actions and deeds are accompanied by reflections upon them, in the form of histories, myths, and song

--- John von Heyking, in Churchill on Friendship as Statecraft, The Montréal Review, May 2021.

In context

As statesman, Churchill understood the role of friendship for his craft. But his statecraft was more than actions and deeds. Recall he won the Nobel Prize not for peace but for literature. At Harrow he won a prize for reciting Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome” from memory (to show that his poor performance in Greek and Latin meant he was not, in his words, a complete “dunce”) and in My Early Life he recommends a Greek-style paideia of “poetry, songs, dancing, drill and gymnastics” for the young. His speeches, correspondence, and writings attest to his view that actions and deeds are accompanied by reflections upon them, in the form of histories, myths, and song. After the war is won, the peace must be won with songs and stories that win over hearts and minds. John F. Kennedy said “he mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. The incandescent quality of his words illuminated the courage of his countrymen.” As I previously mentioned, Churchill chose the hymns and even arranged the deck chairs for the worship service he held with Roosevelt on board the H.M.S. Prince of Wales at Placentia Bay. He composed his speeches in the same format as Biblical psalms. One reviewer of a collection of his speeches proclaimed, “He not only makes laws for his people but writes their songs as well, in the sense that his speeches are battle cries, dirges for the fallen and hymns of victory.” Indeed, his Cabinet colleagues complained of his voluminous correspondence and memos that he was fighting the war simply to write the history.

history is made up of truths that eventually become lies, while mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths

 --- Jean Cocteau, 1962, film "Jean Cocteau s'addresse a l'an 2000", at time code 7:14, h/t Matt Nesselrodt

“I have always preferred mythology to history because history is made up of truths that eventually become lies, while mythology is made up of lies that eventually become truths.”

modern western man ... no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad

 --- Leo Strauss, "The Three Waves of Modernity," Political Philosophy: Six Essays, ed. Hilail Gildin, Pegasus-Bobbs-Merrill, 1975, p. 81-82

Excerpt from https://contemporarythinkers.org/leo-strauss/essay/the-three-waves-of-modernity/:

The crisis of modernity reveals itself in the fact, or consists in the fact, that modern western man no longer knows what he wants–that he no longer believes that he can know what is good and bad, what is right and wrong.  Until a few generations ago, it was generally taken for granted that man can know what is right and wrong, what is the just or the good or the best order of society–in a word that political philosophy is possible and necessary.  In our time this faith has lost its power.  According to the pre-dominant view, political philosophy is impossible: it was a dream, perhaps a noble dream, but at any rate a dream.  While there is broad agreement on this point, opinions differ as to why political philosophy was based on a fundamental error.  According to a very widespread view, all knowledge which deserves the name is scientific knowledge; but scientific knowledge cannot validate value judgments; it is limited to factual judgments; yet political philosophy presupposes that value judgments can be rationally validated.  According to a less widespread but more sophisticated view, the predominant separation of facts from values is not tenable.: the categories of theoretical understanding imply, somehow, principles of evaluation; but those principles of evaluation together with the categories of understanding are historically variable; they change from epoch to epoch; hence it is impossible to answer the question of right and wrong or of the best social order in a universally valid manner, in a manner valid for all historical epochs, as political philosophy requires.

Google Books

If you’re less than five minutes early, you’re late

 --- Saying in the military, quoted by Bear Grylls in ‘The Best Advice a Boss Ever Gave Me’, WSJ Sep 2023

From the article:

“When I first joined the military, a sergeant major told me: ‘If you’re less than five minutes early, you’re late.’ I’ve never forgotten those words and have always tried to make it a mantra when filming or working. I really notice it too in others, on expeditions for example. It speaks to diligence and dedication.”

Bear Grylls is the host of ‘Running Wild with Bear Grylls: The Challenge,’ on National Geographic

The saying reminds me of a "twenty before twenty" an ex-military person told me about: The colonel says that everyone should muster at 0800, the captain makes it 0740, the sergeant major makes it 0720, and the corporal makes it 0700.

There's a StackExchange thread on the origin. Variations include "Early is on time; on time is late" and "Five minutes early is on time."

You can’t put [the universe] in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it

--- physicists Adam Frank and Marcelo Gleiser in The Story of Our Universe May Be Starting to Unravel, NY Times guest essay, 2 Sep 2023, via SN First Up, 6 Sep 2023

Cosmology is not like other sciences. It’s not like studying mice in a maze or watching chemicals boil in a beaker in a lab. The universe is everything there is; there’s only one and we can’t look at it from the outside. You can’t put it in a box on a table and run controlled experiments on it. Because it is all-encompassing, cosmology forces scientists to tackle questions about the very environment in which science operates: the nature of time, the nature of space, the nature of lawlike regularity, the role of the observers doing the observations.

The story behind the essay title: "But one of the Webb’s first major findings was exciting in an uncomfortable sense: It discovered the existence of fully formed galaxies far earlier than should have been possible according to the so-called standard model of cosmology." 

There are no solutions, only trade-offs

 --- Economist Thomas Sowell, quoted passim e.g. by Anna Reynolds at InspireVirtue.com 

we absolutely are going to turn our systems into agents with goals

 --- Zvi Mowshowitz  on the EconTalk podcast, Aug 7, 2023

In context, from the transcript

What we do know is that humans love achieving goals, and that when you give an AI system goals, it helps you achieve your goals. Right? At least on the margin, at least to starting out, people think this. And so, we see Baby GPT and Auto GPT and all these other systems that turns out for 100 lines of code. You can create the scaffolding around GPT-4 that makes an attempt to act like it has goals. Right? To take actions as if it had goals and to act as a goal-motivated system.

And, it's not great because the underlying technologies aren't there, and we haven't gone through the iterations of building the right scaffolding, and we don't know a lot of the tricks, and it's still very, very early days.

But, we absolutely are going to turn our systems into agents with goals that are trying to achieve goals, that then create sub-goals, that then plan but then ask themselves, 'What do we need to do in order to accomplish this thing?' And, that will include like, 'Oh, I don't have this information. I need to go get this information.' 'I don't have this capability. I don't have access to this tool. I need to get this tool.' And, it's a very small leap from there to, 'I'm going to need more money.' Right? Or something like that. And from there, the sky's the limit. So, we can rule out, through experimentation in a way that we couldn't two years ago--right?--this particular theory of Marc's that the systems in the future won't have goals in a meaningful sense unless we take action to stop it.

Host Russ Roberts then went on to talk about aspiration which to me is a subset of having goals - it's the felt experience of having goals. Not surprisingly, he then connected goals to sentience and consciousness.

And, I think part of the reason that the skeptics--the optimists--are more optimistic. And, part of the reason I think we are in some sense just telling different narratives and some are more convincing than others, and it's mainly stories, is that we don't have any vivid examples today of my vacuum cleaner wanting to be a driverless car--an example I've used before. It doesn't aspire. Now, we might see some aspiration or at least perceived aspiration in ChatGPT at some point, but I think part of the problem getting people convinced about its dangers is that that leap--a sentience leap, the consciousness leap, which is where goals come in--doesn't seem credible. At least today. Maybe it will be, and I think that's where you and others who are worried about AI need to help me and others who are less worried to see.

Bennu is like an old friend at this point, even though it's a trickster

 --- Dante Lauretta, principal investigator for NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, discussing at a briefing what it has been like studying the asteroid Bennu, samples of which OSIRIS-REx is returning to Earth later this month, quoted in SN FirstUp, Friday, September 1, 2023

Full quote

Bennu is like an old friend at this point, even though it's a trickster. It likes to play jokes on us. It likes to challenge us. We thrive on that. I really feel a connection to this asteroid. It's holding these clues, and I think it wants us to study it, it wants us to unravel this mystery.