Reading makes a full man; Conference a ready man; and Writing an exact man

--- Francis Bacon, "Of Studies"

Excerpt

And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.

For discussion, see enotes, 'What does Francis Bacon mean by "writing makes an exact man" in his essay "Of Studies"?' This Samuel Johnson quote cited there by William Delaney resonated with me:

Composition is, for the most part, an effort of slow diligence and steady perseverance, to which the mind is dragged by necessity or resolution, and from which the attention is every moment starting to more delightful amusements.

Tech is ... full of people lying to themselves.

 --- Christopher Mims, in What I Got Wrong in a Decade of Predicting the Future of Tech, (unlocked article) WSJ, May 16, 2024 

Excerpt

Kara Swisher, whose Boomtown column at the Journal was in many ways the precursor of this one, once said on a podcast that when she interviews a person in tech who is hyping their company or product, rather than asking herself how they’re lying to her, she asks “how are they lying to themselves?”

Tech is, to put it bluntly, full of people lying to themselves. As countless cult leaders, multilevel marketing recruits, and CrossFit coaches know, one powerful way to convince people that following you will change their life is to first convince yourself.

It’s usually not malicious. Given the rate at which startups fail, to be a founder of one is to engage in a level of magical thinking that in another age would qualify a person for the sanatorium. 

‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like

--- Ben Davis, in Art in the After-Culture, quoted by Shanti Escalante-De Mattei in Stephen Thaler’s Quest to Get His  ‘Autonomous’ AI Legally Recognized Could Upend Copyright Law Forever, Art in America, Jan 8, 2024

Excerpt

In his 2022 book, Art in the After-Culture, art critic Ben Davis writes, “‘Art’ stands in symbolically for the parts of cognition that do not seem machine-like.” Accordingly, the loose definition of art has changed to keep pace with the advancement of machines. Craft is not really art because machines can make tables and sweaters. The advent of cameras, which made rendering a realistic image as simple as pressing a shutter button, initiated Impressionism, Cubism, and the long arc of conceptual art. In contemporary art, the institutions, galleries, and other gatekeepers have increasingly clustered around the figure of the artist and the individual life story, and run away from the material object, which can always be replicated anyway. We are left clutching that indefinable spark as some final differentiator between humans and machines.

this is not my new forever

--- via Paul S on Substack, in Trying to see a bigger picture, 4 May 2024

Excerpt

However, I have been told multiple times that recovery is not a straight-line process, and that I must not let a few bad days distract from a long-term upward trend. Or as one of my oldest friends said to me last summer when he visited me from Houston, a good mantra to repeat at times like these is “this is not my new forever”. And he learned that from his wife. And she learned it from NASA. Because that's what she's taught in astronaut training. Yeah, seriously. Anyway, the point being: if that's what they teach the best people in the world, someone of her calibre, then it is clearly good enough for me. In which spirit, I will try to concentrate here on positives, rather than wallowing in self-pity.

Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers

--- Brandon Sanderson, #2 of Sanderson's Laws of Magic (Wikipedia).

From Wikipedia (references removed):

Sanderson's three laws of magic are creative writing guidelines that can be used to create magic systems for fantasy stories:

1. An author's ability to solve conflict with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic.
2. Weaknesses, limits and costs are more interesting than powers.
3. The author should expand on what is already a part of the magic system before something entirely new is added, as this may otherwise entirely change how the magic system fits into the fictional world.

Additionally, there is a zeroth law:

0. Always err on the side of what's awesome.