018 1:23:50 AM
possibility…" "As for illustrations, why, I could draw you a dragon right now, with a thousand Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 1834-1835
, clipped on Saturday, October 20, 2018 9:24:57 AM
crusts. Of flaming jungles of combustion and mysterious vortices there was not a sign, nor had anyone ever heard of them, for the desolate waste was a place of tedium, and tedious in the extreme, by virtue of the fact that it was desolate, Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 1864-1866
, clipped on Saturday, October 20, 2018 9:26:14 AM
possibility…" "As for illustrations, why, I could draw you a dragon right now, with a thousand Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 1834-1835
, clipped on Saturday, October 20, 2018 9:28:15 AM
at birth. Along the way, natural Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 1244-1244
, clipped on Saturday, October 27, 2018 7:38:46 AM
This expansion was finally halted about 200,000 years ago, probably by the challenges of giving birth to babies with increasingly bulbous heads. In most species, the birth canal is larger than the newborn’s head, but not in humans. Infant skulls have to remain unfused in order to squeeze through the birth canal in a manner that isn’t seen in other species. It seems our brains only ceased expanding because we hit the stops set by our primate body plan; if babies’ heads got any bigger, they wouldn’t be able to squeeze out of mom at birth. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 1240-1244
, clipped on Saturday, October 27, 2018 7:39:37 AM
Now consider what might result if a self-reliant Tukanoan mother decided to drop any seemingly unnecessary steps from the processing of her bitter manioc. She might critically examine the procedure handed down to her from earlier generations and conclude that the goal of the procedure is to remove the bitter taste. She might then experiment with alternative procedures by dropping some of the more labor-intensive or time-consuming steps. She’d find that with a shorter and much less labor-intensive process, she could remove the bitter taste. Adopting this easier protocol, she would have more time for other activities, like caring for her children. Of course, years or decades later her family would begin to develop the symptoms of chronic cyanide poisoning.4 Thus, the unwillingness of this mother to take on faith the practices handed down to her from earlier generations would result in sickness and early death for members of her family. Individual learning does not pay here, and intuitions are misleading. The problem is that the steps in this procedure are causally opaque—an individual cannot readily infer their functions, interrelationships, or importance. The causal opacity of many cultural adaptations had a big impact on our psychology. Wait. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 1878-1888
, clipped on Saturday, November 3, 2018 1:36:01 AM
from educated Westerners, but there remains a striking difference: educated Westerners are trained their entire lives to think that behaviors must be underpinned by explicable and declarable reasons, so we are more likely to have them at the ready and feel more obligated to supply “good” reasons upon request. Saying “it’s our custom” is not considered a good reason. The pressure for an acceptable, clear, and explicit reason for doing things is merely a social norm common in Western populations, which creates the illusion (among Westerners) that humans generally do things based on explicit causal models and clear reasons.9 They often do not. Finally, our evidence from Yasawa suggests that Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 1944-1949
, clipped on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:27:49 PM
Of course, it’s not particularly difficult to get similar responses from educated Westerners, but there remains a striking difference: educated Westerners are trained their entire lives to think that behaviors must be underpinned by explicable and declarable reasons, so we are more likely to have them at the ready and feel more obligated to supply “good” reasons upon request. Saying “it’s our custom” is not considered a good reason. The pressure for an acceptable, clear, and explicit reason for doing things is merely a social norm common in Western populations, which creates the illusion (among Westerners) that humans generally do things based on explicit causal models and clear reasons.9 They often do not. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 1943-1949
, clipped on Thursday, November 8, 2018 11:27:58 PM
For many Westerners, “it’s natural” seems to mean “it’s good.” This view is wrong and comes from shopping in supermarkets and living in landscaped environments. Plants evolved toxins to deter animals, fungi, and bacteria from eating them. The list of “natural” foods that need processing to detoxify them goes on and on. Early potatoes were toxic, and the Andean peoples ate clay to neutralize the toxin. Even beans can be toxic without processing. In California, many hunter-gatherer populations relied on acorns, which, similar to manioc, require a labor intensive, multiday leaching process. Many small-scale societies have similarly exploited hardy, tropical plants called cycads for food. But cycads contain a nerve toxin. If not properly processed, they can cause neurological symptoms, paralysis, and death. Numerous societies, including hunter-gatherers, have culturally evolved an immense range of detoxification techniques for cycads.13 By contrast with our species, other animals have far superior abilities to detoxify plants. Humans, however, lost these genetic adaptations and evolved a dependence on cultural know-how, just to eat. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 1986-1995
, clipped on Saturday, November 10, 2018 7:37:28 AM
This example makes a key point: not only do people often not understand what their cultural practices are doing, but sometimes it may even be important that they don’t understand what their practices are doing or how they work. If people came to understand that bird augury or bone divination didn’t actually predict the future, the practice would probably be dropped or people would increasingly ignore ritual findings in favor of their own intuitions. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 2035-2038
, clipped on Saturday, November 10, 2018 7:42:11 AM
Several lines of evidence indicate that spicing may represent a class of cultural adaptations to the problem of food-borne pathogens. Many spices are antimicrobials that can kill pathogens in foods. Globally, the common spices are onions, pepper, garlic, cilantro, chili peppers (capsicum), and bay leaves. Here’s the idea: the use of many spices represents a cultural adaptation to the problem of pathogens in food, especially in meat. This challenge would have been most important before refrigerators came on the scene. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 2108-2111
, clipped on Friday, November 16, 2018 12:38:27 AM
As a product of this long-running duet between cumulative cultural evolution and genes, our brains have genetically adapted to a world in which information crucial to our survival was embedded implicitly in a vast body of knowledge that we inherit culturally from previous generations. This information comes buried in daily cooking routines (manioc), taboos, divination rituals, local tastes (chili peppers), mental models, and tool-manufacturing scripts (arrow shafts). These practices and beliefs are often (implicitly) MUCH smarter than we are, as neither individuals nor groups could figure them out in one lifetime. As you’ll see in later chapters, this is also true of some institutions, religious beliefs, rituals, and medical practices. For these evolutionary reasons, learners first decide if they will “turn on” their causal-model builders at all, and if so, they have to carefully assess how much mental effort to put into them. And if cultural transmission supplies a prebuilt mental model for how things work, learners readily acquire and adhere to those. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 2143-2150
, clipped on Saturday, November 17, 2018 6:55:35 PM
discussed in chapters 4 and 5, as well as others I’ve not mentioned, is fully Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 2183-2184
, clipped on Saturday, November 17, 2018 7:01:12 PM
from drifts created during a single snowfall to form an aerodynamic dome-shape Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 2198-2198
, clipped on Saturday, November 17, 2018 7:02:20 PM
The point that I’m slowly rolling out here is that human communities—whom we ally with, help, marry, and love—are forged by social norms, which variously harness, extend, and suppress our social instincts. Our species cooperation and sociality is deeply influenced by and highly dependent on culturally evolved social norms, which makes us rather unlike other animals. We acquire social rules by observing and learning from others, and we—at least to some degree—internalize them as goals in themselves. Because cultural learning influences how we judge others, it can create self-reinforcing stable patterns of social behavior—social norms. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 2954-2959
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 3:23:27 PM
When the forces of intergroup competition are spent or weakened, success-biased cultural learning (or purely rational self-interest) will cause individuals to seek out any “cracks” in their groups’ institutions to manipulate or exploit for their own benefit or that of their kith and kin. Over time, history suggests that all prosocial institutions age and eventually collapse at the hands of self-interest, unless they are renewed by the dynamics of intergroup competition. That is, although it may take a long time, individuals and coalitions eventually figure out how to beat or manipulate the system to their own ends, and these techniques spread and slowly corrode any prosocial effects. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3255-3259
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 4:12:17 PM
Overall, this combination of evidence suggests that intergroup competition, in a variety of forms that include nonviolent competition, has been shaping cultural evolution and the social worlds we live in for eons, well back into our species’ evolutionary history. If this evidence provides even a roughly correct view, then intergroup competition, through its influence on the social norms, reputational systems, punishments, and institutions experienced by individuals, will have shaped our genetic evolution. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3522-3526
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 5:23:34 PM
Over our evolutionary history, the sanctions for norm violations and the rewards for norm compliance have driven a process of self domestication that has endowed our species with a norm psychology that has several components. First, to more effectively acquire the local norms, humans intuitively assume that the social world is rule governed, even if they don’t yet know the rules. The violation of these rules could and should have negative consequences. This outcome means that the behavior of others can be interpreted as being influenced by social rules. This also means that, at a young age, we readily develop cognitive abilities and motivations for spotting norm violations and avoiding or exploiting norm violators, as well as for monitoring and maintaining our own reputations Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3589-3594
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 5:31:02 PM
Second, when we learn norms we, at least partially, internalize them as goals in themselves. This internalization helps us navigate the social world more effectively and avoid temptations to break the rules to obtain immediate benefits. In some situations, internalizations may provide a quick and efficient heuristic that saves the cost of running the mental calculations that consider all the potential short- and long-term benefits and probabilistic penalties of an action; instead we simply follow the rule and abide by the norm. This means that our automatic and unreflective responses come to match the normatively required ones. Other times, internalized preferences may merely provide an additional motivation that goes into our calculations. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3595-3600
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 5:31:21 PM
As both Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek argued long before Erik and me, it’s our automatic norm following—not our self-interest or our cool rational calculation of future consequences—that often makes us do the “right thing” and allows our societies to work. This means that how well a society functions depends on its package of social norms. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3725-3727
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 5:46:54 PM
This self-domestication process has also tinkered with our feelings and emotional displays to better navigate a world governed by social norms. Primate emotions related to shame and pride have been retrofitted to apply to social norms. Shame in humans evolved (genetically) from a primate “proto-shame,” the package of feelings and bodily displays that we see in primates when individuals demonstrate or signal their subordinate status to a dominant group member. The shame and proto-shame display in both humans and primates involves slumped shoulders, downcast gaze, crouching, and a diminutive body posture—the idea seems to be to look small and unimposing. However, as the anthropologist Dan Fessler has persuasively argued, shame in humans emerges when someone violates a social norm or delivers a substandard performance as well as in status hierarchies (see chapter 8). Norm violators display shame to their communities for communicative reasons that parallel those that drive subordinates to display shame in the presence of more dominant animals. In both cases, the shame display reaf-firms their acceptance of the local social order. In the context of norm violations, the ashamed is effectively saying to the community, “Yes, I know I violated a norm, and should be admonished for it; but please don’t be too harsh on Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3765-3774
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 5:49:12 PM
In short, to survive in a world governed by social rules enforced by third parties and reputations, we became norm learners with prosocial biases, norm adherers internalizing key motivations, norm-violation spotters, and reputation managers. This makes us rather unlike any other species. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3787-3789
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 5:50:04 PM
First, intergroup competition will tend to favor the spread of any tricks for expanding what members of a group perceive as their tribe. Both religions and nations have culturally evolved to increasingly harness and exploit this piece of our psychology, as they create quasi-tribes. Second, this approach means that the in-group versus out-group view taken by psychologists misses a key point: not all groups are equally salient or thought about in the same way. Civil wars, for example, strongly trace to ethnically or religiously marked differences, and not to class, income, or political ideology.31 This is so because our minds are prepared to carve the social world into ethnic groups, but not into classes or ideologies. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3874-3879
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 8:37:22 PM
During hundreds of thousands of years, intergroup competition spread an immense diversity of social norms that galvanized groups to defend their communities; created risk-sharing networks to deal with environmental shocks like drought, floods, and famines; and fostered the sharing of food, water, and other resources. This meant that, over time, the survival of individuals and their groups increasingly depended on adhering to those group-beneficial social norms, especially when war loomed, famine struck, or droughts persisted. In this world, culture-gene coevolution may have favored a psychological response to intergroup competition, including threats that demanded group solidarity for survival. Under such threats, or in environments where such threats are common, intergroup competition favors cultural practices that monitor individuals more closely and sanction norm violators particularly harshly, thereby suppressing the increased temptation to break the norms (e.g., not sharing food during a famine). Under threat, increased sanctions in the form of ostracism, injury, and execution may have favored an automatic and unconscious innate response to cling more tightly to our social norms and groups, including their beliefs, values, and world views. This means that cues of intergroup competition should promote greater solidarity and identification with one’s group, as well as stronger norm adherence. Stronger norm adherence means both more compliance with norms and stronger negative reactions to norm violations. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 3940-3951
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 10:48:07 PM
This cultural evolutionary process may also shape the learnability of the know-how and skills related to tools, technology, and practices. Over generations, the details, techniques, and protocols that go into producing complex technologies should—all other things being equal—tend to simplify in ways that make them easier to learn and more intuitive. This propensity suggests that larger and more interconnected populations not only will have a larger variety of more sophisticated tools and technologies, but also that they will have more learnable techniques for producing them. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4058-4062
, clipped on Wednesday, December 12, 2018 11:00:23 PM
Larger populations can overcome the inherent loss of information in cultural transmission because if more individuals are trying to learn something, there’s a better chance that someone will end up with knowledge or skills that are at least as good as, or better than, those of the model they are learning from. Interconnectedness is important because it means more individuals have a chance to access the most skilled or successful models, and thereby have a chance to exceed them, and so can recombine elements learned from different highly skilled or successful models to create novel recombinations. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4153-4157
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 6:37:18 AM
It turns out that if all you know is climatic temperature, then you can account for about one-third of the variation in the sonority of languages. Languages in warmer climates tend to use more vowels than those in colder climates and rely more heavily on the most sonorous vowel, /a/. For consonants, languages in warmer climates rely more heavily on the most sonorant consonants, like /n/, /l/, and /r/. By contrast, languages in colder climates lean more heavily on the least sonorous vowels, as the /i/ in deep. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4495-4499
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 9:05:25 AM
This simple idea can have much nuance added to it. For example, not all warm climates are equally conducive to sonorous speech. In regions with dense forest cover, the advantages of high sonority might be less pronounced, or as the anthropologists Mel and Carol Ember have argued, very cold and windy climates may select against linguistic practices that involve opening one’s mouth widely, due to the increased heat loss. To this they added the idea that social norms about sexual restrictiveness might also influence sonority. Adding both of these nuances to the basic climatic temperature analysis, they managed to account for four-fifths of the variation in the sonority of languages (or at least of the few dozen languages they had data for). Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4499-4504
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 9:06:08 AM
Ancient literary works tell the same story as the cross-cultural research. The Old Testament, the works of Homer, and ancient Vedic poems are remarkably vague about color and at times devoid of colorful descriptions. Neither the sky nor the sea is “blue.” The worlds of these works are largely cast in black, white, and red. Terms for green, blue, and yellow—as basic descriptive terms—don’t emerge until later in the literary histories of these societies. It’s amazing that these rich, poetic cultural treasures are nearly colorless. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4546-4549
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 9:09:32 AM
Philosophers have long been impressed by “language’s” ability to embed phrases within larger hierarchical structures, often using grammatical tools for subordination. However, these findings suggest that much of the hierarchical structuring and fancy subordination that we see in most modern languages is the product of long-term cumulative cultural evolution. This is not to say that we humans don’t have some souped-up innate abilities for dealing with hierarchical structures, which may also be useful for making tools or understanding social relationships, but merely that the elegant bits of grammar that permit us to fully harness these abilities were built by cultural evolution. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4692-4697
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 11:56:22 AM
cognitive abilities that underlie these patterns might have come from. If a genetic mutant with new mental abilities for creating hierarchical linguistic structures emerged in a society having only a simple protolanguage, Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4791-4793
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 12:13:27 PM
In a world with only language evolving, it’s not obvious where the cognitive Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4791-4791
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 12:15:02 PM
In a world with only language evolving, it’s not obvious where the cognitive abilities that underlie these patterns might have come from. If a genetic mutant with new mental abilities for creating hierarchical linguistic structures emerged in a society having only a simple protolanguage, she wouldn’t have anyone with whom to use her advanced abilities. No one lacking her cognitive abilities could understand her or copy her complex patterns. However, complex tools are also assembled sequentially, hierarchically, and sometimes recursively, just like (most) modern languages. To make a spear, you have to obtain the wood, straighten it, and balance it for throwing. Then, or maybe first, you have to obtain the flint, bone, or obsidian to make the spear tip. This material has to be knapped or carved to make a spear point. Then you need some sinew or resin to attach the spearhead to the shaft. Thus, there are componential parts (objects), actions (knapping), and rules (orderings) for assembling the parts. All of this has to be done with the goal of obtaining a good spear, just as sentences are assembled with the goal of communicating. Similarly, food-processing techniques to detoxify seeds, such as nardoo or acorns, involve sequential protocols with components and subcomponents (grinding, leaching, and cooking), which must be done in order. Beyond sequences and hierarchies, some technical skills, like weaving and knitting, demand recursive applications of the same techniques in a manner that could potentially continue without bound. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 4791-4801
, clipped on Thursday, December 13, 2018 12:15:09 PM
In thinking about what inexperienced girls and young women might learn from mothers and grandmothers, it bears underlining just how dependent humans are on cultural learning for what should be basic mammalian functions. Human mothers, for example, have to be taught how to breast-feed properly, by latching the infant in a way that prevents the infant from biting through the nipple. Similarly, without cultural transmission, many mothers are inclined to toss away the viscous, yellowish fluid that secretes from their breasts after birth, before the milk arrives. This valuable fluid—colostrum—plays a number of important biological roles, including helping improve an infant’s immune system. Nevertheless, many humans intuitively perceive colostrum as “sour milk,” which should not be given to infants.16 Other species do not make this serious mistake. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 5780-5786
, clipped on Friday, December 14, 2018 12:41:09 AM
The combination of (1) an increasing reliance on social learning and (2) the emergence of pair-bonding and alloparenting may explain the emergence of the division of labor between men and women. However, the key to understanding the division of labor is to recognize that it’s rooted in a division of information. As cultural information begins to accumulate such that no one individual can know everything, pair-bonded couples can specialize in complementary bodies of culturally acquired skills, practices, and knowledge. Female hunter-gatherers, by virtue of birthing, lactating, and providing primary care for babies, need to focus on learning about infant handling, nursing, weaning, food preparation and processing, and any foraging skills that guarantee a steady flow of calories. Males, by contrast, can specialize in know-how about toolmaking, defense, weapons, hunting, and tracking. Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 5801-5807
, clipped on Friday, December 14, 2018 12:42:39 AM
Unique feats of genius are rare, since once the tectonic forces of cumulative cultural evolution have closed the knowledge gap to a point where one person can step across, intellectual histories show that multiple people often independently manage to take that step.7 Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 6026-6028
, clipped on Friday, December 14, 2018 1:01:34 AM
So, yes, we are smart, but not because we stand on the shoulders of giants or are giants ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of a very large pyramid of hobbits. The hobbits do get a bit taller as the pyramid ascends, but it’s still the number of hobbits, not the height of particular hobbits, that’s allowing us to see farther.8 Joseph Henrich
, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter.
loc. 6056-6059
, clipped on Friday, December 14, 2018 1:03:27 AM
Do I hear a protest? “ There is nothing philosophical about our criticism of statistical significance tests” (someone might say). The problem is that a small P -value is invariably, and erroneously, interpreted as giving a small probability to the null hypothesis.” Really? P -values are not intended to be used this way; presupposing they ought to be so interpreted grows out of a specific conception of the role of probability in statistical inference. That conception is philosophical . Methods characterized through the lens of over-simple epistemological orthodoxies are methods misapplied and mischaracterized. This may lead one to lie, however unwittingly, about the nature and goals of statistical inference, when what we want is to tell what’ s true about them. Mayo, Deborah G.
, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars.
loc. 418-425
, clipped on Friday, December 14, 2018 1:23:54 AM
are separate, and more or less equal (for different aims). Current-day eclecticisms Mayo, Deborah G.
, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars.
loc. 965-965
, clipped on Saturday, December 15, 2018 9:02:19 AM
The Law of Likelihood (LL) will immediately be seen to fail our minimal severity requirement – at least if it is taken as an account of inference. Why? There is no onus on the Likelihoodist to predesignate the rival hypotheses – you are free to search, hunt, and post-designate a more likely, or even maximally likely, rival to a test hypothesis Mayo, Deborah G.
, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars.
loc. 1069-1071
, clipped on Sunday, December 16, 2018 3:18:58 AM
We capture enemy tanks at random and note the serial numbers on their engines. We know the serial numbers start at 0001. We capture a tank number 2176. How many did the enemy make? On the likelihood analysis, the best-supported guess is: 2176. Now one can defend this remarkable result by saying that it does not follow that we should estimate the actual number as 2176 only that comparing individual numbers, 2176 is better supported than any larger figure. My worry is deeper. Let us compare the relative likelihood of the two hypotheses, 2176 and 3000. Now pass to a situation where we are measuring, say, widths of a grating in which error has a normal distribution with known variance; we can devise data and a pair of hypotheses about the mean which will have the same log-likelihood ratio. I have no inclination to say that the relative support in the tank case is ‘ exactly the same as’ that in the normal distribution case, even though the likelihood ratios are the same. Mayo, Deborah G.
, Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars.
loc. 1111-1118
, clipped on Sunday, December 16, 2018 3:35:20 AM
The Universe is infinite but bounded, and therefore a beam of light, in whatever direction it may travel, will after billions of centuries return—if powerful enough—to the point of its departure; and it is no different with rumor, that flies about from star to star and makes the rounds of every planet. Lem, Stanislaw
, The Cyberiad.
loc. 2039-2041
, clipped on Thursday, December 20, 2018 3:00:31 AM
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living. The Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 43-48
, clipped on Saturday, December 22, 2018 8:41:45 AM
Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible. He is a kind of confidence man, preying on people’s vanity, ignorance, or loneliness, gaining their trust and betraying them without remorse. Like the credulous widow who wakes up one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting subject of a piece of nonfiction writing learns—when the article or book appears—his hard lesson. Journalists justify their treachery in various ways according to their temperaments. The more pompous talk about freedom of speech and “the public’s right to know”; the least talented talk about Art; the seemliest murmur about earning a living. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 43-48
, clipped on Saturday, December 22, 2018 8:42:03 AM
One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common. The journalistic encounter seems to have the same regressive effect on a subject as the psychoanalytic encounter. The subject becomes a kind of child of the writer, regarding him as a permissive, all-accepting, all-forgiving mother, and expecting that the book will be written by her. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 426-428
, clipped on Sunday, December 23, 2018 2:07:02 AM
What had I done to cause the man to think of me as another persecutor, rather than simply as a colleague who had come to discuss issues of common interest raised by his lawsuit? I realized that I had been unimaginative. When one is feeling as beleaguered as McGinniss must have been feeling, anything short of utter, empathic agreement will seem hostile and unfeeling. When one is in pain, one wants sympathy and reassurance, not abstract argument. And when one has maintained—as McGinniss and Kornstein and Buckley and Wambaugh had maintained—that the whole future of journalism may depend on the writer’s freedom to dissemble, because otherwise the subject will flee, then one is fairly obliged to flee from a writer who doesn’t seem all that convinced of the rightness of one’s position. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 789-795
, clipped on Sunday, December 23, 2018 3:24:58 AM
This was the feeling of gratified vanity that American journalism all but guarantees its practitioners when they are out reporting. In our society, the journalist ranks with the philanthropist as a person who has something extremely valuable to dispense (his currency is the strangely intoxicating substance called publicity), and who is consequently treated with a deference quite out of proportion to his merits as a person. There are very few people in this country who do not regard with rapture the prospect of being written about or being interviewed on a radio or television program. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 798-803
, clipped on Sunday, December 23, 2018 3:30:37 AM
But how many of us with no illusions left about the nature of romantic love will for that reason turn down a plausible lover when one comes along? Don’t a rare few affairs not turn out badly? And isn’t the latest lover invariably different in kind from all the previous ones? Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 812-814
, clipped on Sunday, December 23, 2018 3:31:56 AM
“It’s the same with the judicial process,” Bostwick said. “People feel that it’s a search for truth. But I don’t think that is its function in this society. I’m convinced that its function is cathartic. It’s a means for allowing people to air their differences, to let them feel as if they had a forum. You release tension in the social body in some way, whether or not you come to the truth.” Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 868-871
, clipped on Sunday, December 23, 2018 4:13:19 AM
I felt more acutely conscious than ever of the surrealism that is at the heart of journalism. People tell journalists their stories as characters in dreams deliver their elliptical messages: without warning, without context, without concern for how odd they will sound when the dreamer awakens and repeats them. Here I sat, eating my Thanksgiving dinner with this stranger dressed in white, whom I would never see again, and whose existence for me henceforth would be on paper, as a sort of emblematic figure of the perils of the jury system. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 1555-1559
, clipped on Monday, December 24, 2018 4:39:42 AM
literary characters are drawn with much broader and blunter strokes, are much simpler, more generic (or, as they used to say, mythic) creatures than real people, and their preternatural vividness derives from their unambiguous fixity and consistency. Real people seem relatively uninteresting in comparison, because they are so much more complex, ambiguous, unpredictable, and particular than people in novels. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 1659-1662
, clipped on Monday, December 24, 2018 4:55:19 AM
When a journalist undertakes to quote a subject he has interviewed on tape, he owes it to the subject, no less than to the reader, to translate his speech into prose. Only the most uncharitable (or inept) journalist will hold a subject to his literal utterances and fail to perform the sort of editing and rewriting that, in life, our ear automatically and instantaneously performs. Janet Malcolm
, The Journalist and the Murderer.
loc. 2070-2073
, clipped on Monday, December 24, 2018 7:36:02 AM
But what amazed me the most was the wisdom of my body, which knew not only to defend itself from my mind but specifically how to defend itself. I realize now that Yeats's statement, 'I am an immortal soul tied to the body of a dying animal' i s diametrically opposite to the actual state of affairs vis-à-vis the human condition." Philip K. Dick
, Valis.
loc. 574-576
, clipped on Tuesday, December 25, 2018 8:38:56 AM
Man and the true God are identical -- as the Logos and the true God are -- but a lunatic blind creator and his screwed-up world separate man from God. That the blind creator sincerely imagines that he is the true God only reveals the extent of his occlusion. This is Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, man belongs with God against the world and the creator of the world (both of which are crazy, whether they realize it or not). The answer to Fat's question, "Is the universe irrational, and is it irrational because an irrational mind governs it?" receives this answer, via Dr. Stone: "Yes it is, the universe is irrational; the mind governing it is irrational; but above them lies another God, the true God, and he is not irrational; in addition that true God has outwitted the powers of this world, ventured here to help us, and we know him as the Logos," which, according to Fat, is living information. Philip K. Dick
, Valis.
loc. 938-945
, clipped on Tuesday, December 25, 2018 10:03:12 AM
"Reality is that which when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." Philip K. Dick
, Valis.
loc. 1086-1086
, clipped on Tuesday, December 25, 2018 10:18:53 AM
Journalists are rarely in a position to establish the truth of an issue themselves, since they didn’t witness it personally. They are “entirely dependent on self-interested ‘sources’” to supply their facts. Every part of the news-making process is defined by this relationship; everything is colored by this reality. Ryan Holiday
, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.
loc. 775-777
, clipped on Thursday, December 27, 2018 9:22:59 AM
Ultimately, that is why iterative journalism is so attractive for publishers. It eliminates costs such as fact-checkers or staff time to build relationships with sources. It is profitable, because it allows writers to return to the same story multiple times and drives more comments, links, and excitement than normal, non-“breaking” news. To call it a learning experience or a process, or anything but a way to make more money, is a lie. Ryan Holiday
, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator.
loc. 2458-2461
, clipped on Friday, December 28, 2018 2:23:02 AM
Why is it, she thought, that people always leave us just before we know them? Bennett, Robert Jackson
, American Elsewhere.
loc. 2322-2323
, clipped on Thursday, January 3, 2019 9:11:10 AM
It must be added that, in a way, he was indeed a member of our younger generation, which means that he was honest, that he believed in, demanded, and searched for truth; that, because he believed in it, he yearned to serve it and give it his whole strength; he was spoiling for immediate action, was prepared to sacrifice everything, his life itself, in an act of supreme devotion. Unfortunately, these young men often fail to understand that the sacrifice of their lives may be the easiest of all sacrifices, much easier, for instance, than giving up five or six years of their seething youth to hard study, to the acquisition of knowledge which would increase their strength tenfold in the service of that same cause, and in the performance of the great works they aspire to. But to sacrifice those few years to study often proves too much for them. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 626-632
, clipped on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 5:41:34 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Wednesday, January 9, 2019 9:59:00 AM
This was not simply economic interdependence, because each jati performing its function also had a ritual significance for the other jatis. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3269-3270
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 5:40:38 AM
Indian social development outran both political and economic development early on. The subcontinent acquired a common culture under a set of religious beliefs and social practices that marked it as a distinctive civilization long before anyone ever tried to unify it politically. And when that unification was attempted, the strength of the society was such that it was able to resist political authority and prevent the latter from reshaping society. So whereas China developed a strong state that kept society weak in a self-perpetuating manner, India had a strong society that prevented a strong state from emerging in the first place. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3407-3411
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 6:02:55 AM
It never occurred to any Maurya ruler to engage in anything resembling nation building, that is, to try to penetrate the whole society and imbue it with a different, common set of norms and values. The Mauryas had no real concept of sovereignty, that is, a right to impose impersonal rules over the whole of their territory. There was no uniform Indian Penal Code in the subcontinent until one was introduced by the poet and politician Thomas Babington Macaulay under British rule.14 The monarchy did not engage in massive social engineering but rather protected the existing social order in all of its variety and complexity. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3507-3512
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 6:12:10 AM
In many respects, modern India is the result of a foreign nation-building project. Kaviraj argues that, contrary to the Indian nationalist narrative, “The British did not conquer an India which existed before their conquest; rather, they conquered a series of independent kingdoms that became political India during, and in part as a response to their dominion.”22 This echoes the view of Sunil Khilnani, that the “idea of India” as a political, as opposed to a social, entity did not exist before the British Raj.23 The important institutions that bind India together as a polity—a civil service, an army, a common administrative language (English), a legal system aspiring to the application of uniform and impersonal laws, and of course democracy itself—were the result of Indians interacting with the British colonial regime and assimilating Western ideas and values into their own historical experience. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3582-3589
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 6:20:50 AM
It is not that democracy in its modern institutional manifestations is deeply rooted in ancient Indian practices, as observers like Amartya Sen have suggested.26 Rather, the course of Indian political development demonstrates that there was never the social basis for the development of a tyrannical state that could concentrate power so effectively that it could aspire to reach deeply into society and change its fundamental social institutions. The type of despotic government that arose in China or in Russia, a system that divested the whole society, beginning with its elites, of property and personal rights, has never existed on Indian soil—not under an indigenous Hindu government, not under the Moghuls, and not under the British.27 This led to the paradoxical situation that protests against social injustice, of which there were a huge number, were typically never aimed against India’s ruling political authorities, as was the case in Europe and in China. Rather, they were aimed at the social order dominated by the Brahmin class, and often expressed themselves as dissident religious movements like Jainism or Buddhism that rejected the metaphysical foundations of the worldly order. The political authorities were simply regarded as too distant and too irrelevant to daily life to matter. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3614-3623
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 6:23:17 AM
The countries of Pakistan and Bangladesh, and the sizable Muslim minority in India, might not exist but for the fighting ability of Muslim armies. That military prowess in turn did not emerge only on the basis of a fanatical commitment to religion. It was based on states that were able to organize effective institutions to concentrate and use power—and above all, the institution of military slavery. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3877-3880
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 7:35:00 AM
The new tribes were not necessarily kinship based, but they reflected a deep-seated human urge to promote and protect the interests of descendants, friends, and clients against the requirements of an impersonal social system. As time went on, the Mamluk system degenerated from a centralized state to something resembling a rent-seeking coalition of warlord factions. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 3990-3992
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 8:47:35 AM
This sentiment was echoed by a number of early Turkish writers16 and inscribed into the so-called circle of equity, which was built around eight propositions: 1. There can be no royal authority without the military. 2. There can be no military without wealth. 3. The reaya produce the wealth. 4. The sultan keeps the reaya by making justice reign. 5. Justice requires harmony in the world. 6. The world is a garden, its walls are the state. 7. The state’s prop is the religious law. 8. There is no support for the religious law without royal authority. These propositions were usually written around a circle, with the eighth leading back to the first, indicating that religious legitimacy (point 8) was necessary to support royal authority (point 1).17 This is an unusually succinct statement about the interrelationships of military power, economic resources, justice (including rates of taxation), and religious legitimacy. It suggests that Turkish rulers did not see their objectives as the narrow maximization of economic rents, but rather the maximization of overall power through a balance of power, resources, and legitimacy.18 Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4169-4183
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 8:57:55 AM
The reduction of relationships in the family to “a mere money relation” that Marx thundered against was not, it appears, an innovation of the eighteenth-century bourgeoisie but appeared in England many centuries before that class’s supposed rise. Putting one’s parents out to pasture in a nursing home has very deep historical roots in Western Europe. This suggests that, contrary to Marx, capitalism was the consequence rather than the cause of a change in social relationships and custom. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4440-4443
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:14:40 AM
The relatively high status of women in Western Europe was an accidental by-product of the church’s self-interest. The church made it difficult for a widow to remarry within the family group and thereby reconvey her property back to the tribe, so she had to own the property herself. A woman’s right to own property and dispose of it as she wished stood to benefit the church, since it provided a large source of donations from childless widows and spinsters. And the woman’s right to own property spelled the death knell for agnatic lineages, by undermining the principle of unilineal descent. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4513-4517
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:22:52 AM
Constructivism, Hayek argued, was a conceit of the last three hundred years, and particularly of a series of French thinkers including Descartes and Voltaire, who thought the human mind was sufficient to understand the workings of human society. This led to what Hayek regarded as huge mistakes, such as the French and Bolshevik revolutions, in which top-down political power was used to reorder the whole of society based on a preconceived notion of social justice. In Hayek’s day (the middle decades of the twentieth century), this mistake was being repeated not only by Socialist countries such as the Soviet Union, which relied on rational planning and centralized authority, but by social democratic welfare states in Europe. This was wrong, according to Hayek, for a number of reasons, the most important of which was the fact that no single planner could ever have enough knowledge about the actual workings of a society to rationally reorder it. The bulk of knowledge in a society was local in character and dispersed throughout the whole society; no individual could master enough information to anticipate the effects of a planned change in the laws or rules. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4715-4723
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:42:09 AM
Social order was not, according to Hayek, the result of top-down rational planning; rather, it occurred spontaneously through the interactions of hundreds or thousands of dispersed individuals who experimented with rules, kept the ones that worked, and rejected those that didn’t. The process by which social order was generated was incremental, evolutionary, and decentralized; only by making use of the local knowledge of myriads of individuals could a working “Great Society” ever appear. Spontaneous orders evolved in the manner Darwin posited for biological organisms—through decentralized adaptation and selection, and not through the purposeful design of a creator. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4724-4729
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:42:44 AM
Common Law is not just a formalized and written version of customary law. It is law of a fundamentally different sort. As we saw in chapter 4, a major change in the meaning of law occurs when societies make the transition from tribal to state-level forms of organization. In tribal societies, justice between individuals is a bit like contemporary international relations, based on the self-help of rival groups in a world where there is no higher third-party enforcer of rules. State-level societies, by contrast, are different precisely because such an enforcer exists, the state itself. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4761-4765
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:45:22 AM
The rule of law rests on the law itself and on the visible institutions that administer it—judges, lawyers, courts, and the like. It also rests on the formal procedures by which those institutions operate. But the proper functioning of a rule of law is as much a normative as an institutional or a procedural matter. The vast majority of people in any peaceful society obey the law not so much because they are making a rational calculation about costs and benefits, and fear punishment. They obey because they believe that the law is fundamentally fair, and they are morally habituated to follow it. They are much less inclined to obey the law if they believe that it is unjust. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4872-4876
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:53:59 AM
But a fair normative order also requires power. If the king was unwilling to enforce the law against the country’s elites, or lacked the capacity to do so, the law’s legitimacy would be compromised no matter what its source in religion, tradition, or custom. This is a point that Hayek and his libertarian followers fail to see: the Common Law may be the work of dispersed judges, but it would not have come into being in the first place, or been enforced, without a strong centralized state. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 4889-4892
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 9:55:17 AM
But ideas by themselves are not sufficient to bring about stable liberal democracy in the absence of an underlying balance of political forces and interests that make it the least bad alternative for all of the actors. The miracle of modern liberal democracy, in which strong states capable of enforcing law are nonetheless checked by law and by legislatures, could arise only as a result of the fact that there was a rough balance of power among the different political actors within the society. If none of them was dominant, then they would need to compromise. What we understand as modern constitutional government arose as a result of this unwanted and unplanned compromise. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 6026-6030
, clipped on Tuesday, March 12, 2019 3:54:44 PM
The French case teaches a lesson about the role of the rule of law in political development. The rule of law that had emerged in the Middle Ages before modern states existed acted as a constraint on tyranny, but it also acted as a constraint on modern state building since it protected old social classes and customs that would have to be abolished for a truly modern society to exist. The lawful defense of liberty against centralizing monarchs in the early modern period meant defense of a traditional feudal order and highly entailed, feudal property rights that were incompatible with a modern capitalist economic order. Patrimonial rule evolved precisely because governments felt they had to respect the property rights of traditional elites. They could not expropriate their assets directly and therefore had to resort to borrowing and increasingly bizarre financial chicaneries. Respect for the rule of law thus helped to create a highly unequal society in which the state tried but ultimately failed to get its hands on the wealth of the oligarchic elite. As a result, it had to raise revenues on the backs of the poor and the politically weak, exacerbating inequality and paving the way for its own demise. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 6543-6551
, clipped on Wednesday, March 13, 2019 11:07:22 AM
We are taking the time to consider the Hungarian case for a simple reason: to show that constitutional limits on a central government’s power do not by themselves necessarily produce political accountability. The “freedom” sought by the Hungarian noble class was the freedom to exploit their own peasants more thoroughly, and the absence of a strong central state allowed them to do just that. Everyone understands the Chinese form of tyranny, one perpetrated by a centralized dictatorship. But tyranny can result from decentralized oligarchic domination as well. True freedom tends to emerge in the interstices of a balance of power among a society’s elite actors, something that Hungary never succeeded in achieving. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 6898-6903
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 11:13:21 AM
It is notable that the building blocks of later English representative political institutions started out as judicial bodies like the county and hundred courts. In English history, the rule of law emerged well before there was anything like political accountability, and the latter was always closely tied to the defense of the law. The participatory nature of English justice, and the locally responsive nature of judicial rule-making under the Common Law, created a much greater feeling of popular ownership of the law in England than in other European societies. Public accountability meant in the first instance obedience to the law, despite the fact that neither judgemade nor statute law was produced in this period by a democratic political process. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 7462-7467
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 12:57:51 PM
There are at least two reasons why accountable government in England did not degenerate into rapacious oligarchy. The first has to do with England’s social structure compared to that of Hungary. While the groups represented in the English Parliament were an oligarchy, they sat on top of a society that was much more mobile and open to nonelites than was Hungary’s. In Hungary, the gentry had been absorbed into a narrow aristocracy, whereas in England they represented a large and cohesive social group, more powerful in certain ways than the aristocracy. England, unlike Hungary, had a tradition of grassroots political participation in the form of the hundred and county courts and other institutions of local governance. English lords were accustomed to sitting in assemblies on equal terms with their vassals and tenants to decide issues of common interest. Hungary, furthermore, had no equivalent of the English yeomanry, relatively prosperous farmers who owned their own land and could participate in local political life. And cities in Hungary were strictly controlled by the noble estate and did not generate a rich and powerful bourgeoisie the way that English ones did. Second, despite English traditions of individual liberty, the centralized English state was both powerful and well regarded through much of the society. It was one of the first states to develop a uniform system of justice, it protected property rights, and it acquired substantial naval capabilities in its struggles with various Continental powers. The English experiment with republican government after the beheading of Charles I in 1649 and the establishment of Cromwell’s Protectorate was not a happy one. The regicide itself seemed, even to the supporters of Parliament, an unjust and illegal act. The English Civil War witnessed the same sort of progressive radicalization experienced later during the French, Bolshevik, and Chinese revolutions. The more extreme anti-Royalist groups like the Levellers and the Diggers seemed to want not just political accountability but also a much broader social revolution, which frightened the property-owning classes represented in Parliament. It was thus with a great deal of relief that the monarchy was restored in 1660 with the accession of Charles II.2 After the Restoration, the issues of political accountability reappeared under the Catholic James II, whose machinations again aroused suspicions and opposition from Parliament and ultimately led to the Glorious Revolution. But this time around, no one wanted to dismantle the monarchy or the state; they only wanted a king who would be accountable to them. They got one in William of Orange. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 7874-7892
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:05:54 PM
Human beings never existed in a presocial state. The idea that human beings at one time existed as isolated individuals, who interacted either through anarchic violence (Hobbes) or in pacific ignorance of one another (Rousseau), is not correct. Human beings as well as their primate ancestors always lived in kin-based social groups of varying sizes. Indeed, they lived in these social units for a sufficiently long period of time that the cognitive and emotional faculties needed to promote social cooperation evolved and became hardwired in their genetic endowments. This means that a rational-choice model of collective action, in which individuals calculate that they will be better off by cooperating with one another, vastly understates the degree of social cooperation that exists in human societies and misunderstands the motives that underlie Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8015-8021
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:15:25 PM
Natural human sociability is built around two principles, kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The principle of kin selection or inclusive fitness states that human beings will act altruistically toward genetic relatives (or individuals believed to be genetic relatives) in rough proportion to their shared genes. The principle of reciprocal altruism says that human beings will tend to develop relationships of mutual benefit or mutual harm as they interact with other individuals over time. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8021-8025
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:16:35 PM
Human beings have an innate propensity for creating and following norms or rules. Since institutions are essentially rules that limit individual freedom of choice, one can equivalently say that human beings have a natural inclination to create institutions. Rules can be rationally derived by individuals calculating how to maximize their own self-interest, which requires that they enter into social contracts with other individuals. Human beings are born with a suite of cognitive faculties that allow them to solve prisoner’s-dilemma-type problems of social cooperation. They can remember past behavior as a guide to future cooperation; they pass on information about trustworthiness through gossip and other forms of information sharing; they have acute perceptual faculties for detecting lies and untrustworthy behavior through vocal and visual cues; and they have common modes for sharing information through language and nonverbal forms of communication. The ability to make and obey rules is an economizing behavior in the sense that it greatly reduces the transaction costs of social interaction and permits efficient collective action. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8031-8039
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:16:53 PM
Human beings have a natural propensity for violence. From the first moment of their existence, human beings have perpetrated acts of violence against other human beings, as did their primate ancestors. Pace Rousseau, the propensity for violence is not a learned behavior that arose only at a certain point in human history. At the same time, social institutions have always existed to control and channel violence. Indeed, one of the most important functions of political institutions is precisely to control and aggregate the level at which violence appears. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8049-8053
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:18:10 PM
Human beings by nature desire not just material resources but also recognition . Recognition is the acknowledgment of another human being’s dignity or worth, or what is otherwise understood to be status. Struggles for recognition or status often have a very different character from struggles over resources, since status is relative rather than absolute, or what the economist Robert Frank calls a “positional good.” Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8054-8057
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:18:29 PM
It is important to resist the temptation to reduce human motivation to an economic desire for resources. Violence in human history has often been perpetrated by people seeking not material wealth but recognition. Conflicts are carried on long beyond the point when they make economic sense. Recognition is sometimes related to material wealth, but at other times it comes at the expense of material wealth, and it is an unhelpful oversimplification to regard it as just another type of “utility.” Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8065-8069
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:19:32 PM
Many people, observing religious conflict in the contemporary world, have become hostile to religion as such and regard it as a source of violence and intolerance.5 In a world of overlapping and plural religious environments, this can clearly be the case. But they fail to put religion in its broader historical context, where it was a critical factor in permitting broad social cooperation that transcended kin and friends as a source of social relationships. Moreover, secular ideologies like Marxism-Leninism or nationalism that have displaced religious beliefs in many contemporary societies can be and have been no less destructive due to the passionate beliefs that they engender. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8087-8092
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:22:46 PM
Second, in human societies, variation among institutions can be planned and deliberate, as opposed to random. Hayek argues strongly against the idea that human societies self-consciously design institutions, something he traces to the hubris of post-Cartesian rationalism.9 He argues that most information in societies is local in nature and therefore cannot be comprehended by centralized human agents.10 The weakness of Hayek’s argument is that human beings successfully design institutions all the time, at all levels of society. He does not like top-down, centralized social engineering on the part of states, but he is willing to accept bottom-up, decentralized institutional innovation that is no less subject to human design. While large-scale design may work less frequently than smaller-scale projects, it still does periodically work. Human beings can rarely plan for unintended consequences and missing information, but the fact that they can plan means that the variance in institutional forms they create is more likely to produce adaptive solutions than simple randomness. Hayek is correct, however, that institutional evolution is not dependent on the ability of human beings to design successful institutions; random variation and the principle of selection by themselves can produce an adaptive evolutionary outcome. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8158-8168
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:30:40 PM
While individual leaders can shape institutions, more highly developed institutions not only survive poor individual leaders but also have a system for training and recruiting new and better ones. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8264-8265
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 2:41:29 PM
The stability of dysfunctional equilibria suggests one reason why violence has played such an important role in institutional innovation and reform. Violence is classically seen as the problem that politics seeks to solve,21 but sometimes violence is the only way to displace entrenched stakeholders who are blocking institutional change. The fear of violent death is a stronger emotion than the desire for material gain and is capable of motivating more far-reaching changes in behavior. Fukuyama, Francis
, The Origins of Political Order.
loc. 8350-8353
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 4:00:23 PM
It may be that a rational approach to the world is nuanced and gray, capable of accommodating contradictions, all of which leads to hesitancy and a lack of certainty, as is indeed true. An easy shortcut is to combine ignorance with straight-out endorsement of ignorance—no signs of rational inquiry but, more important, no signs of self-doubt or contradiction. Robert Trivers
, The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life.
loc. 475-477
, clipped on Thursday, March 14, 2019 5:24:49 PM
Like literature, music can overwhelm you with sudden emotion, can move you to absolute sorrow or ecstasy; like literature, painting has the power to astonish, and to make you see the world through fresh eyes. But only literature can put you in touch with another human spirit, as a whole, with all its weaknesses and grandeurs, its limitations, its pettinesses, its obsessions, its beliefs; with whatever it finds moving, interesting, exciting or repugnant. Only literature can give you access to a spirit from beyond the grave – a more direct, more complete, deeper access than you’d have in conversation with a friend. Even in our deepest, most lasting friendships, we never speak as openly as when we face a blank page and address a reader we do not know. Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 54-60
, clipped on Saturday, March 16, 2019 7:52:11 AM
As he said it, I realised that he was expressing not just a belief, but a hope, because he was one of those people, and you don’t see them every day, who take an instinctive pleasure in the happiness of their fellow men – that he was, in other words, nice. Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 1783-1784
, clipped on Sunday, March 24, 2019 3:33:53 PM
Around ten that morning, I decided that it was a decent hour to ring Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 2237-2238
, clipped on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 11:35:46 PM
protestations of faith. Around ten that morning, I decided that it was a decent hour to ring Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 2237-2238
, clipped on Tuesday, March 26, 2019 11:35:59 PM
We feel nostalgia for a place simply because we’ve lived there, whether we lived well or badly scarcely matters. The past is always beautiful. So, for that matter, is the future. Only the present hurts, and we carry it around like an abscess of suffering, our companion between two infinities of happiness and peace. Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 2251-2254
, clipped on Thursday, March 28, 2019 11:34:58 PM
Like most men, probably, I skipped the chapters on religious duties, Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 2261-2262
, clipped on Thursday, March 28, 2019 11:40:55 PM
Like most men, probably, I skipped the chapters on religious duties, Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 2261-2262
, clipped on Thursday, March 28, 2019 11:42:14 PM
had put an end to all that. Thanks to them, the place had regained Michel Houellebecq
, Submission.
loc. 2427-2427
, clipped on Friday, March 29, 2019 8:30:58 AM
• • • I applied for a class Elif Batuman
, The Idiot.
loc. 175-175
, clipped on Wednesday, April 17, 2019 11:27:59 PM
• • • I applied for a class Elif Batuman
, The Idiot.
loc. 175-175
, clipped on Thursday, April 18, 2019 9:56:37 PM
• • • I applied for a class Elif Batuman
, The Idiot.
loc. 175-175
, clipped on Thursday, April 18, 2019 9:56:39 PM
Already I was the impetuous one in our friendship—the one who cared less about tradition and personal safety, who evaluted every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time—while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and systems, who wrote things in the designated spaces, and saw herself as the inheritor of centuries of human history and responsibilities. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from Elif Batuman
, The Idiot.
loc. 355-359
, clipped on Saturday, April 20, 2019 9:30:32 PM
Already I was the impetuous one in our friendship—the one who cared less about tradition and personal safety, who evaluted every situation from scratch, as if it had arisen for the first time—while Svetlana was the one who subscribed to rules and systems, who wrote things in the designated spaces, and saw herself as the inheritor of centuries of human history and responsibilities. Already we were comparing to see whose way of doing things was better. But it wasn’t a competition so much as an experiment, because neither of us was capable of acting differently, and each viewed the other with an admiration that was inseparable from pity. Elif Batuman
, The Idiot.
loc. 355-359
, clipped on Saturday, April 20, 2019 9:30:40 PM
me. Lines appeared on his forehead. “I have a wife,” he said. “And it’s Elif Batuman
, The Idiot.
loc. 1200-1200
, clipped on Monday, April 22, 2019 11:55:20 PM
This is the First Law of Educational Inefficacy: Any Educational Agenda will Cause an Equal-and-Opposite CounterAgenda to be Formed. The Agenda and CounterAgenda mingle, interact, make noise, and then dissipate in a cloud of photocopied handouts. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 48-50
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 2:09:44 PM
Teachers are quite limited in the formal means offered to them to get kids to do what they want: they can proffer grades or some more tangible sort of reward (popcorn party Fridays!), they can threaten to call parents or to exile kids to an administrator’s room or to the back of the classroom, but they obviously can’t make the kids do anything. Although teachers are often referred to as in loco parentis, this isn’t actually true: a friend of mine teaching in another middle school had a parent of one of her students tell her that she would be coming in to give the kid a spanking in front of his peers– “I called the Health Department, and the law says I’m allowed to give him three claps on his behind,” and though my friend dissuaded the parent from this unwise course of action, it did illustrate how parents are not teachers and school is not home. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 173-179
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 2:25:10 PM
Small children will watch, effortlessly and rapt, a beetle burrowing into the ground, froglets crossing a path, or a nest of ants scattering when a rock is overturned. In middle school, kids can still be tricked into paying attention, particularly for something gross or dangerous or illicit. By high school, the flicker of interest is for many kids vanished. As we age, the awareness of the social world often crowds out interest in the natural one, perhaps ever more so as the social world expands into vast electronic form. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 351-355
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 2:44:33 PM
Seeing requires a sense of solitude, if not its truth, a willingness to push away for a moment our worries about who we are to other people to take in what is before our nose. 8 AGAINST UNIDIMENSIONALITY During my mostly disastrous second year teaching in the Bronx, I worked on Saturdays at a state park about 50 miles north of the city, up the Hudson Valley. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 356-362
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 2:44:52 PM
Seeing requires a sense of solitude, if not its truth, a willingness to push away for a moment our worries about who we are to other people to take in what is before our nose. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 356-358
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 2:45:01 PM
For many kids, keeping them writing keeps them quiet enough to assure a simulacrum of learning in the classroom, but may at times prevent actual learning from taking place. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 417-419
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 3:03:59 PM
One of the great losses of our current conception of childhood- which treats, occasionally justifiably, each unrelated adult as a potential mortal threat- is that it makes for fewer people for kids to learn from who aren’t there for the sole purpose of being learned from, fewer people who can teach us that adulthood is not just a choice between drudgery and excess. We all need someone to tell us that we are better drowned than duffers, but that if we are not duffers we won’t drown. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 830-835
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:19:48 PM
First, kids come to school with the expectation of working towards success, that they will put forth effort, and in return they will be rewarded by not getting into trouble, and a class that is constantly trying one form of instruction and then another gives little in the way of consistent feedback to tell the kid he’s doing what he’s supposed to do. Second, a class where the teacher is constantly explaining a complex activity tends to require more time listening and less time doing, more cognitive burden just trying to understand what the teacher wants you to do, before it even comes time to try to understand the stuff you are supposed to learn. Together, being stymied in the desire to do some work and waiting, waiting, for the teacher to explain his dumb plan for the day is…boring. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 903-909
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:27:11 PM
I should say that the existence of any of these roles, or the psychological importance that a kid places on one adult or another in his life is in no way in contradiction to the proposition that the net impact of any given teacher or adult is, in general, approximately zero. If this kid hadn’t found you to mentor him or to reflect back what he is or could be, to show one possibility of what he could become, he would have found someone nearly as good or better, at least in our mostly wealthy, mostly forgiving society. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 930-935
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:29:40 PM
The talent show didn’t make anybody learn much more, of course, or learn more at all, but the point of school is hardly learning, but to figure out a way to be in the same building with a bunch of other people day after day after day, to clap when the lights come on and laugh even when a joke doesn’t quite go right, to do your piece and then let somebody else go onstage and do theirs. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1068-1071
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:44:12 PM
Human beings are resilient things, that to themselves are often true, even when those selves are not how we want them to be. Parenthood generally involves this recognition, that our dreams for other people must ultimately bow before the person they are bound to become. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1208-1211
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:55:25 PM
Much of adulthood is learning to live with diminishing returns. Our best efforts, at work or love or the rest of life, are often less productive than our half efforts. As with the pint of ice cream hiding in the freezer, devouring some is usually better than devouring all. But we have a harder time applying that insight to public policy. Our society can help some people some of the time with some expenditure of resources. But whether we can help more people more of the time with greater expenditure of resources is not simply a matter of being “smart” in our Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1203-1207
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:55:38 PM
Much of adulthood is learning to live with diminishing returns. Our best efforts, at work or love or the rest of life, are often less productive than our half efforts. As with the pint of ice cream hiding in the freezer, devouring some is usually better than devouring all. But we have a harder time applying that insight to public policy. Our society can help some people some of the time with some expenditure of resources. But whether we can help more people more of the time with greater expenditure of resources is not simply a matter of being “smart” in our interventions, of listening to the results of “evidence-based policy.” Human beings are resilient things, that to themselves are often true, even when those selves are not how we want them to be. Parenthood generally involves this recognition, that our dreams for other people must ultimately bow before the person they are bound to become. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1203-1211
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 5:55:45 PM
Feeling different from where we're from, and longing for it once we've left, are the modern condition, and even if we stay on the block where we're from, it will change and leave us behind. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1259-1260
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 6:01:21 PM
When we think about the forces that would contribute to intellectual or cultural pluralism versus monotony, we might think about both the rainforest and the salt marsh. The salt marsh makes everyone play by the same rules, and they are a very challenging set of rules, with multiple competing simultaneous problems to solve. The result is that only a small set of solutions can survive- the same sea grasses and same few species of animals over and over again. The rainforest both allows more independent subenvironments to persist, and allows each of those subenvironments to impose its own rules on its inhabitants. An organism struggling for survival in each of those niches does not experience its life as easy or forgiving– nature is red in tooth and claw in the Amazon every bit or more as in the marshlands– but the threats that nature imposes are more local, specific, and varied from place to place, with the result that far more varied solutions can result. We should think about if we are making our schools a forest or a marsh. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1284-1292
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 6:05:12 PM
To see, not to learn, is in the end the purpose of every trip. Toad, Spotted
, 13 Ways of Going on a Field Trip: Stories about Teaching and Learning.
loc. 1528-1530
, clipped on Sunday, May 12, 2019 7:46:49 PM
The Darwinian Revolution is both a scientific and a philosophical revolution, and neither revolution could have occurred without the other. As we shall see, it was the philosophical prejudices of the scientists, more than their lack of scientific evidence, that prevented them from seeing how the theory could actually work, but those philosophical prejudices that had to be overthrown were too deeply entrenched to be dislodged by mere philosophical brilliance. It took an irresistible parade of hard-won scientific facts to force thinkers to take seriously the weird new outlook that Darwin proposed. Daniel C. Dennett
, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life.
loc. 360-364
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 2:50:02 PM
If you want to predict the way some set of sensory signals will change and evolve over time, a good thing to do is to learn how those sensory signals are determined by interacting external causes. And a good way to learn about those interacting causes is to try to predict how the sensory signal will change and evolve over time. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 873-876
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 3:51:29 PM
In sum, predictive processing depicts attention as increasing the gain on select prediction errors. Attention thus forms an integral aspect of the inferential cascade that constitutes the normal perceptual process. Endogenous attention here corresponds to processes of volitional control that impact the gain on prediction errors associated with some task-relevant feature (e.g., the shape of the four-leaf clover) or some selected spatial location. Exogenous attention corresponds to the more automatic processing that ups the gain on select prediction errors during the fluent performance of a well-learnt task, or in response to some ecologically salient cue (such as a flash of light, a motion transient, or a sudden noise). Such ecologically salient cues tend to produce strong sensory signals, and such signals are implicitly ‘expected’ to display a high signal-to-noise ratio. There is thus a kind of hyperprior in play: an expectation of precision for stronger signals, that plausibly mandates increasing the gain on associated prediction error (see Feldman & Friston, 2010, p. 9; see also Hohwy, 2012, p. 6). Finally, expectations of precision were also seen to guide exploratory actions, determining (for example) patterns of saccade that track the regions of the scene where more precise information Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 1738-1747
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 4:48:03 PM
In sum, predictive processing depicts attention as increasing the gain on select prediction errors. Attention thus forms an integral aspect of the inferential cascade that constitutes the normal perceptual process. Endogenous attention here corresponds to processes of volitional control that impact the gain on prediction errors associated with some task-relevant feature (e.g., the shape of the four-leaf clover) or some selected spatial location. Exogenous attention corresponds to the more automatic processing that ups the gain on select prediction errors during the fluent performance of a well-learnt task, or in response to some ecologically salient cue (such as a flash of light, a motion transient, or a sudden noise). Such ecologically salient cues tend to produce strong sensory signals, and such signals are implicitly ‘expected’ to display a high signal-to-noise ratio. There is thus a kind of hyperprior in play: an expectation of precision for stronger signals, that plausibly mandates increasing the gain on associated prediction error (see Feldman & Friston, 2010, p. 9; see also Hohwy, 2012, p. 6). Finally, expectations of precision were also seen to guide exploratory actions, determining (for example) patterns of saccade that track the regions of the scene where more precise information is most likely to be found Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 1738-1747
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 4:48:08 PM
The claim I wish to defend, more carefully stated, is thus that animals6 able to perceive a complex external world of interacting causes using the characteristic resources of prediction-driven learning will be animals capable of the endogenous generation of sensory-like states. It does not seem far-fetched to suggest that dreaming, imagining, and mental imagery thus became available as part and parcel of the very same cognitive package that delivered our grip on a structured (organism-salient) external world. This does not mean that every such animal can, by some deliberate act of will, bring such imaginings about. Indeed, it seems very likely that for most creatures acts of deliberate imagining (which I suspect may require the use of self-cueing via language) are simply impossible. But creatures that are thus enabled to perceive a structured world possess the neural resources to generate, from the top-down, approximations to those same sensory states. There thus emerges a deep duality between online perception (as enabled by the predictive processing architecture) and capacities for the endogenous generation of quasi-sensory states. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2054-2063
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:11:56 PM
Sleep, thanks to the altered balances just described, provides an opportunity to remedy this. During sleep, the brain’s model is insulated from further sensory testing but can still be improved by simplification and streamlining. This is because the quantity that is minimized by the brain is actually (as we will see in chapter 9) prediction error plus model complexity. During sleep, precise prediction errors are not generated, so the balance shifts towards the reduction of model complexity. Sleep may thus allow the brain to engage in synaptic pruning so as to improve (make more powerful and generalizable) the knowledge enshrined in the generative model (see Tononi & Cirelli, 2006; Gilestro, Tononi, & Cirelli, 2009; Friston & Penny, 2011).13 The resulting links between sleep and good cognitive housekeeping are intuitive and may offer special comfort to those that feel 7 hours is simply not enough! For if Hobson and Friston are right, then ‘taking the brain off-line to prune exuberant associations established during wakefulness may be a necessary price we pay for having a sophisticated cognitive system that can distil complex and subtle associations from sensory samples’ (Hobson & Friston, 2012, p. 95). Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2206-2216
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:19:48 PM
If memory is fallible and prone to reconstructive errors, that may be because it is oriented towards the future at least as much as towards the past … similar neural systems are involved in both autobiographical memory and future thinking, and both rely on a form of imagination. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2311-2313
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:26:19 PM
‘Active Inference’ (Friston, 2009; Friston, Daunizeau, et al., 2010) then names the combined mechanism by which perceptual and motor systems conspire to reduce prediction error using the twin strategies of altering predictions to fit the world, and altering the world to fit the predictions. This general schema may also—perhaps more transparently—be labelled ‘action-oriented predictive processing’ (Clark, 2013). In the case of motor behaviours, the key driving predictions now have a subjunctive flavour. They are, Friston and colleagues suggest, predictions of the proprioceptive patterns that would ensue were the action to be performed. ‘Proprioception’ names the inner sense that informs us about the relative locations of our bodily parts and the forces and efforts that are being applied. It is to be distinguished from exteroceptive (i.e., standard perceptual) channels, such as vision and audition, and from interoceptive channels informing us of hunger, thirst, and the states of the viscera. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2557-2564
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:54:08 PM
The primary motor cortex is no more or less a motor cortical area than striate (visual) cortex. The only difference between the motor cortex and visual cortex is that one predicts retinotopic input while the other predicts proprioceptive input from the motor plant. (Friston, Mattout, & Kilner, 2011, p. 138) Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2589-2591
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:55:50 PM
Perception and action here follow the same deep logic and are implemented using versions of the same computational strategy. In each case, the systemic imperative remains the same: the reduction of ongoing prediction error. In perception, this occurs when a top-down cascade successfully matches the incoming sensory data. In action, it occurs when physical motion cancels out prediction errors by producing the trajectory that yields some predicted sequence of proprioceptive states. Action thus emerges as a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy in which neural circuitry predicts the sensory consequences of the selected action. Those consequences do not immediately obtain, however, so prediction error ensues: error that is then quashed by moving the body so as to bring about the predicted sequence of sensations. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2592-2597
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 5:56:02 PM
Active inference dispenses with this hard [inverse] problem by noting that a hierarchical generative model can map predictions in extrinsic coordinates to an intrinsic (proprioceptive) frame of reference. This means the inverse problem becomes almost trivial—to elicit firing in a particular stretch receptor one simply contracts the corresponding muscle fibre. In brief, the inverse problem can be relegated to the spinal level, rendering descending afferents from M1 [primary motor cortex] predictions as opposed to commands—and rendering M1 part of a hierarchical generative model, as opposed to an inverse model. (Adams, Shipp, & Friston, 2013, p. 26) Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2751-2757
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:08:04 PM
This very broad story about action, it is worth noticing, could be accepted even by those who may wish to reject the rather particular model in which proprioceptive predictions play the role of motor commands—perhaps because they wish to retain the more familiar apparatus of efference copy, cost functions, and paired forward and inverse models. For all that the broader view of prediction and action here asserts is that (i) action and perception each depend upon probabilistic hierarchical generative models and (ii) perception and action work together, in regimes characterized by complex circular causal flow, so as to minimize sensory prediction errors. Action and perception, such a view suggests, are similarly and continuously constructed around the evolving flow of prediction error. This, I suggest, is the fundamental insight about action suggested by work on the predictive brain. The direct exploitation of proprioceptive predictions as motor commands simply provides one possible neuronal implementation of this much broader schema—albeit one that Friston and colleagues consider to be highly plausible18 given known facts concerning the physiology of the motor system (Shipp et al., Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2792-2801
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:11:11 PM
The PP architecture here combines, in a pervasive and fluent way, two of the most striking characteristics of neural organization. The two characteristics are functional differentiation (sometimes misleadingly called ‘specialization’) and integration. Functional differentiation means that local neural assemblies will come to exhibit different ‘response profiles’ where these reflect ‘a combination of intrinsic local cortical biases and extrinsic factors including experience and the influence of functional interactions with other regions of the brain’ (Anderson, 2014, p. 52). These response profiles will help determine the kinds of task for which the assembly might be recruited. But this, as Anderson rightly stresses, need not imply specialization in the more standard sense of (for example) there being regions that specialize in fixed tasks such as face recognition or mind reading. Integration (of the rather profound kind exhibited by the neural economy) means that those functionally differentiated areas interact dynamically in ways that allow transient task-specific processing regimes (involving transient coalitions of neural resources) to emerge as contextual effects repeatedly reconfigure the flow of information and influence. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 2931-2939
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:19:09 PM
The primary effect of this (as we saw in chapter 2 above) is to systematically vary the relative influence of top-down versus bottom-up information by increasing the gain (‘volume’) on selected error units. This provides a way to implement a rich set of attentional mechanisms whose role is to bias processing so as to reflect estimates of the reliability and salience of (different aspects of) both the sensory signal and the generative model itself.9 But those same mechanisms offer a promising means of implementing fluid and flexible forms of large-scale gating among cortical populations. To see this, we need only note that very low-precision prediction errors will have little or no influence upon ongoing processing and will fail to recruit or nuance higher level representations. Altering the distribution of precision-weightings thus amounts, in effect, to altering the ‘simplest circuit diagram’ (Aertsen & Preissl, 1991) for current processing. The neural mechanisms of attention are here identical with the neural mechanisms that alter patterns of effective connectivity. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3055-3063
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:26:41 PM
Mirroring properties may thus be consequences of the operation of a hierarchical predictive processing regime that posits shared representations for perception and action and within which ‘the brain does not represent intended motor acts or the perceptual consequences of those acts separately; the constructs represented in the brain are both intentional and perceptual [having] both sensory and motor correlates’ (p. 156). Such representations are essentially meta-modal high-level associative complexes linking goals and intentions to sensory consequences. Those states have differing constellations of modality-specific implications (some proprioceptive, some visual, etc.) according to the context in which they occur: implications that are implemented by varying the precision-weighting of different aspects of the prediction error signal. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3261-3267
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:37:55 PM
These are all examples of ‘grounded abstractions’ (for this general notion, see Barsalou, 2003; Pezzulo, Barsalou, et al., 2013) that open the door to more compositional and strategic operations, such as solving novel motor problems, mimicking the observed behaviour of other agents, engaging in goal-directed planning, and pre-testing behaviours in offline imagery. Such grounded abstractions do not float free of their roots in embodied action. Instead, they constitute what might be thought of as a kind of ‘dynamical programming language’ for those interactions: a language in which, for example, ‘continuous sensory-motor sequences are automatically segmented into a set of reusable behavior primitives’ (Tani, 2007, p. 2). Tani et al. (2004) show that robots equipped (as a result of learning-driven self-organization) with such primitives are able to deploy them so as to imitate the observed behaviour of another. In another experiment, they show that such primitives also facilitate the mapping of behaviours onto simple linguistic forms, so that a robot can learn to follow a command to, for example, point (using its body), push (using its arm), or hit (with its arm) in ways that target designated objects or spatial locations. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3314-3323
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:40:23 PM
It is a natural consequence of prediction-based learning that the learner uncovers (when all is working correctly) the weave of interacting distal causes that—given her action repertoire and interests—characterizes the interact-able environment in which learning occurs. In this way prediction-based learning brings into view a structured external world, built of persisting (though often temporally evolving) objects, properties, and complex nested causal relations. As a result, ‘the recognition system “inherits” the dynamics of the environment and can predict its sensory products accurately’ Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3485-3489
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:45:53 PM
Moreover, the bulk of our normal, successful, daily perceptual contact with the world—if the prediction machine models are on the mark—is determined as much by our expectations concerning the sensed scene as by the driving signals themselves. Even more strikingly, the forward flow of sensory information2 here consists only in the propagation of error signals, while richly contentful predictions flow downwards and sideways, interacting in complex non-linear fashions via the web of reciprocal connections. A key result of this pattern of influence, as noted back in chapter 1, is much greater efficiency in the use of neural encodings, because: ‘An expected event does not need to be explicitly represented or communicated to higher cortical areas which have processed all of its relevant features prior to its occurrence’ (Bubic et al., 2010, p. 10). In ecologically normal circumstances, the role of moment-by-moment perceptual contact with the world is thus ‘merely’ to check and when necessary correct the brain’s best guessing concerning what is out there. This is a challenging vision. It depicts our (mostly non-conscious) expectations as a major source3 of the contents of our perceptions: contents that are, however, constantly being checked, nuanced, and selected by prediction error signals sensitive to the evolving sensory input. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3463-3474
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:46:42 PM
Despite all this, I think we should resist the claim that what we perceive is best understood as a kind of hypothesis, model, fantasy, or virtual reality. The temptation to think so, it seems to me, rests on two mistakes. The first mistake is to conceive of inference-based routes to adaptive response as introducing a kind of representational veil between agent and world. Instead, it is only the structured probabilistic know-how distilled from prediction-driven learning that enables us to see through the veil of surface statistics to the world of distal interacting causes itself.4 The second mistake is a failure to take sufficient account of the role of action, and of organism-specific action repertoires, in both selecting and constantly testing the ongoing stream of prediction itself. Rather than aiming to reveal some kind of action-neutral image of an objective realm, prediction-driven learning delivers a grip upon affordances: the possibilities for action and intervention that the environment makes available to a given agent.5 Taken together, these points suggest that the probabilistic inference engine in the brain does not constitute a barrier between agent and world. Rather, it provides a unique tool for encountering a world of significance, populated by human affordances. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3474-3484
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:46:49 PM
Despite all this, I think we should resist the claim that what we perceive is best understood as a kind of hypothesis, model, fantasy, or virtual reality. The temptation to think so, it seems to me, rests on two mistakes. The first mistake is to conceive of inference-based routes to adaptive response as introducing a kind of representational veil between agent and world. Instead, it is only the structured probabilistic know-how distilled from prediction-driven learning that enables us to see through the veil of surface statistics to the world of distal interacting causes itself.4 The second mistake is a failure to take sufficient account of the role of action, and of organism-specific action repertoires, in both selecting and constantly testing the ongoing stream of prediction itself. Rather than aiming to reveal some kind of action-neutral image of an objective realm, prediction-driven learning delivers a grip upon affordances: the possibilities for action and intervention that the environment makes available to a given agent.5 Taken together, these points suggest that the probabilistic inference engine in the brain does not constitute a barrier between agent and world. Rather, it provides a unique tool for encountering a world of significance, populated by human affordances. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3474-3484
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:47:07 PM
Such systems—like PP systems more generally—are also able to induce their own so-called ‘hyperpriors’ from the data. Hyperpriors (here used interchangeably with ‘overhypotheses’, see Kemp et al., 2007) are essentially ‘priors upon priors’ embodying systemic expectations concerning very abstract (at times almost ‘Kantian’) features of the world. For example, one highly abstract hyperprior might demand that each set of multimodal sensory inputs has a single best explanation. This would enforce a single peak for the probabilistic distributions consequent upon sensory stimulation, so that we always saw the world as being in one determinate state or another, rather than (say) as a superposition of equiprobable states. Such a hugely abstract hyperprior might be a good candidate for innate specification. But it might equally well be left to early learning, since the need to use sensory input to drive actions, and the physical impossibility of acting in two very different ways at once, could conceivably11 drive an HBM to extract even this as a general principle governing inference. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3562-3570
, clipped on Sunday, May 19, 2019 6:51:21 PM
Thus, large bodies of work in visual neuroscience suggest that multiple different bodies of information are continuously computed in parallel and partially integrated when (but only when and to whatever extent) some current action or response demands. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3628-3630
, clipped on Sunday, June 2, 2019 10:48:02 PM
Dewey writes of seeing as an ‘unbroken act’ which: is as experienced no more mere sensation than it is mere motion (though the onlooker or psychological observer can interpret it into sensation and movement), it is in no sense the sensation which stimulates the reaching; we have, as already sufficiently indicated, only the serial steps in a coordination of acts. But now take a child who, upon reaching for bright light (that is, exercising the seeing-reaching coordination) has sometimes had a delightful exercise, sometimes found something good to eat and sometimes burned himself. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3731-3736
, clipped on Sunday, June 2, 2019 10:57:50 PM
Dewey writes of seeing as an ‘unbroken act’ which: is as experienced no more mere sensation than it is mere motion (though the onlooker or psychological observer can interpret it into sensation and movement), it is in no sense the sensation which stimulates the reaching; we have, as already sufficiently indicated, only the serial steps in a coordination of acts. But now take a child who, upon reaching for bright light (that is, exercising the seeing-reaching coordination) has sometimes had a delightful exercise, sometimes found something good to eat and sometimes burned himself. Now the response is not only uncertain, but the stimulus is equally uncertain; one is uncertain only so far as the other is. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3731-3737
, clipped on Sunday, June 2, 2019 10:58:02 PM
The "well-informed" think they know something about matters that the experts are reluctant even to speak of. Information at second hand always gives an impression of tidiness, in contrast with the data at the scientist's disposal, full of gaps and uncertainties. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 315-316
, clipped on Friday, June 14, 2019 8:24:22 PM
Literature, from the very beginning, has had a single enemy, and that is the restriction of the expressed idea. It turns out, however, that freedom of expression sometimes presents a greater threat to an idea, because forbidden thoughts may circulate in secret, but what can be done when an important fact is lost in a flood of impostors, and the voice of truth becomes drowned out in an ungodly din? When that voice, though freely resounding, cannot be heard, because the technologies of information have led to a situation in which one can receive best the message of him who shouts the loudest, even when the most falsely? Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 356-360
, clipped on Friday, June 14, 2019 8:33:32 PM
But it really makes no difference whether the unknown lies in the lap of Nature or, instead, is buried among the pages of worthless manuscripts read by no one; because an idea that has not entered the bloodstream of science, and does not circulate seminally in it, in practice does not exist for us. The receptivity of science, at any time in history, to a radically different interpretation of phenomena has in fact not been great. The madness and suicide of one of the creators of thermodynamics is an example of this. Our civilization, in its "advanced" scientific part, is a narrow construct, a vision repeatedly constricted by a historically stiffening conglomeration of multiple factors, among which sheer coincidence, though considered to be in strict accordance with inflexible methodologies, may play a major role. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 418-424
, clipped on Friday, June 14, 2019 8:45:12 PM
Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 462-465
, clipped on Friday, June 14, 2019 9:16:42 PM
Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 462-465
, clipped on Friday, June 14, 2019 9:16:52 PM
Man's quest for knowledge is an expanding series whose limit is infinity, but philosophy seeks to attain that limit at one blow, by a short circuit providing the certainty of complete and inalterable truth. Science meanwhile advances at its gradual pace, often slowing to a crawl, and for periods it even walks in place, but eventually it reaches the various ultimate trenches dug by philosophical thought, and, quite heedless of the fact that it is not supposed to be able to cross those final barriers to the intellect, goes right on. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 462-465
, clipped on Friday, June 14, 2019 9:16:55 PM
In history there have appeared, innumerable times, thinkers who believed that one could actually progress, in knowledge, from zero; they made of the mind a blank page and held that it could be filled with one and only one necessary order. This fiction has been the basis of awesome efforts. Yet such an operation cannot be carried out. It is impossible to commence anything without first making assumptions, and our awareness of this fact in no way diminishes its reality. Those assumptions inhere in the very biology of man, and in the amalgam of civilization which serves as the interface between the organisms and the environment; and this amalgam is permitted because the actions that must be taken in order to survive are not rendered unequivocal by the environment. The environment, rather, leaves the organisms a chink for freedom of choice, a chink spacious enough to include thousands of possible cultures. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 1256-1262
, clipped on Saturday, June 15, 2019 2:15:59 AM
The technologies of information have created, supposedly, a paradise in which anyone who desires to can know everything; but this is a complete fiction. Selection, tantamount to resignation, is as unavoidable as breathing. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 1945-1947
, clipped on Sunday, June 16, 2019 10:00:26 AM
I confess that he made me uneasy, because I do not believe in human perfection, and people who have no quirks, tics, obsessions, the touch of some minor mania, or points on which they turn rabid—I suspect such people of systematic imposture (we judge others by ourselves) or of totally lacking character. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 2092-2094
, clipped on Sunday, June 16, 2019 10:13:41 AM
Humankind always felt most at home—though never comfortable—in situations that were slightly desperate: that spice did not bring solace to the body, but did appease the soul. But the call of "all forces and reserves to the front of science" was stirring as long as "intelligent machines" were not able to replace the scientists effectively. Lem, Stanislaw
, His Master's Voice.
loc. 2782-2784
, clipped on Sunday, June 16, 2019 7:27:19 PM
Malthus had brought about in him a complete “conversion,” one which, he wrote to his trusted friend Joseph Hooker in 1844, was “like confessing a murder.” Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 373-374
, clipped on Tuesday, July 2, 2019 3:29:53 PM
From the moment we grasp, firmly and completely, Darwin’s theory of evolution, we begin to realize that we have obtained not merely a description of the past, or an explanation of the present, but a veritable key to the future; and this consideration becomes the more forcibly impressed on us the more thoroughly we apply the doctrine; the more clearly we see that not only the organization and structure of the body, and the cruder physical impulses, but that the whole constitution of our ethical and aesthetic nature, all the refinements of beauty, all the delicacy of our sense of beauty, our moral instincts of obedience and compassion, pity or indignation, our moments of religious awe, or mystical penetration—all have their biological significance, all (from the biological point of view) exist in virtue of their biological significance. Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 1259-1264
, clipped on Saturday, July 6, 2019 9:25:49 AM
that the epiorganism will and should evolve in the direction of greater integration (i.e. less individual freedom and responsibility), and that its units (i.e. you and I) should become more specialized (with less scope for activity and change), more interdependent (less self-reliant), and more a part of the whole state (less individual)…. Then the biologist finds himself face to face with the fact that this is a totalitarian idea.40 Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 2224-2227
, clipped on Monday, July 15, 2019 5:01:08 PM
“My freedom to move my fist,” the Supreme Court Justice William Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 2266-2267
, clipped on Monday, July 15, 2019 5:04:53 PM
Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you. Ted Chiang
, Exhalation.
loc. 832-836
, clipped on Sunday, July 21, 2019 7:33:11 AM
me so deeply. Would that we could choose the things that trouble Ted Chiang
, Exhalation.
loc. 3837-3837
, clipped on Saturday, July 27, 2019 3:05:06 AM
Haldane was by now working at the Indian Statistical Institute and living in an ivory tower in Orissa. No, Penrose intoned coldly to Bill, he didn’t see the connection between a moral trait like altruism and genetics. Recently he’d changed the name of the Annals of Eugenics to the Annals of Human Genetics, and would have no talk of genes for human behavior. At best the genetic evolution of altruism was a waste of time; more to the point, it was pernicious. Morphology was one thing, but hadn’t the Third Reich been enough? Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 2876-2880
, clipped on Sunday, July 28, 2019 5:57:43 AM
Selection was a mechanism for generating an exceedingly high degree of improbability; even altruistic behavior was fashioned by its unsentimental, ruthless cull. Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 3054-3055
, clipped on Tuesday, July 30, 2019 2:48:29 PM
Everything depended on the environment. Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 3592-3593
, clipped on Saturday, August 10, 2019 3:32:05 AM
In evolutionary terms only a thin blue line seemed to separate it from spite. What determined whether a living being should act kindly or with malice had nothing to do with an “essence” or “inner core”—both, after all, resided within us. Instead, if the surrounding creatures were similar altruism could evolve; if they were different, spite was the solution. Pure unadulterated goodness was Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 3596-3599
, clipped on Saturday, August 10, 2019 3:32:50 AM
In evolutionary terms only a thin blue line seemed to separate it from spite. What determined whether a living being should act kindly or with malice had nothing to do with an “essence” or “inner core”—both, after all, resided within us. Instead, if the surrounding creatures were similar altruism could evolve; if they were different, spite was the solution. Pure unadulterated goodness was a fiction. Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 3596-3599
, clipped on Saturday, August 10, 2019 3:32:57 AM
A complete unknown walking off the street into the chair’s office and being given keys to a room of his own in arguably the world’s greatest department of human genetics in a matter of minutes? It Harman, Oren
, The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness.
loc. 3617-3618
, clipped on Saturday, August 10, 2019 3:34:22 AM
Dewey’s descriptions elegantly prefigure the complex interplay, highlighted by predictive processing, between altering our predictions to fit the evidence (‘perception’) and seeking out the evidence to fit our predictions (‘action’). But it also suggests (rightly, I think) that we really ought not to conceive these, within the predictive processing framework, as competing strategies.14 Rather, the two strands constantly work hand in hand to reveal a world that is, in a certain sense, constituted in action. For actions now disclose evidence that leads to more actions, and our experience of the world is constituted by this ongoing cycle. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 3740-3745
, clipped on Saturday, August 17, 2019 5:30:29 AM
From that more global perspective, our susceptibility to the illusion is not really a cognitive failure at all. For were the system to overturn the many delicately interlaced layers of intermediate-level processing that deliver this verdict, the result would be failures of veridical perception in many other (more ecologically normal) circumstances. Andy Clark
, Surfing Uncertainty: Prediction, Action, and the Embodied Mind.
loc. 4095-4097
, clipped on Saturday, August 17, 2019 7:33:28 AM
Starchild Universe appeals to a select elite) -- and now the consequences have wreaked havoc on the Universe's lovingly plotted nostalgebraist
, Floornight.
loc. 1799-1800
, clipped on Saturday, August 17, 2019 6:54:17 PM
He didn’t think she had this kind of boldness in her. After this round of fellows had completed their first year, he’d taken them to Chelsea Piers to celebrate with a trapeze lesson—it was the conclusion of an extensive in-joke they’d all developed over the year about offsite corporate events that included team-building exercises. She’d been too afraid to try, but she’d watched, and when he was done with his turn, he’d sat on the side with her and talked to her and learned she was in a club consisting of mostly old men who went to Marx Brothers screenings and that she did improv and Taffy Brodesser-Akner;
, Fleishman Is in Trouble.
loc. 2427-2431
, clipped on Sunday, August 25, 2019 5:44:50 AM
He didn’t think she had this kind of boldness in her. After this round of fellows had completed their first year, he’d taken them to Chelsea Piers to celebrate with a trapeze lesson—it was the conclusion of an extensive in-joke they’d all developed over the year about offsite corporate events that included team-building exercises. She’d been too afraid to try, but she’d watched, and when he was done with his turn, he’d sat on the side with her and talked to her and learned she was in a club consisting of mostly old men Taffy Brodesser-Akner;
, Fleishman Is in Trouble.
loc. 2427-2430
, clipped on Sunday, August 25, 2019 5:44:59 AM
He didn’t think she had this kind of boldness in her. After this round of fellows had completed their first year, he’d taken them to Chelsea Piers to celebrate with a trapeze lesson—it was the conclusion of an extensive in-joke they’d all developed over the year about offsite corporate events that included team-building exercises. She’d been too afraid to try, but she’d watched, and when he was done with his turn, he’d sat on the side with her and talked to her and learned she was in a club consisting of mostly old men who went to Marx Brothers screenings and that she did improv Taffy Brodesser-Akner;
, Fleishman Is in Trouble.
loc. 2427-2431
, clipped on Sunday, August 25, 2019 5:45:09 AM
I would try not to put too much weight on the moments that are the worst in marriage: when one of you is in a good mood and the other can’t recognize it or rise to its occasion and so leaves the other dangling in the loneliness of it; when one of you pretends to not really understand what the other person is saying and instead holds that person to a technicality they don’t deserve. Taffy Brodesser-Akner;
, Fleishman Is in Trouble.
loc. 5888-5891
, clipped on Sunday, August 25, 2019 5:03:34 PM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:31:44 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:31:52 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:32:04 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:32:06 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:32:07 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:32:18 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:33:37 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:33:38 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:33:40 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:34:02 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:34:24 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:34:26 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:11 AM
special zeal, clasping his hands with particular fervor and reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1931-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:23 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:24 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:25 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:30 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:31 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:32 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:36 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:37 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:40 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:50 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:52 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:36:59 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:37:02 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:37:04 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:37:06 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:37:17 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:37:26 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:38:07 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:38:07 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:38:18 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:38:59 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:40:30 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:40:32 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:40:41 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:40:45 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:25 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:27 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:27 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:29 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:37 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:37 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:38 AM
reverence. Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 1932-1932
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:41:40 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 8:59:54 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 9:01:36 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 9:03:24 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 9:03:50 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 9:06:52 AM
The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others. When he has no respect for anyone, he can no longer love and, in order to divert himself, having no love in him, he yields to his impulses, indulges in the lowest forms of pleasure, and behaves in the end like an animal, in satisfying his vices. And it all comes from lying—lying to others and to yourself. A man who lies to himself, for instance, can take offense whenever he wishes, for there are times when it is rather pleasant to feel wronged—don’t you agree? So a man may know very well that no one has offended him, and may invent an offense, lie just for the beauty of it, or exaggerate what someone said to create a situation, making a mountain out of a molehill. And although he is well aware of it himself, he nevertheless does feel offended because he enjoys doing so, derives great pleasure from it, and so he comes to feel real hostility toward the imaginary offender Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 993-1001
, clipped on Sunday, September 8, 2019 9:07:18 AM
To imagine an authority ex machina that would somehow suppress the misery and havoc men inflict on each other as a result of their passions means in effect to wish away, rather than to solve, the very difficulties that have been discovered. It is perhaps for this reason that the repressive solution did not long survive the detailed analysis of the passions in the seventeenth century. Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 372-375
, clipped on Saturday, September 14, 2019 8:00:47 AM
Actually Montesquieu’s praise for commerce was not without reservations. In the same chapter in which he commends commerce for its contribution to peace, he regrets the way in which commerce brings with it a monetization of all human relations and the loss of hospitality and of other “moral virtues which lead one to not always discuss one’s interests with rigidity.” Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 1276-1279
, clipped on Saturday, September 14, 2019 12:54:21 PM
For example, among the reasons for which “the foundation on which freedom was built, may serve to support a tyranny” he lists the fear of losing wealth and situations in which “heirs of family find themselves straitened and poor, in the midst of affluence.” Relative deprivation and ressentiment resulting from actual or feared downward mobility are here seen as intimately bound up with the acquisitive society and its tumultuous ways, and these feelings are viewed as breeding ground for the ready acceptance of whatever “strong” government promises to stave off such real or imagined dangers. Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 1818-1822
, clipped on Monday, September 16, 2019 4:48:41 AM
Here the interests are far from taming or chaining the passions of the rulers; on the contrary, if the citizens become absorbed by the pursuit of their private interests, it will be possible for a “clever and ambitious man to seize power.” And Tocqueville directs some superbly caustic and prophetic words (written years before the rise of Napoleon III) at those who, for the sake of a favorable business climate, ask only for “law and order”: A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene.10 According to Ferguson and Tocqueville, then, economic expansion and the preoccupation with individual economic improvement that goes with it both cause the advance of the political arts and can also be responsible for their deterioration. This thought was later taken up by Marx in his class analysis of the 1848 revolutions: from progressive, the political role of the bourgeoisie turned reactionary as these events unfolded. But the earlier formulations are, in a sense, richer, for they demonstrate that economic expansion is basically and simultaneously ambivalent in its political effects, whereas Marxist thought imposes a temporal sequence with the positive effects necessarily antedating the negative ones. The uneasiness of Ferguson and Tocqueville over the Montesquieu-Steuart doctrine can be summarized in two points. First of all, so they showed, there is another side to the insight that the modern economy, its complex interdependence and growth constitute so delicate a mechanism that the grands coups d’autorité of despotic government become impossible. If it is true that the economy must be deferred to, then there is a case not only for constraining the imprudent actions of the prince but for repressing those of the people, for limiting participation, in short, for crushing anything that could be interpreted by some economist-king as a threat to the proper functioning of the “delicate watch.” Secondly, Ferguson and Tocqueville implicitly criticized the older tradition of thought that had seen in the pursuit of material interest a welcome alternative to the passionate scramble for glory and power. While not invoking the fallacy of composition, they put forward a rather similar point: as long as not everyone is playing the “innocent” game of making money, the total absorption in it of most citizens leaves the few who play for the higher stakes of power freer than before to pursue their ambition. In this way social arrangements that substitute the interests for the passions as the guiding principle of human action for the many can have the side effect Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 1853-1874
, clipped on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 9:10:01 PM
Here the interests are far from taming or chaining the passions of the rulers; on the contrary, if the citizens become absorbed by the pursuit of their private interests, it will be possible for a “clever and ambitious man to seize power.” And Tocqueville directs some superbly caustic and prophetic words (written years before the rise of Napoleon III) at those who, for the sake of a favorable business climate, ask only for “law and order”: A nation that demands from its government nothing but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the bottom of its heart; it is the slave of its well-being, and the man who is to chain it can arrive on the scene. Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 1853-1858
, clipped on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 9:10:20 PM
The uneasiness of Ferguson and Tocqueville over the Montesquieu-Steuart doctrine can be summarized in two points. First of all, so they showed, there is another side to the insight that the modern economy, its complex interdependence and growth constitute so delicate a mechanism that the grands coups d’autorité of despotic government become impossible. If it is true that the economy must be deferred to, then there is a case not only for constraining the imprudent actions of the prince but for repressing those of the people, for limiting participation, in short, for crushing anything that could be interpreted by some economist-king as a threat to the proper functioning of the “delicate watch.” Secondly, Ferguson and Tocqueville implicitly criticized the older tradition of thought that had seen in the pursuit of material interest a welcome alternative to the passionate scramble for glory and power. While not invoking the fallacy of composition, they put forward a rather similar point: as long as not everyone is playing the “innocent” game of making money, the total absorption in it of most citizens leaves the few who play for the higher stakes of power freer than before to pursue their ambition. In this way social arrangements that substitute the interests for the passions as the guiding principle of human action for the many can have the side effect of killing the civic spirit and of thereby opening the door to tyranny. Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 1864-1874
, clipped on Tuesday, September 17, 2019 9:11:03 PM
In one of the most attractive and influential of these critiques, the stress is on the repressive and alienating feature of capitalism, on the way it inhibits the development of the “full human personality.” From the vantage point of the present essay, this accusation seems a bit unfair, for capitalism was precisely expected and supposed to repress certain human drives and proclivities and to fashion a less multifaceted, less unpredictable, and more “one-dimensional” human personality. This position, which seems so strange today, arose from extreme anguish over the clear and present dangers of a certain historical period, from concern over the destructive forces unleashed by the human passions with the only exception, so it seemed at the time, of “innocuous” avarice. In sum, capitalism was supposed to accomplish exactly what was soon to be denounced as its worst feature. Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 1961-1967
, clipped on Wednesday, September 25, 2019 10:44:55 PM
reveals what is special about this book. It is a study in the history of arguments Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 2021-2022
, clipped on Thursday, September 26, 2019 10:23:28 PM
Hirschman out as dapper as he was learned. It Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 2037-2038
, clipped on Thursday, September 26, 2019 10:23:53 PM
saddening trip to South America, where Hirschman conferred with friends and Sen, Amartya, Hirschman, Albert O., Adelman, Jeremy
, The Passions and the Interests.
loc. 2039-2039
, clipped on Thursday, September 26, 2019 10:24:47 PM
class, worked on the social mobility of Ivy League students from Clark, Gregory
, The Son Also Rises.
loc. 82-83
, clipped on Friday, September 27, 2019 11:01:48 PM
Hoover seemed to be the best of America. Not a politician, but a successful businessman, a progressive forward-looking leader. He was the Great Engineer, the Great Humanitarian, the Great Idealist, the Great Administrator. And now he was president, with seemingly limitless potential. And yet behind the image, Hoover was deeply conservative, skeptical of federal action, paralyzed by his own brilliance, and a mean-spirited micromanager. It would be hard to find a worse leader for a crisis. Matt Stoller
, Goliath.
loc. 1284-1287
, clipped on Sunday, November 10, 2019 10:24:07 PM
The new lending model was a subtle but transformative shift in the politics of banking and business, from caretaking to profit maximizing. Lending against the replacement value meant that businesses would focus on making sure that they took care of their property, and on the quality of their ships and factories. Lending against cash flow, however, meant that businesses would focus on maximizing cash-generating activities, like tax avoidance. A ship was not valuable because it was well-maintained, but because it could quickly generate more cash. Matt Stoller
, Goliath.
loc. 5017-5021
, clipped on Sunday, November 24, 2019 1:08:16 AM
many respects, the entire edifice of twentieth-century antimonopolism stood on the foundation of fair trade and other laws designed to keep the capitalist—and the trading companies they controlled—from interfering in the process of pricing a good. Brandeis had warned in 1913 of the shortsightedness of consumerism. “Far-seeing organized capital secures,” he wrote, “the cooperation of the short-sighted unorganized consumer to his own undoing. Thoughtless or weak, he yields to the temptation of trifling immediate gain; and selling his birthright for a mess of pottage, becomes himself an instrument of monopoly.” Matt Stoller
, Goliath.
loc. 6728-6733
, clipped on Wednesday, December 11, 2019 12:45:26 AM
to drive here to the store and wait for me. There was no time to waste, you know. The last time, it was Timofei who took me to Mokroye, but this time he’s gone there with the enchantress . . . Tell me, Andrei, will we get there much after them?” “One hour, sir. They won’t get there more than an Fyodor Dostoevsky
, The Brothers Karamazov.
loc. 9086-9088
, clipped on Saturday, December 14, 2019 10:23:32 PM
First, there are two models of preference in government. You can prefer government X to government Y because either (a) X provides better government to its subjects, or (b) you, personally, have more power in the administration of X. Better, as Milton put it, to reign in Hell. We can call (a) the Popean model, (b) the Luciferian model. Mencius Moldbug
, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations.
loc. 1597-1600
, clipped on Wednesday, December 18, 2019 12:03:38 AM
One major goal of a bureaucracy is to distribute as much importance (ie, power, or at least apparent power) as possible to its employees, which argues for maximizing the number of individuals involved in every decision. Impact means power means status, and it’s not for the money that bright young people flock to Dupont Circle. Mencius Moldbug
, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations.
loc. 1715-1717
, clipped on Wednesday, December 18, 2019 11:50:07 PM
Most progressives are socially normal human beings, who in any political environment, would just be choosing the largest, best-appointed bandwagon for their personal conveyance. In Nazi Germany they would be Nazis, in Russia they would be Bolsheviks, in the kingdom of Louis XIV they would be all for Louis XIV. This is one of the many reasons there is no need to guillotine them. Au contraire: one way to know you’ve actually seized actual power is that these remoras latch on to you. The effect is unmistakable and quite pleasant. Mencius Moldbug
, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations.
loc. 4120-4124
, clipped on Monday, December 23, 2019 2:06:08 PM
Slavery was put down in America, not in consequence of any action on the part of the slaves, or even any express desire on their part that they should be free. It was put down entirely through the grossly illegal conduct of certain agitators in Boston and elsewhere, who were not slaves themselves, nor owners of slaves, nor had anything to do with the question really. It was, undoubtedly, the Abolitionists who set the torch alight, who began the whole thing. And it is curious to note that from the slaves themselves they received, not merely very little assistance, but hardly any sympathy even; and when at the close of the war the slaves found themselves free, found themselves indeed so absolutely free that they were free to starve, many of them bitterly regretted the new state of things. Mencius Moldbug
, A Gentle Introduction to Unqualified Reservations.
loc. 4177-4182
, clipped on Monday, December 23, 2019 2:10:51 PM
There can be no compromise between those who live under the pressure of need and of material increase, who are the walking shadows of the dead, and on the other side, those who are carefree, joyous, pleasure-loving and worship beauty. One seeks the preservation and expansion of mere life, the other seeks the exaltation of life. Bronze Age Pervert
, Bronze Age Mindset.
loc. 761-765
, clipped on Tuesday, December 31, 2019 7:31:07 PM
Houellebecq talks about how as a boy he couldn’t stand the self-satisfied, dronelike and calm “reasonable” voice of narrators on nature shows, that try to obscure the worst agonies of animals, murder in blood. According to any rational calculation, life is not worth living, because pain far outweighs pleasure. Heavily medicated nihilists are likely to deny this—the blessed and happy know it’s true…but also know that reason and rationality are false. Gnosticism Bronze Age Pervert
, Bronze Age Mindset.
loc. 1293-1296
, clipped on Tuesday, December 31, 2019 8:35:18 PM
The problem for man as for other animal isn’t stress or suffering, but the feeling that one can’t escape: the despair and panic of exhaustion and entrapment. Bronze Age Pervert
, Bronze Age Mindset.
loc. 1304-1305
, clipped on Tuesday, December 31, 2019 8:36:18 PM
But there occurs to me (continued I) with regard to your main topic, a difficulty, which I shall just propose to you without insisting on it; lest it lead into reasonings of too nice and delicate a nature. In a word, I much doubt whether it be possible for a cause to be known only by its effect (as you have all along supposed) or to be of so singular and particular a nature as to have no parallel and no similarity with any other cause or object, that has ever fallen under our observation. It is only when two species of objects are found to be constantly conjoined, that we can infer the one from the other; and were an effect presented, which was entirely singular, and could not be comprehended under any known species, I do not see, that we could form any conjecture or inference at all concerning its cause. If experience and observation and analogy be, indeed, the only guides which we can reasonably follow in inferences of this nature; both the effect and cause must bear a similarity and resemblance to other effects and causes, which we know, and which we have found, in many instances, to be conjoined with each other. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 1775-1782
, clipped on Monday, January 13, 2020 2:56:29 AM
The existence, therefore, of any being can only be proved by arguments from its cause or its effect; and these arguments are founded entirely on experience. If we reason a priori, anything may appear able to produce anything. The falling of a pebble may, for aught we know, extinguish the sun; or the wish of a man control the planets in their orbits. It is only experience, which teaches us the nature and bounds of cause and effect, and enables us to infer the existence of one object from that of another 34 . Such is the foundation of moral reasoning, which forms the greater part of human knowledge, and is the source of all human action and behaviour. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 1981-1986
, clipped on Saturday, January 18, 2020 1:30:59 AM
When we run over libraries, persuaded of these principles, what havoc must we make? If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion. Hume, David
, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.
loc. 1993-1996
, clipped on Saturday, January 18, 2020 1:33:26 AM
I learned that if you have something critical to say about a piece of scientific work, it is better to say it firmly but nicely and to preface it with praise of any good aspects of it. I only wish I had always stuck to this useful rule. Unfortunately I have sometimes been carried away by my impatience and expressed myself too briskly and in too devastating a manner. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 836-838
, clipped on Saturday, January 18, 2020 9:30:29 AM
People have sometimes stated that Pauling’s model of the a helix or his incorrect model for DNA gave us the idea that DNA was a helix. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Helices were in the air, and you would have to be either obtuse or very obstinate not to think along helical lines. What Pauling did show us was that exact and careful model building could embody constraints that the final answer had in any case to satisfy. Sometimes this could lead to the correct structure, using only a minimum of the direct experimental evidence. This was the lesson that we learned and that Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins failed to appreciate in attempting to solve the structure of DNA. That, and the necessity for making no assumptions that could not be doubted from time to time. It should also be said that Jim and I were highly motivated to succeed, even if we approached problems in a relaxed manner, were quick to spot success when we saw it and to learn what lessons we could draw both from successes and from failures. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 1003-1010
, clipped on Saturday, January 18, 2020 9:44:35 AM
The more important point is that Jim was looking for something significant and immediately recognized the significance of the correct pairs when he hit upon them by chance—"chance favors the prepared mind.” This episode also demonstrates that play is often important in research. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 1098-1100
, clipped on Saturday, January 18, 2020 2:13:09 PM
I cannot help thinking that so many of the “models” of the brain that are inflicted on us are mainly produced because their authors love playing with computers and writing computer programs and are simply carried away when a program produces a pretty result. They hardly seem to care whether the brain actually uses the devices incorporated in their “model.” Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 1977-1980
, clipped on Saturday, January 18, 2020 4:50:23 PM
The experiments also taught me how superficial my knowledge was, even though I had taken part in numerous discussions about this very system. There is nothing like actively doing experiments to make one realize all the ins and outs of a technique. It also helps to fix the details in one’s head, especially as reading the “experimental methods” section of most scientific papers is more boring than almost anything I know. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2133-2136
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 2:52:52 AM
What is found in biology is mechanisms, mechanisms built with chemical components and that are often modified by other, later, mechanisms added to the earlier ones. While Occam’s razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research. While DNA could be claimed to be both simple and elegant, it must be remembered that DNA almost certainly originated fairly close to the origin of life when things were necessarily simple or they could not have got going. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2348-2352
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:18:00 AM
What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2360-2362
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:18:47 AM
When confronted with what appears to be a difficulty, they usually prefer to tinker with their theory rather than seeking for some crucial test. One should ask: What is the essence of the type of theory I have constructed, and how can that be tested? even if it requires some new experimental method to do so. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2408-2410
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:23:16 AM
It is amateurs who have one big bright beautiful idea that they can never abandon. Professionals know that they have to produce theory after theory before they are likely to hit the jackpot. The very process of abandoning one theory for another gives them a degree of critical detachment that is almost essential if they are to succeed. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2413-2415
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:30:11 AM
In spite of the almost ideal climate, scientists here seem to work hard. In fact, some of them work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking. They should heed the saying, “A busy life is a wasted life.” I Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2463-2465
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:33:15 AM
My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure,” I was supposed to have said in my molecular biology days. (I believe I was sailing at the time.) I think one should approach these problems at all levels, as was done in molecular biology. Classical genetics is, after all, a black-box subject. The important thing was to combine it with biochemistry. In nature hybrid species are usually sterile, but in science the reverse is often true. Hybrid subjects are often astonishingly fertile, whereas if a scientific discipline remains too pure it usually wilts. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2554-2558
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:39:28 AM
Workers in brain theory are thus pulled in several directions. Intellectual snobbery makes them feel they should produce results that are mathematically both deep and powerful and also apply to the brain. This is not likely to happen if the brain is really a complicated combination of rather simple tricks evolved by natural selection. If an idea they conceive doesn’t help to explain the brain, the theorists may hope that perhaps it may be useful in AI. There is thus no compelling drive for them to press on and on until the way the brain actually works is laid bare. It is more fun to produce “interesting” computer programs and much easier to get grants for such work. There is even the possibility that they might make some money if their ideas could be used in computers. The situation is not helped by the general view that psychology is a “soft” science, which seldom if ever produces definitive results but stumbles from one theoretical fad to the next one. Nobody likes to ask if a model is really correct since, if they did, most work would come to a halt. Francis Crick
, What Mad Pursuit.
loc. 2738-2745
, clipped on Tuesday, January 28, 2020 3:49:13 AM
I eventually realized that I was committing the economist’s cardinal sin of assuming ceteris paribus, that is, assuming that everything else but the phenomenon being studied, in this case securitization, remained the same. Typically, everything does not remain the same. Most important, deregulation and developments like securitization had increased competition, which increased the incentives for bankers (and financial managers more generally) to take on more complex forms of risk. Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 94-97
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 3:43:57 PM
legal system: because business transactions do not depend on propinquity, Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 286-286
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 3:58:08 PM
Put differently, the central problem of free-enterprise capitalism in a modern democracy has always been how to balance the role of the government and that of the market. While much intellectual energy has been focused on defining the appropriate activities of each, it is the interaction between the two that is a central source of fragility. In a democracy, the government (or central bank) simply cannot allow ordinary people to suffer collateral damage as the harsh logic of the market is allowed to play out. A modern, sophisticated financial sector understands this and therefore seeks ways to exploit government decency, whether it is the government’s concern about inequality, unemployment, or the stability of the country’s banks. The problem stems from the fundamental incompatibility between the goals of capitalism and those of democracy. And yet the two go together, because each of these systems softens the deficiencies of the other. Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 412-418
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 6:30:30 PM
After all, not everyone has the aptitude or inclination Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 552-553
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 10:54:31 PM
As more and more Americans realize they are simply not equipped to compete, and as they come to terms with their own diminished expectations, the words economic freedom do not conjure open vistas of unlimited opportunity. Instead they offer a nightmare vision of great and continuing insecurity, and growing envy as the have-nots increasingly become the have-nevers. Without some change in this trend, destructive class warfare is no longer impossible to contemplate. Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 665-669
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 11:02:07 PM
The problem with using the might of the government is rarely one of intent; rather, it is that the gap between intent and outcome is often large, typically because the organizations and people the government uses to achieve its aims do not share them. This lesson from recent history, including the savings and loans crisis, should have been clear to the politicians: the consequences of the government’s pressing an agile financial sector to act in certain ways are often unintended and extremely costly. Yet the political demand for action, any action, to satisfy the multitudes who believe the government has all the answers, is often impossible for even the sensible politician to deny. Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 840-845
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 11:15:57 PM
The new miracle solution is microcredit—lending to the poor through group loans, a system in which peer pressure from the group makes individuals more likely to repay. Although it has promise on a small scale, history suggests that when scaled up, and especially when used as an instrument of government policy, it will likely create significant problems. Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 963-965
, clipped on Tuesday, February 4, 2020 11:23:59 PM
"Reading," he says, "is always this: there is a thing that is there, a thing made of writing, a solid, material object, which cannot be changed, and through this thing we measure ourselves against something else that is not present, something else that belongs to the immaterial, invisible world, because it can only be thought, imagined, or because it was once and is no longer, past, lost, unattainable, in the land of the dead...." Italo Calvina
, If on a Winters Night.
loc. 969-972
, clipped on Wednesday, February 5, 2020 2:02:49 AM
the firm as part of their plans—tend to suffer a double blow when their employer Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 4015-4015
, clipped on Wednesday, March 4, 2020 8:00:26 AM
The fault lines that have led to the global trade imbalances and created today’s Mandevillean world are deep. Moreover, because the imbalances are the result of deeply embedded strategies, change will be painful. It is not just a matter of raising an interest rate here, a tax there, or an exchange rate somewhere else. It is tempting for the international establishment to treat adjustment as a simple matter and then express continuous surprise that change does not occur. It also gives politicians the dangerous impression that change is easy for the other side, so punitive trade sanctions can help persuade. We should have no illusions: change is difficult for all countries, though they all stand to gain in the long term, not just from a more stable world economy but also from a more sustainable domestic growth strategy. Rajan, Raghuram G.
, Fault lines.
loc. 4537-4542
, clipped on Monday, March 9, 2020 10:38:46 PM
Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years. John M. Barry
, The Great Influenza.
loc. 158-159
, clipped on Tuesday, March 10, 2020 10:42:11 PM
Many schools bestowed a medical degree upon students who simply attended lectures and passed examinations; in some, students could fail several courses, never touch a single patient, and still get a medical degree. Not until late—very late—in the nineteenth century, did a virtual handful of leaders of American medical science begin to plan a revolution that transformed American medicine from the most backward in the developed world into the best in the world. John M. Barry
, The Great Influenza.
loc. 186-189
, clipped on Tuesday, March 10, 2020 10:45:45 PM
