Quotes

Oracles get fulfilled because they are read as warrants to take action to bring about what they prophesy

2012-01-19T10:01:00.000-08:00

--- William Ian Miller in Losing It (2011) p. 219

Quote in context:

In Genesis, notwithstanding the Lord telling her in an oracle that the older of the twins in her womb would serve the younger, Rebecca is not about to sit around passively and wait for the Lord to fulfill the oracle. She plots and implements the deception of her old blind husband and the shafting of her first born: she does all the work (25.23, 27.6 13). Oracles get fulfilled because they are read as warrants to take action to bring about what they prophesy.

Good news is dangerous stuff; it is a tax on your remaining supply of good luck

2012-01-19T09:51:00.000-08:00

--- William Ian Miller, in Losing It (2011) p. 90

Quote in context:

Suppose, though, your good fortune does buy you happiness: you have no complaints. Yet you must complain. Your continued happiness hinges on your fulfilling the complaint requirement. Happiness uncomplained about provokes the gods, and surely the evil eye of your neighbors. Thus the Yiddish “no evil eye” (kein erin harah), upon hearing good news. Good news is dangerous stuff; it is a tax on your remaining supply of good luck. Best to protect against the harmful consequences of good luck and ward oil the demons by knocking on some nearby wood. Beware, too, the envy of your neighbors. it is one of mankind’s most predictable traits to find as much cause for complaint in another’s good fortune as in one’s own misfortune. The former being experienced as a special case of the latter. In a world in which one’s standing is gauged relative to others and the competition is fierce, your good fortune costs your neighbors. They will, unless you go out of your way to make their envy less painful to them, plot to make your happiness painful to you. As the Bemba proverb says: “To find one beehive in the woods is good luck, to find two is very good luck, to find three is witchcraft.” If your luck is too good to be true, it might cost you your life.

Do not be overrighteous, neither be overwise — why destroy yourself?

2012-01-19T09:42:00.000-08:00

--- Ecclesiastes 7:16, via William Ian Miller's Losing It (2011), p. 65

Miller's gloss:

Proverbial wisdom is prudent rather than heroic: discretion tends to trump valor. You do not count chickens before they hatch, you do not go looking for tights or get stuck in a web of deceits. (A carefully planned single deceit is fine, but webs are hard to manage.) The wise are constantly wary of the ubiquitous wicked, with their lies and snares, who always seem vastly to outnumber the righteous, among whom you are unsure whether to include yourself, for it sometimes takes tire to fight fire. Ecclesiastes is even more cynical: “All things have I seen in the days of my vanity: there is a just man that perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that prolongeth his life in his wickedness. Be not righteous over much: neither make thyself over wise: why shouldest thou destroy thyself?” (7.15—16). Be good and wise in modest doses or you are either dead meat or have just wasted your time.

And as with age his body uglier grows, / So his mind cankers.

2012-01-19T09:31:00.000-08:00

--- Prospero, The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1. The epigraph to William Ian Miller's Losing It (2001)

Quote in context, referring to (?) Caliban:

Prospero: A devil, a born devil, on whose nature
Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,
Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost,
And, as with age his body uglier grows,
So his mind cankers. . . .

“If you think that you can think about a thing inextricably attached to something else without thinking of the thing which it is attached to, then you have a legal mind.”

2011-12-29T11:35:00.000-08:00

--- widely attributed to Thomas Reed Powell, early 20th Century legal thinker; via Pierre Schlag's blog post "Law School Exam Last Minute Help" December 6, 2011

"Listen to the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers"

2011-12-28T16:11:00.000-08:00

--- Christof Koch, from Chapter 20, "An Interview" (fictitious) in The quest for consciousness: a neurobiological approach,Roberts & Company, 2004, p. 316-17 (hardback)

Interviewer: What, then, is the role of philosophers in your quest for a scientific theory of consciousness?

Christof: Historically, philosophy does not have an impressive track record of answering questions about the natural world in a decisive manner, whether it’s the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the origin of life, the nature of the mind, or the nature-versus-nurture debate. This failure is rarely talked about in polite, academic company. Philosophers, however, excel as asking conceptual questions from a point of view that scientists don’t usually consider. Notions of the Hard versus the Easy Problem of consciousness, phenomenal versus access consciousness, the content of consciousness versus consciousness as such, the unity of consciousness, the causal conditions for consciousness to occur, and so on, are fascinating issues that scientists should ponder more often. So, listen to the questions posed by philosophers but don’t be distracted by their answers. A case in point is the philosopher’s zombie.

"life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going"

2011-12-28T15:55:00.000-08:00

--- from The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore by Tennessee Williams, quoted by Christof Koch as the epigraph to Ch. 11, Memories and Consciousness (p. 187) of The quest for consciousness: a neurobiological approach,Roberts & Company (2004) (hardback)

Epigraph as given:

Has it ever struck you, Connie, that life is all memory, except for the one present moment that goes by you so quick you hardly catch it going? It’s really all memory, Connie, except for each passing moment.

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are"

2011-12-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

--- The Talmud (also attributed to Anais Nin), quoted by Allen Frances in his review (pay wall) of Richard Noll's American Madness: The rise and fall of dementia praecox in New Scientist, 10 December 2011

Quote in context:

"We don't see things as they are, we see things as we are." This simple Talmudic saying summarises the essence of epistemology. Psychiatric disorders provide a striking example: they are not real things in nature, but labels we create to describe troubling aspects of human experience.

Sometimes labels take on a life of their own. People mistakenly think that naming a psychiatric problem shapes it into a simple disease with a reductionist, biological explanation. Labelling mental disorders is useful in providing a common language and guide to treatment. But psychiatric disorders are remarkably heterogeneous and overlapping in their presentations and complex in their causation. The human brain rarely reveals its secrets in simple answers.

All of which brings us to the wonderful book, American Madness, an artful analysis of the rise and fall of the label "dementia praecox" from its promising birth in 1896 to its unlamented death in 1927. Introduced by the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin, the term was used to describe an early onset of psychotic symptoms that presaged a tragic downhill course and poor outcome - as distinct from manic depressive illness, which has a more variable age of onset, cyclical course, and greater chance for a good outcome.

Later in the piece, Frances notes:

In retrospect, there was nothing inherently superior about either term. Schizophrenia won [over dementia praecox because it was less discouraging, implied therapy might help, was not of German origin when the US was at war with Germany and was of Swiss origin at a time when the two major figures in American psychiatry were Swiss immigrants. If it sounds arbitrary, it was. Human nature doesn't sort into neat and obvious categories.

"a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation"

2011-12-10T12:28:00.001-08:00

--- Diana Athill, in Somewhere Towards the End: A Memoir (2009), p. 20

In context:

My second after-Paul love was available, even eligible, but his very eligibility seemed to make him too good to be true. He liked me a lot. For a time he almost thought he was in love with me, but he never quite was and I sensed almost from the beginning that it was going to end in tears, whereupon I plunged in deeper and deeper. And it did end in tears quite literally, both of us weeping as we walked up and down Wigmore Street on our last evening together. With masochistic abandon lloved him even more for his courage in admitting the situation and sparing me vain hopes (andin fact such courage, which takes a lot of summoning up, is some thing to be grateful for, because a broken heart mends much faster from a conclusive blow than it does from slow strangulation. Believe me! Mine experienced both.)

Another nice passage is on p. 49:

I think that underneath, or alongside, a reader's conscious response to a text, whatever is need in him is taking in whatever the text offers to assuage that need.

"Each algorithm has a point of view"

2011-12-02T15:32:00.001-08:00

--- Kevin Slavin, interviewed by Alison George for New Scientist in "Game developer: Beware algorithms running your life" 22 August 2011

Quote in context:

The pernicious thing about algorithms is that they have the mathematical quality of truth - you have the sense that they are neutral - and yet, of course, they have authorship. For example, Google's search engine is composed entirely of fancy mathematics, but its algorithms, like everybody's, are all based on an ideology - in this case that a page is more valuable if other pages think it's valuable. Each algorithm has a point of view, and yet we have no sense of what algorithms are, or even that they exist.

"Though you may get a new life, you can’t get a new past. You don’t get to leave your story."

2011-12-02T15:05:00.001-08:00

--- Poet Wendell Berry, in the essay “Sweetness Preserved” (1998) about the poetry ofDonald Hall, discussing “Elegy for Wesley Wells”, collected in Imagination in Place: Essays (2011)

Quote in context:

In immortalizing his grandfather Wells, Donald Hall theyoung elegist is also immortalizing a part of his own life which he nowconsiders to be finished. That life, if it is to have a present life, must havethe immortal life of art. Maybe you are outside your life when you think yourpast has ended. Maybe you are outside your life when you think you are outsideit. I don’t know what Donald Hall in later life would say. I know only what Iin later life would say, partly from knowing the story I am talking about, thatthough you may get a new life, you can’t get a new past. You don’t get to leave your story. If you leave your story, then how you left your story is your story, and you had better not forget it.

"Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive"

2011-10-29T14:12:00.000-07:00

--- George Dyson, in an interview with Martin Eierman in the European, 17.10.2011 (via Peter Haynes)

With a little more context, from the interview:

There are many different ways of computing. Pure deterministic finite-state digital computing is one form, but there are other forms as well. Statistical computing is much more robust, because you don’t need all parts in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. . . .

Finding answers is easy. The hard part is creating the map that matches specific answers to the right question. That’s what Google did: They used the power of computing – which is cheap and really does not have any limits – to crawl the entire internet and collected and index all the answers. And then,by letting human beings spend their precious time asking the right questions, they created a map between the two. . . .

We now live in a world where information is potentially unlimited. Information is cheap, but meaning is expensive. Where is the meaning? Only human beings can tell you where it is. We’re extracting meaning from our minds and our own lives.

"If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer. You're the product being sold"

2011-10-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

--- cartoon by "geek", found on the web, titled "Facebook and You". The little piggy on the left says, "Isn't it great? We have to pay nothing for the barn." The one on the right replies, "Yeah! And even the food is free."

For as long as the link lasts, here's the cartoon:

“Each of these bands is its own Russian novel”

2011-09-29T12:53:00.000-07:00

---Rebecca Arbogast (regulator, investment analyst, government affairs exec),describing the complex characters and plots of radio allocation proceedings;mentioned in conversation 9/22/2011, referring to an insight she had when working at the FCC in the late Nineties

"If you seek tranquillity, do less" (and better)

2011-09-10T19:56:00.000-07:00

--- Democritus frg B 3, quoted by Marcus Aurelius in Meditations Book 4, 24

More interesting is Aurelius's gloss on Democritus, here from Gregory Hays's new translation (Modern Library 2003)

“If you seek tranquillity, do less.” Or (more accurately) do what’s essential – what the logos of a social being requires, and in the requisite way. Which brings a double satisfaction: to do less, better.

Because most of what we say and do is not essential. If you can eliminate it, you‘ll have more time, and more tranquillity. Ask yourself at every moment, “Is this necessary”?

But we need to eliminate unnecessary assumptions as well. To eliminate unnecessary actions that follow.

"Life is a path that you beat while you walk it"

2011-09-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

--- ascribed to Antonio Machado, in Arie de Geus, The Living Company (1997) p. 155.

It seems to be quoting the line "se hace camino al andar" from the poem Caminante, no hay camino, which could also be translated as, "the road is made by walking" or "you make your path as you walk."

Here's the text from the ellyjean blog, with a translation she ascribes to wikipedia:

Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.

Wanderer, your footsteps are
the road, and nothing more;
wanderer, there is no road,
the road is made by walking.
By walking one makes the road,
and upon glancing behind
one sees the path
that never will be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no road–
Only wakes upon the sea.

De Geus responds this way: "To me, this line embodies the most profound lesson onplanning and strategy that I have ever learned. When you look back, you see aclear path that brought you here. But you created that path yourself. Ahead, thereis only uncharted wilderness."

“A language isn’t something you learn so much as something you join”

2011-09-05T14:10:00.000-07:00

--- Arika Okrent, author of a book on artificial argots, quoted in Tongues and grooves: The lure of made-up languages, The Economist, 6 Aug 2011.From the story:

SCRABBLE is compelling enough, but playing it in Esperanto, for those of a certain cast of mind, is even more addictive. The invented language’s tidy roots and suffixes are well suited to wordplay. A recent game in London featured words like acajeto (a little bit of dirt) and artamehoj (echoes of the love of art). Over its 120-year history Esperanto may have failed in its original mission to bring world peace via mutual intelligibility, but it remains both an engaging intellectual exercise and a route to a ready-made social life.

“A language isn’t something you learn so much as something you join,” says Arika Okrent, author of a book on artificial argots. Few people will bother to learn a language on abstract or idealistic grounds, she says. Esperanto gives them a reason to get started, because of the culture that has grown up around it.

It also covers Klingon (no surprise).

"A policy of avoiding small recessions has resulted in the biggest downturn since the 1930s"

2011-09-04T12:10:00.000-07:00

--- The Economist's Buttonwood columnist, "Running out of options" 30 July 2011

Just as in complex systems everywhere - this reminds me of the unintended consequences of fire suppression in the national parks - trying to prevent problems from occurring at all makes the eventual conflagration all the greater.

Quote in context - the opening and closing paragraphs of the column:

ECONOMIC policy in the developed world over the past 25 years has followed one overriding principle: the avoidance of recession at all costs. For much of this period monetary policy was the weapon of choice. When markets wobbled, central banks slashed interest rates. A by-product of this policy was a series of debt-financed asset bubbles. When the last of those bubbles burst in 2007 and 2008, the authorities had to add fiscal stimulus and quantitative easing (QE) to the policy mix.The subsequent huge rise in budget deficits was largely the result of a collapse in tax revenues that had been artificially inflated by the debt-financed boom. Britain and America ended up with deficits of more than 10% of GDP, shortfalls that were unprecedented in peacetime.

. . .

In a sense, the bill has come due for the past 25 years. A policy of avoiding small recessions has resulted in the biggest downturn since the 1930s. Public finances turned out to be weaker than politicians thought. As a result, they have used up all their ammunition tackling the current crisis. Governments in the rich world will have very few options left if the economy weakens again.

A great follow-up via Frank Pasquale: Hyman Minsky said, "stability breeds instability."

"the bear does not understand about fasting"

2011-08-18T00:35:00.000-07:00

--- Ascribed to St. Sergius, patron saint of Russia, in a story retold by Ann Persson in The Circle of Love: Praying with Rublev's icon of the Trinity (2010) p. 32

Excerpt:

Like St Francis, Sergius was a friend to birds and wild animals. There is a story that tells how he regularly fed a bear that came near to his hut. Of there was not enough bread for the two of them, he gave his portion to the bear, because, he said, 'the bear does not understand about fasting'.

"it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make [a mature] individual, and then he is good only for dying"

2011-08-05T20:34:00.000-07:00

--- Ernest Becker, paraphrasing André Malraux's The Human Condition (no reference given), The Denial of Death (1973) p. 268

Quote in context:

We saw [in Chapter Four] that there really was no way to overcome the real dilemma of existence, the one of the mortal animal who at the same time is conscious of his mortality. A person spends years coming into his own, developing his talent, his unique gifts, perfecting his discriminations about the world, broadening and sharpening his appetite, learning to bear the disappointments of life, becoming mature, seasoned—finally a unique creature in nature, standing with some dignity and nobility and transcending the animal condition; no longer driven, no longer a complete reflex, not stamped out of any mold. And then the real tragedy, as André Malraux wrote in The Human Condition: that it takes sixty years of incredible suffering and effort to make such an individual, and then he is good only for dying. This painful paradox is not lost on the person himself— least of all himself. He feels agonizingly unique, and yet he knows that this doesn’t make any difference as far as ultimates are concerned. He has to go the way of the grasshopper even though it takes longer.

"behind every great fortune there is a psychological aberration"

2011-08-04T13:47:00.000-07:00

--- The Economist's Schumpeter columnist, in Great bad men as bosses, 23 July 2011.

Quote in context:

Balzac supposedly wrote that “behind every great fortune lies a great crime”. It would be truer to say that behind every great fortune there is a psychological aberration. Henry Ford hated Jews. George Eastman sanctioned industrial espionage. Thomas Watson turned IBM into a personality cult, complete with company songs about “our friend and guiding hand”, a man whose “courage none can stem”. Michael Milken, the inventor of junk bonds, was jailed. Richard Tedlow of Harvard Business School argues that many “giants of enterprise” suffer from what Norwegians call stormannsgalskap, the madness of great men.

Stormannsgalskap is particularly common among media barons, not least because they frequently blur the line between reporting reality and shaping it. William Randolph Hearst is widely suspected of stirring up the Spanish-American war to give his papers something to report. Lord Beaverbrook regarded himself as a kingmaker, literally so in the case of George VI. These men’s megalomania was captured in two masterworks: Orson Welles’s film “Citizen Kane” and Evelyn Waugh’s novel “Scoop”.

The ugly side of these entrepreneurs is often just as important to their success as their admirable side. You cannot reshape an industry without extraordinary confidence in your own rightness. And it is hard to build a great company from scratch without what Mr Tedlow dubs “the imperialism of the soul”. But these negative qualities often end up undermining the empires that they helped to create.

"Law is the practice of rules in a context of deals"

2011-07-22T14:14:00.000-07:00

--- Adam Gopnik, referring to context of Abraham Lincoln's thought, in Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life (2009), Ch. 1, Lincoln's Mind.

In context:

A love of the grease and a feel for the gist, the habit of compromise even at the cost of absolute clarity, a restatement of technical argument in emphatic simplicities, clarity achieved and helpful ambiguity sought—these were the heart of Lincoln’s style, and of his soul. They explain why we still argue about him: he said very clear things against slavery—and, for a time at least, he was ready to keep the slaves if he could find a bargain to keep the South in the Union. Law is the practice of rules in a context of deals, and Lincoln believed in both.

Curiously, Gopnik's phrase works just as well inverted, though perhaps better if Regulation is substituted as the subject: "Regulation is the practice of deals in a context of rules."

"Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it"

2011-07-04T15:12:00.000-07:00

--- Benedictus Spinoza, quoted by Viktor Frankl in Man’s Search for Meaning, Part I: Experiences in a Concentration Camp, p. 74

Quote from Frankl:

What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? –“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.

This is from the Ethics, Part V, Prop III (Latin). The Elwes translation is available on Gutenberg.org:

PROP. III. An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion, as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea thereof.

Proof.--An emotion, which is a passion, is a confused idea (by the general Def. of the Emotions). If, therefore, we form a clear and distinct idea of a given emotion, that idea will only be distinguished from the emotion, in so far as it is referred to the mind only, by reason (II. xxi., and note); therefore (III. iii.), the emotion will cease to be a passion. Q.E.D.

Corollary--An emotion therefore becomes more under our control, and the mind is less passive in respect to it, in proportion as it is more known to us.

"a simile is just a metaphor with the scaffolding still up"

2011-07-04T13:27:00.000-07:00

--- James Geary, I is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (2001), p. 8

"Beautiful—but not desirable; ugly—but not repulsive; false—but not rejected"

2011-05-14T19:09:00.000-07:00

--- The perception of things in Buddhist wisdom, supposedly according R H Blyth, quoted by Ken Jones in "Buddhism and Social Action: An Exploration" (no reference given)

In context:

In this Wisdom, in the words of R.H. Blyth, things are beautiful — but not desirable; ugly — but not repulsive; false — but not rejected. What is inevitable, like death, is accepted without rage; what may not be, like war, is the subject of action skillful and the more effective because, again, it is not powered and blinded by rage and hate. We may recognize an oppressor and resolutely act to remove the oppression, but we do not hate him. Absence of hatred, disgust, intolerance or righteous indignation within us is itself a part of our growth towards enlightenment (bodhi).

In an interesting example of the question of the suitability of righteous indignation, the New York Times reported the following in "Promoting Peace, Nobel Laureates Square Off, Politely" just yesterday:

On a stage during the opening session of the Newark Peace Education Summit, the Dalai Lama and Jody Williams, a world-famous anti-land-mine activist, disagreed — sometimes obliquely, always politely — about the importance of inner tranquillity, the role of anger and the moral character of the United States.

...

In the main panel on Friday morning, the Dalai Lama, wearing a deep red robe that hung to his ankles, and others said that people must attain inner peace in order to learn, and promote peace in the world. “Too much emotion, attachment, anger or fear, that kind of mental state, you can’t investigate objectively,” he said.

That did not sit well with Ms. Williams, an American, who is, as the Dalai Lama put it, “quite blunt.”

“I thought it was strange to be asked to be on this panel on inner peace, because I don’t have much,” she said. “It’s anger at injustice which fires many of us.”

Update 13 July, 2011: I found the original Blyth quote on p. 278 of "Zen in English Literature & Oriental Classics" (The Hokuseido Press, 1942), following just after a retelling the story of the monk carrying the young woman over the ford:

Things are beautiful but not desirable ; ugly but not repulsive ; false, but not rejected ; dirty, but ourselves no cleaner.

[punctuation as in the original]

"Coal plants kill, but they only kill a few at a time, which is highly preferred by politicians"

2011-05-13T10:21:00.000-07:00

--- Bill Gates on coal vs. nuclear power, speaking at WIRED's Disruptive by Design Business Conference, 3 May 2011, quoted in "Bill Gates: Don't dismiss nuclear energy" by JP Mangalindan, Fortune May 3, 2011
In context:

Gates suggested there's much more potential for nuclear energy, despite the recent disaster with Japan's Fukushima reactor. As he sees it, nuclear has a "factor million" of energy creation compared with coal. And as he quipped, "coal plants kill, but they only kill a few at a time, which is highly preferred by politicians."

"Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be, we will never relax with where or who we are."

2011-05-03T00:47:00.000-07:00

--- Pema Chodron, quoted on her Facebook page in the note Start Where You Are, April 21, 2011. It's probably an excerpt from one of her books.

The full Facebook item (quotes theirs):

"In Tibetan there is an interesting word: ye tang che. The ye part means 'totally, completely,' and the rest of it means 'exhausted.' It describes an experience of complete hopelessness, of completely giving up hope. This is an important point. This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope that there is somewhere better to be, that there is someone better to be, we will never relax with where or who we are."

"Humility, trust, and desire—making faith. For ages humanity has built this experience, but stupid people like me must discover it all again, must touch it for themselves."

2011-04-15T19:10:00.000-07:00

--- Anna Kamienska (1920–1986), Polish poet, journal entry from the selection "Industrious Amazement: A Notebook" translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh, in Poetry magazine, March 2011, vol. CLCVIII, no. 6, p. 514

The whole entry:

From the whole liturgy my favorite words are those of the centurion, repeated before communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof. Speak but the word and my soul shall be healed.” They have the power of poetry. Humility, trust, and desire—making faith. For ages humanity has built this experience, but stupid people like me must discover it all again, must touch it for themselves.

Kamienska stumbled into her faith. Here's another entry from the same collection:

I wasn’t looking for God at all.

I sought my Dead One.

I’ll never cease repeating this, amazed.

The "Dead One" is her husband Jan, who figures constantly in the notebook. For example:

And then a dream took pity on me again. I got up before dawn. When I went back to bed it was dark. I sensed he was beside me, he’d crossed the room. He lay down next to me. We talked entwined. “What’s it like there?” “There’s God and there are birds,” he said. Maybe he meant to say “angels”? God and birds. He left, went through the wall and jumped into a passing truck. He opened his mouth as if he were shouting something.

"Play teaches us skills. Stories teach us what to do with them."

2011-04-09T12:34:00.000-07:00

--- Harry Dewulf, in a letter to New Scientist (subscription required), 23 March 2011

Dewulf responds to an article about the "gamification" of everyday life, arguing

The best computer games exploit two basic desires. The first is to learn: a well-designed learning curve provides satisfaction from the achievement of mastery of the game. The greater the complexity, the greater the satisfaction.

The second desire is for a story. First-person "shooter" games involving one participant have the player follow a predetermined story path, deriving satisfaction from discovering the twists and turns.

He then offers the quote above. He concludes

Much of the gaming described in your article is light on play and storytelling, and heavy on "cumulomania" - the mindless racking-up of points, powers and achievements. Even the games strongest in learning and storytelling, like the Civilization series, eventually deteriorate into steady statistical accumulation.

Apps which rely on our attachment to endless accumulation of tokens and whose value is derived from potentially divisive social competition will have to be continually refreshed or replaced with new content - with diminishing returns as all the niches for apps that teach something useful are occupied.

If I am wrong about the games bubble, then the world will become increasingly divided between dopamine freaks endlessly indulging their cumulomania and those who prefer to use their time accumulating real value.

“The catch with ardent followers is that they’ll go ardently follow something else after a short while.”

2011-04-07T13:13:00.000-07:00

--- Walter Podrazik, co-author of the book Watching TV, on the precipitous decline of Glenn Beck's ratings, quoted in Why is Glenn Beck leaving his Fox News show?, Linda Feldmann for the Christian Science Monitor, April 6, 2011

"It's 1946 in cyber[warfare]"

2011-03-31T10:07:00.000-07:00

--- James Mulvenon, a founding member of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, a Washington DC nonprofit, quoted on page 2 of Mark Clayton's feature for the Christian Science Monitor, March 2, 2011, The new cyber arms race. See below for another great quote, by Mike McConnell, director of US national intelligence 2007-2009.

From the article:

"Here's the problem – it's 1946 in cyber," says James Mulvenon, a founding member of the Cyber Conflict Studies Association, a nonprofit group in Washington. "So we have these potent new weapons, but we don't have all the conceptual and doctrinal thinking that supports those weapons or any kind of deterrence. Worse, it's not just the US and Soviets that have the weapons – it's millions and millions of people around the world that have these weapons."

In the new cyber world order, the conventional big powers won't be the only ones carrying the cannons. Virtually any nation – or terrorist group or activist organization – with enough money and technical know-how will be able to develop or purchase software programs that could disrupt distant computer networks.

And the US, because it's so wired, is more vulnerable than most big powers to this new form of warfare. It's the price the country may one day pay for being an advanced and open society.

"If the nation went to war today, in a cyberwar, we would lose," Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence from 2007 to 2009, told a US Senate committee a year ago. "We're the most vulnerable. We're the most connected. We have the most to lose."

"The polar ends of a society's assets -- its wealth and its criminals -- are guarded with equal vehemence"

2011-03-27T11:46:00.000-07:00

--- Avi Steinberg, p. 214 in Running the Books: The Adventures of an Accidental Prison Librarian (2010)

Excerpt, from a meditation about a ruined prison:

But ambiguity is born of long life. Archaeologists are occasionally unsure whether an unidentified solidly built ancient structure is a prison or whether it is a treasury building. The polar ends of a society's assets -- its wealth and its criminals -- are guarded with equal vehemence. Both are of supreme concern and utmost value. Ultimately they are indistinguishable.

This is particularly salient in the United States since, as Steinberg notes on p. 394, "America has 5 percent of the world'ds population, 25 percent of the world's prison population. A population the size of an American city left without the vote."

For more on prisons in America, see these two July 2010 Economist articles:

Rough justice (leader)
Too many laws, too many prisoners (reporting)

In the second story, The Economist writes: "The system has three big flaws, say criminologists. First, it puts too many people away for too long. Second, it criminalises acts that need not be criminalised. Third, it is unpredictable. Many laws, especially federal ones, are so vaguely written that people cannot easily tell whether they have broken them."

"Our experiences, then, are not just our sensations"

2011-03-26T12:15:00.000-07:00

--- James Hall, Prof. of Philiosophy Emeritus, University of Richmond, in "Postmodern and New-Age Problems," lecture 23 in the Teaching Company course Tools of Thinking: Understanding the World Through Experience and Reason, published as an excerpt in a Teaching Company catalog, March 2011

In context:

Let's look at this [question of observation] at a down-home level. I would insist that you cannot observe edible things on banana trees unless you had some experience that would lead you to construe what you see as safe and nourishing. This is why a city slicker who is lost in the forest can starve to death because he does not observe what is out there as food. He does not thave the requisite experience and background to categorize things in useful ways and to see that he is surrounded by edible, useful material.

Our experiences, then, are not just our sensations. Our experiences, our observations, are the way that we construe our sensations, and the way that we construe them is a product of all our experiences, and of a great many other things as well. So one could claim, then -- and many people have claimed -- that our observations are relative to the conceptual apparatus, and the prior experience, and all of the other things that come into play, that enable us to construe our sensations the way we do and arrive at the observations that we arrive at.

"Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not"

2011-03-19T09:06:00.000-07:00

--- Carolyn Forché, lines from her elegy "Travel Papers", published in Poetry magazine, February 2011.

Excerpt:

Such is the piano’s sadness and the rifle’s moonlight.
Stairwells remember as do doors, but windows do not—

do not, upon waking, gaze out a window
if you wish to remember your dream

"in the most secret heart of every intellectual ... lies hidden ... the hope of power"

2011-03-18T09:47:00.000-07:00

--- Lionel Trilling's character Gifford Maxim, from the 1947 novel The Middle of the Journey via Michael Knox Berry's opinion piece "When compassion turns to coercion", Christian Science Monitor March 14, 2011

Quote in context:

For a moment Maxim did not answer. Then, “Is it not strange,” he said, “do you not find it strange that as we become more sensitive to the sufferings of mankind, we become more and more cruel? The more we think of the human body and the human mind as being able to suffer, and the sorrier we feel for that, and the more we plan to prevent suffering, the more we are drawn to inflict suffering. The more tortures we think up, the more people we believe deserve to be tortured. The more we think that people can be ruled by fear of suffering. We have become our brother’s keeper—and we will keep him in fear, we will keep him in concentration camps, we will keep him in straitjackets, we will keep him in the grave.”

...

“And never has there been so much talk of liberty while the chains are being forged. Democracy and freedom. And in the most secret heart of every intellectual, where he scarcely knows of it himself, there lies hidden the real hope that these words hide. It is the hope of power, the desire to bring his ideas to reality by imposing them on his fellow man. We are all of us, all of us, the little children of the Grand Inquisitor. The more we talk of welfare, the crueler we become. How can we possibly be guilty when we have in mind the welfare of others, and of so many others?”

"Giving up is half the battle"

2011-03-14T09:25:00.000-07:00

--- Reputed to have been said by a meditation teacher. Via John Givot, while chatting at the conclusion of a 10-day sit on 12 March 2011 about the importance of admitting one's weakness to oneself. A web search on 14 March 2011 didn't yield any attribution; in fact, many of the results for the string "giving up is half the battle" were people saying "not giving up is half the battle" :-)

"such a pleasure to read that it must have been hell to write"

2011-03-02T10:22:00.000-08:00

--- The Economist, in its review of Alex Ross's Listen To This (2010)

From the opening paragraph of the review:

“Writing about music isn’t especially difficult,” avers Alex Ross, the New Yorker’s music critic, at the start of his new collection of essays. That sounds too modest. Mr Ross’s history of music in the 20th century, “The Rest is Noise”, published in 2007, is such a pleasure to read that it must have been hell to write. The same goes for these pieces, which are mostly reworked articles from his day job, ranging from Björk to Brahms, and Radiohead to Verdi.

"The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought"

2011-02-23T08:47:00.000-08:00

--- Spanish poet and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca, in a lecture in Buenos Aires titled “Play and Theory of the Duende”, quoted in "What is the hardest word to translate from Spanish?" dictionary.com's the hot word column, February 22, 2011

In context:

In the dictionary, the word is listed as “elf” or “magic.” However, in actual practice, when the word shows up in text, it is rarely in the context of a woodland spirit, although that is where the word’s etymology begins. . . .

In 1933 Spanish poet and theater director Federico Garcia Lorca gave a lecture in Buenos Aires titled “Play and Theory of the Duende” in which he addressed the fiery spirit behind what makes great performance stir the emotions:

“The duende, then, is a power, not a work. It is a struggle, not a thought. I have heard an old maestro of the guitar say, ”The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet.’ Meaning this: it is not a question of ability, but of true, living style, of blood, of the most ancient culture, of spontaneous creation … everything that has black sounds in it, has duende.”

"... the world is alive and in dread; it is, as the ancient Greek philosopher Thales claimed, 'full of gods.'"

2011-02-20T11:13:00.000-08:00

--- Painter Madeleine Avirov, in the opening sentence of an essay about her experience of poetry, in the January 2011 issue of Poetry.

In context:

When I wake in the night in fear I regain the knowledge that no child lacks: the world is alive and in dread; it is, as the ancient Greek philosopher Thales claimed, “full of gods.” The time is invariably between three and four in the morning.

This belief is attributed to Thales, according to Wikipedia, in Aristotle, De Anima, 411a7, and for other ancient sources see the discussion in Kirk and Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers, 93-7. A Crandall University philosophy department web page portrays it thus: "Thales' view seems to be as follows. As most Greeks, he holds that soul is the cause of all motion, even of inanimate objects. Thus, since there is motion, there must be a soul causing each instance of motion. . . . He then takes a further step and concludes that soul, or the cause of motion, is a god." Not quite as poetic as Avirov's gloss...

"Babies are like the [R&D] division of the human species and we're production and marketing"

2011-02-20T10:40:00.000-08:00

--- Philosopher and psychologist Alison Gopnik, in conversation with Alan Saunders on ABC Radio National's The Philosopher's Zone, 29 Jan 2011

In context:

Alan Saunders: So babies and kids brains are clearly different to adult brains, which is what makes us think of them as something 'different'.

Alison Gopnik: One of the things I say is that babies are like the research and development division of the human species and we're production and marketing. They're the ones who are just exploring in a blue-sky way figuring out the way the world works, and we're the ones who actually take all those things that we learned as babies and put them to use as adults.

"Loving yourself is about as likely as tickling yourself"

2011-02-02T11:52:00.000-08:00

---James Richardson, number 8 in his poem, "Vectors 2.3: Fifty Aphorism and Ten-Second Essays", originally published in America Poetry Review, collected in The Best American Poetry 2010, p. 124

A few others on the list that jumped out at me:

4. Spontaneity takes a few rehearsals.

10. No one's so entertaining as the one who thinks you are

13. Office supplies stores are the Cathedrals of Work in General. They forgive, they console, they promise a new start. These supplies have done work like yours a million times. Maybe when you get home it will already be finished.

14. When it gets ahead of itself, the wave breaks.

15. I'd listen to my conscience if I could be sure it was really mine.

17. The lesser of two evils is the one with the less evil friends.

26. What keeps us deceived is the hope that we aren't.

34. Do unto others and an eye for an eye have the same payment plan.

38. The great man's not sure he wants you to criticize even his great rival, let there be no such thing as greatness.

40. My best critic is me, too late.

"Only the present has a true shape in our mind, it’s the only image of truth, and all truth is ugly"

2011-01-18T20:18:00.001-08:00

--- Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), poet and writer, from his daybooks “Zibaldone di pensieri”, August 18, 1821, transl. W. S. di Piero, published in Poetry magazine, November 2010, p.134

Full quote from Poetry:

The past in memory, like the future in our imagination, is more beautiful than the present. Why? Because only the present has a true shape in our mind, it’s the only image of truth, and all truth is ugly.

This reminds me of the Buddhist teaching to realize the dissatisfaction of existence by being constantly aware of the present moment.

"No law can impede violation or disobedience of the law"

2011-01-18T20:18:00.000-08:00

--- Giacomo Leopardi (1798-1837), poet and writer, from his daybooks “Zibaldone di pensieri”, August 31, 1820, transl. W. S. di Piero, published in Poetry magazine, November 2010, p.132

"To say that one practices zazen in order to become an enlightened person is like saying one practices medicine to become a doctor"

2010-12-30T14:54:00.000-08:00

--- Thomas P. Kasulis, in Zen Action, Zen Person (1989), summarizing Dōgen:

In short, Dōgen rejects the view that zazen is a technique by which one comes to realization. Zazen is not the cause of satori; even at that first moment when the student begins to sit in meditation, zazen is already realization. Thus, in referring to enlightenment, Dōgen usually prefers to use the character shō (“authentication”) rather than satori (“realization”) or kaku (“awakening”). For Dōgen, proper sitting authenticates the enlightenment already there. Conversely, the student never reaches the point at which zazen is superseded. To say that one practices zazen in order to become an enlightened person is like saying one practices medicine to become a doctor. To practice medicine is to be a doctor. To practice zazen is to be enlightened. Enlightenment is not a static state of achievement; it is the active undertaking of the way exemplified in zazen.

"a man who is afraid of sinning because of Hell-fire, is afraid, not of sinning, but of burning"

2010-12-04T11:36:00.000-08:00

--- Augustine of Hippo, Epistolae 145, 4; quoted in Peter Brown, Augustine of Hippo (1967, 2000) p. 375

Context in Brown: "It is Pelagius, not Augustine, who harps on the terrors of the Last Judgment: to which Augustine simply remarked that ‘a man who is afraid of sinning because of Hell-fire, is afraid, not of sinning, but of burning.’"

Who better knows clay, the geologist or the potter?

2010-11-22T20:22:00.000-08:00

--- Thomas Kasulis, proposing an analogy for the difference between Western and Japanese philosophy, quoted in his interview on the Philosopher's Zone

From the transcript:

Alan Saunders: When you wrote to us here at The Philosopher's Zone about your forthcoming book, Engaging Japanese Philosophy you use a nice analogy that I'd like to repeat here: 'The easiest way to think of the difference between Western and Japanese philosophy is to ask who better knows clay, the geologist or the potter?' Now for the most part, modern Western philosophy sides with the geologist. While for the most part Japanese philosophers have studied with the Potter. Both traditions recognise both kinds of knowing, but there is a marked difference in emphasis as to which is the more profound.

Thomas Kasulis: That's right, and that's why I call the book Engaging Japanese Philosophy because I think that in modern Western -- mediaeval Western is kind of interestingly different in some ways, and some ways also the ancient traditions, or some of them -- but in the modern West, what we might consider from 1600 on and certainly since the enlightenment, from 1800 on, that Western model has been one of objectivity, detachment, observation, and logical reflection. Whereas in many cases Japan's model has been one of engagement.

Both traditions agree that both are kinds of knowing, I think. I don't think there's any problem there. But the issue is which is the really important kind of knowing?

"public goods: things ... that everyone wants and nobody is prepared to pay for"

2010-10-24T11:52:00.000-07:00

--- Nice definition of public goods from James Astill in The Economist's special report on forests, 25 Sep 2010; this quote from the article "Money can grow on trees"

Quote in context:

Yet in the national accounts the clearance is recorded as progress. About a quarter of Indonesian output comes from forestry, agriculture and mining, all of which, in a country more than half-covered in trees, involve felling. But this is bad accounting. It captures very few of the multiple costs exacted by the clearance, which fall not so much on loggers and planters but on poor locals, all Indonesians and the world at large.

The Indonesian exchequer, for one, is missing out. Illegal logging is estimated to cost it $2 billion a year in lost revenues. But that can be fixed by policing. A bigger problem is that most of the goods and services the country’s forests provide are invisible to the bean-counters. Many of them are public goods: things like clean air and reliable rains that everyone wants and nobody is prepared to pay for. And where they are traded, they are often undervalued because their worth or scarcity is not fully appreciated.

"we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion"

2010-10-09T08:19:00.000-07:00

--- David Eagleman, opinion column Beyond God and atheism: Why I am a 'possibilian', New Scientist, 27 September 2010

Excerpts, quote quote highlighted below:

Given these considerations, I do not call myself an atheist. I don't feel that I have enough data to firmly rule out other interesting possibilities. On the other hand, I do not subscribe to any religion. Traditional religious stories can be beautiful and often crystallise hard-won wisdom - but it is hardly a challenge to poke holes in them. Religious structures are built by humans and brim with all manner of strange human claims - they often reflect cults of personality, xenophobia or mental illness. The holy books of these religions were written millennia ago by people who never had the opportunity to know about DNA, other galaxies, information theory, electricity, the big bang, the big crunch, or even other cultures, literatures or landscapes.

So it seems we know too little to commit to strict atheism, and too much to commit to any religion. Given this, I am often surprised by the number of people who seem to possess total certainty about their position.

...

I don't think the important goal should be to fight for a particular story in the absence of strong evidence; it should be to explore and celebrate the vast possibilities.

...

This is why I call myself a "possibilian". Possibilianism emphasises the active exploration of new, unconsidered notions. A possibilian is comfortable holding multiple ideas in mind and is not driven by the idea of fighting for a single, particular story. The key emphasis of possibilianism is to shine a flashlight around the possibility space. It is a plea not simply for open-mindedness, but for an active exploration of new ideas.

...

In every generation, people are seduced by the idea that they possess all the tools they need to explain the universe. They have always been wrong. From consciousness to dark energy, we know that we are missing an unknowable number of pieces of the puzzle. This is why in the debates between the strict atheists and the fundamentally religious, I choose a third side. A little less pretence of certainty and a little more exploration of the possibility space.

As Voltaire put it, "Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd."

"Hurt people hurt people"

2010-09-18T08:16:00.000-07:00

---David Hooker, a black community-builder, recounting an incident in an Oxford, Miss. bar; from a CS Monitor story Beyond racism: lessons from the South on racial discrimination and prejudice, Sep 18, 2010. (This article is part of the cover-story package for the Sept. 20, 2010 issue of The Christian Science Monitor weekly magazine. The weekly is well worth having - subscribe!)

Excerpt

Mr. Hooker, who lives in Atlanta and teaches at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., stepped into the Ajax bar to order some food. A white Mississippian sitting at the bar said to no one in particular, but within Hooker's earshot, "I remember when they didn't let niggers in here."

Recounting the episode, Hooker says he replied, "That was crazy, wasn't it? I remember that, too."

Hooker adds: "He kind of looked at me, like, 'What do you mean? You're not going to be offended?' "

The two ended up having a 45-minute chat that spanned the election of Obama, the Ole Miss football team, and hopes for their kids. "He was asking to have a conversation about race – he just didn't quite know how," says Hooker. "The reason I could hear that as an invitation is because I constantly remind myself that hurt people hurt people – they're exposing you to a place of their own pain."

Times are changing, it seems, though not in the way Northerners might imagine. Willie Griffin, an entrepreneur who moved back South is quoted as saying, "If there's prejudice today, it's more of a class thing than a racial thing."

"Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

2010-09-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

--- Francis Bacon, in the essay "On Studies", found via a lecture by Brooks Landon on "The Rhythm of Threes" in his Teaching Company course Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer's Craft.

This short essay is packed with wonderful quotes; it short, and bears reading in full. Here are a few that jumped out at me:

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man.

Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend.

"Innovation is unnatural"

2010-09-16T19:35:00.000-07:00

--- The Economist's Schumpeter columnist, in review (Aug 30, 2010) of “The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge” by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble ("G&T")

From the piece:

G&T say that you need to start by recognising that innovation is unnatural. Established businesses are built for efficiency, which depends on predictability and repeatability—on breaking tasks down into their component parts and holding employees accountable for hitting their targets. But innovation is by definition unpredictable and uncertain. Bosses may sing a pretty song about innovation being the future. But in practice the heads of operational units will favour the known over the unknown.

...

G&T argue that companies need to build dedicated innovation machines. These machines need to be free to recruit people from outside (since big companies tend to attract company men rather than rule-breakers). They also need to be free from some of the measures that prevail in the rest of the company. But they must avoid becoming skunk works. They need to be integrated with the rest of the company—they must share some staff, for example, and they must tap into the wider company’s resources as they turn ideas into products. And they must be tightly managed according to customised rather than generic rules. For example, they should be held accountable for their ability to learn from mistakes rather than for their ability to hit their budgets.

Sounds good, but it's easy to give recipes. Still, it's a good quote

"A neoconservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality"

2010-09-05T10:39:00.000-07:00

--- attributed passim to Irving Kristol, cited to Two Cheers for Capitalism (1979) at conservativeforum.org's page on Kristol.

I heard Peter Berkowitz mention it in a Philosopher's Zone program about Leo Strauss and the state of American conservatism.

I wouldn't say I've been mugged by reality yet, but I definitely feel like I'm walking in a rough neighborhood...

"If the people are to be ruled they must first be scared"

2010-08-17T15:56:00.000-07:00

--- A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (2008) p. 158, quoted by Walter Rodgers in his CSMonitor Commentary "Obama vs.his enemies", 21 February 2010

From Nuttall:

It is sometimes said that political leaders require a “demonised Other” to retain control of their citizens. If the people are to be ruled they must first be scared. This is very nearly the situation at the beginning of Henry V. The King desperately needs a war with France if he is to control such as Scroop and Grey.

"fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates"

2010-08-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

--- David Bowman, in the essay "Scorched earth: Wildfires will change the way we live," New Scientist, 10 October 2009

In context:

A key to understanding those consequences [of global climate change] is the notion of the "fire regime", where different vegetation has characteristic fires in terms of recurrence, intensity, seasonality and biological effects. Indeed, fire can be thought of as an emergent property of vegetation in the same way that vegetation can be thought of as an emergent property of climates. In other words, Earth has a "pyrogeography".

"There are societies where, once the book is closed, the reader goes on believing; there are others where he does not."

2010-08-16T14:17:00.000-07:00

--- Paul Veyne, tr. Paula Wissing, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? (1983, 1988), p. 22, Ch. 2, "The Plurality and Analogy of True Worlds"

According a certain program of truth, that of deductive and quantified physics, Einstein is true in our eyes. But if we believe in the Iliad, it is no less true according to its own mythical program. The same can be said for Alice in Wonderland. For, even if we consider Alice and the plays of Racine as fiction, while we are reading them we believe; we weep at the theater. The world of Alice and its fairytale program is offered to us as a realm as plausible and true as our own—as real in relation to itself, so to speak. We have shifted the sphere of truth, but we are still within the true or its analogy. This is why realism in literature is at once a fake (it is not reality), a useless exertion (the fairy world would seem no less real), and the most extreme sophistication (to fabricate the real with our real: how baroque!). Far from being opposed to the truth, fiction is only its by-product. All we need to do is open the Iliad and we enter into the story, as they say, and
lose our bearings. The only subtlety is that later on we do not believe. There are societies where, once the book is closed, the reader goes on believing; there are others where he does not.

"Financial markets are a collection of arguments"

2010-08-16T14:01:00.000-07:00

--- Michael Lewis, p. 79 of "The Big Short" (2010)

Extended quote:

[Deutsche Bank trader Greg] Lippman had at least one good reason for not putting up a huge fight [against the request from management to make a bet against the subprime bond market]: There was a fantastically profitable market waiting to be created. Financial markets are a collection of arguments. The less transparent the market and the more complicated the securities, the more money the trading desks at big Wall Street firms can make from the argument. The constant argument over the value of the shares of some major publicly traded company has very little value, as both buyer and seller can see the fair price of the stock on the ticker, and the broker’s commission has been driven down by competition. The argument over the value of credit default swaps on subprime mortgage bonds – a complex security whose value was derived from that of another complex security – could be a gold mine.

"He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one"

2010-08-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

--- Johann Hari, in his review of Richard Toye's "Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made"for the New York Times, August 12, 2010

Churchill was a brutal imperialist. From the review:

The young Churchill charged through imperial atrocities, defending each in turn. When the first concentration camps were built in South Africa, he said they produced “the minimum of suffering” possible. At least 115,000 people were swept into them and 14,000 died, but he wrote only of his “irritation that kaffirs should be allowed to fire on white men.” Later, he boasted of his experiences. “That was before war degenerated,” he said. “It was great fun galloping about.”

....

So how can the two Churchills be reconciled? Was his moral opposition to Nazism a charade, masking the fact that he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival? Toye quotes Richard B. Moore, an American civil rights leader, who said that it was “a most rare and fortunate coincidence” that at that moment “the vital interests of the British Empire” coincided “with those of the great overwhelming majority of mankind.” But this might be too soft in its praise. If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

"Great thoughts / do not nourish / small thoughts / as parents do children"

2010-07-03T15:17:00.000-07:00

--- poet Kay Ryan, in the poem Great Thoughts, from Say Uncle (2000) reprinted in the new collection The Best Of It (2010)
In context:

Great thoughts
do not nourish
small thoughts
as parents do children.

Like the eucalyptus
they make the soil
beneath them barren.

Standing in a
grove of them
is hideous.

"c’est le métier qui rentre"

2010-07-02T14:15:00.000-07:00

--- a French expression that might be translated as "the craft is entering". It has been paraphrased as "pain is the craft entering the apprentice." Larousse gives "it shows you're learning."

Here's some context from my friend Pierre-Yves Saintoyant:

We would say this, for instance, when cutting or burning your finger when trying to cook, doing some DIY, or hurting yourself in any way while trying a new craft; or suffering and complaining in learning a new process. For instance if you lose all your work because you did not do any backup, someone could tell you “c’est le métier qui rentre” ;-) If you develop some pain (e.g. blisters) while doing some work, someone might tell you “c’est le métier qui rentre” to “comfort” you.

This expression is also used when beginners make mistakes to encourage them to continue (and hopefully improve); someone could tell them “that’s not bad, c’est le métier qui rentre”.

“Your destination is the present moment”

2010-06-28T14:35:00.000-07:00

--- Yoga teacher Seong Yoon Lee, heard during class, 6/27/2010

"Once sent out, a word takes wing beyond recall"

2010-06-25T11:19:00.000-07:00

--- Roman poet Horace, Horace 65-8 bc: Epistles, source Oxford Quotations database

From the translation on authorama.com

Moreover, that I may advise you (if in aught you stand in need of an adviser), take great circumspection what you say to any man, and to whom. Avoid an inquisitive impertinent, for such a one is also a tattler, nor do open ears faithfully retain what is intrusted to them; and a word, once sent abroad, flies irrevocably.

"The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it"

2010-06-18T11:44:00.000-07:00

--- The Economist in a leader on the American newspaper business, June 12th 2010

Quote in context:

Thanks to family connections, Chandler ended up in control of the Los Angeles Times in 1960. The paper he inherited was parochial and conservative, reflecting the city it served. Chandler jettisoned the anti-union dogma and set about building a west-coast rival to the New York Times. His paper was heavy on foreign news and serious, objective reporting. The result was hugely impressive—but not, as it turned out, suited to the internet era. In the past few years the paper has suffered repeated staff cuts. In 2007 it was acquired by a property magnate and in 2008 filed for bankruptcy protection.

The problem with such newspapers is that, although they do much that is excellent, they do little that is distinctive enough for people to pay for it. The Los Angeles Times’s foreign reporting is extremely good. But it is hard to argue that it is better than the stuff supplied by the New York Times or foreign papers—sources to which the residents of Los Angeles now have unfettered, largely free access via their laptops and iPhones. Similarly, it has never been clear why each major newspaper needs its own car reviewer: a Corolla is a Corolla, whether it is driven in Albuquerque or Atlanta. And by extension, it is not clear why presidential candidates or sport teams require huge journalistic entourages. Papers should concentrate on what they do best, which means, in many cases, local news and sport. If the rest is bought in from wire services or national outfits, readers are unlikely to complain—as long as there is enough competition between those larger providers to keep up standards (and thanks to the internet there probably is now). Specialisation generally means higher quality.

"a gloriously over-engineered stand-up scooter"

2010-06-18T11:38:00.000-07:00

--- The Economist's description of the Segway, in a profile of Dean Kamen, "Mr Segway's difficult path", Technology Quaterly, June 12th 2010. Classic Economist.

In context:

The invention for which Mr Kamen is best known is the Segway Transporter, a gloriously over-engineered stand-up scooter that had the misfortune to emerge just after the dotcom crash in 2001, just as the disillusioned technology industry was looking for the next big thing. Before its unveiling, Mr Kamen’s mysterious new invention was the subject of feverish speculation. Steve Jobs of Apple said it was “as big a deal as the PC” and John Doerr, a venture capitalist, mused that it would be “bigger than the internet”. It was, in fact, a rather clever two-wheeled, self-balancing scooter, using technology similar to the iBot. But after all the hype it could not possibly live up to expectations.

"in a golden age everyone goes around complaining about how yellow everything is"

2010-05-17T14:27:00.000-07:00

--- Randall Jarrell, quoted by Adam Kirsch in his exchange with Ilya Kaminsky on the occasion of the publication of The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry, ed. by Kaminsky and Susan Harris; in Various Tongues: An ExchangeIs true translation impossible?, Poetry, March 2010, p. 467

Quote in context:

Randall Jarrell said that in a golden age everyone goes around complaining about how yellow everything is. I don’t want to make that old mistake, but I wonder if there are some costs to living in a time when books like The Ecco Anthology make so much foreign-language poetry so easily accessible. What strikes me about the many examples you cite, from Wyatt down to Akhmatova, is that they are all cases of poets immersing themselves in a foreign literature and using its resources to renovate their own.

"the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be"

2010-05-11T20:59:00.000-07:00

--- Elizabeth Lund in "Poet Kay Ryan: A profile", Christian Science Monitor, August 25, 2004

Quote in context:

"I've tried to live very quietly, so I could be happy," she says, explaining that the simpler her routine, the more complex her thinking can be. Her poems function much the same way, with deep currents underlying a simple-looking surface, as in "Hope" from the collection "Elephant Rocks":

Hope
What's the use
of something
as unstable
and diffuse as hope -
The almost-twin
of making-do,
the isotope
of going on:
what isn't in
the envelope
just before
it isn't:
the always tabled
righting of the present.

"I feel that the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more"

2010-05-11T11:50:00.000-07:00

--- Jonas Salk, quoted passim. According to wikiquote, this was said on receiving the Congressional Medal for Distinguished Civilian Achievement on 23 April 1956. Other variations cited there:

The reward for work well done is the opportunity to do more
I feel that the greatest reward for success is the opportunity to do more.

"What if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being?"

2010-04-14T01:11:00.000-07:00

--- sociologist William Sims Bainbridge in an interview about his work on World of Warcraft, New Scientist, 27 March 2010

In context; interviewer's question followed by Bainbridge's answer:

You've done a lot of work with religion. What does religion in WoW tell us about the real-world phenomenon?

The horrendous question that always troubles me is, what if religion is factually false but necessary for human well-being? What does science do then? Could there be some other stage of development in which we express ourselves through a kind of protean self in numerous realities with different levels of faith or suspension of disbelief appropriate to each of them?

That, on a much smaller scale, is what is happening with the fictional religions in WoW. The overwhelming majority of the people that play WoW don't take its religions seriously.

The difference between faith and fantasy might not have been very distinct in ancient times, and it's possible that we will move towards a time when instead of religion, people's hopes can be expressed in something that's acknowledged to be a fantasy but also, on some level, sort of real. WoW might exemplify that kind of post-religious future.

"What interests me ... is how one is to live when one neither believes in God, nor totally in reason"

2010-04-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

--- Albert Camus, quoted by Edward Hughes, Professor of French at Queen Mary University of London and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Albert Camus, in a Philosopher's Zone program on Albert Camus and The Absurd, 30 January 2010

Quote in context:

In 1945-46, Camus argued that, he says, 'I'm not a philosopher because I don't believe sufficiently in reason to sign up to a thought that would be seen as being philosophically systematic'. He says, 'What interests me is to know how one is to live, and this is more precisely how one is to live when one neither believes in God, nor totally in reason.'

Looks like I really should go read The Myth of Sisyphus...

“Choose each word as a precision tool”

2010-04-05T13:15:00.000-07:00

--- speech writer Ted Sorensen, quoted by Peter Grier in his Decoder column of March 29, 2010

In context:

Ask not whether Ted Sorensen wrote “Ask not what your country can do for you...,” the famous line from John Kennedy’s inaugural. He says today he doesn’t remember.

But whether he wrote that gem or not, Mr. Sorensen, who was one of JFK’s closest advisers, remains perhaps the greatest Washington speechwriter of modern times.

In his memoirs, he drops this bit of advice for aspiring political wordsmiths: “Choose each word as a precision tool.”

Remember that the next time you’re listening to some politician try to sell you something. Washington speeches often aren’t arguments so much as word-delivery machines. They’re sprinkled with bons mots that in themselves are intended to induce in you, the listener, a particular emotional response.

I loved that phrase, "Washington speeches often aren’t arguments so much as word-delivery machines"

“Good politics is repetition”

2010-04-05T13:11:00.000-07:00

--- Senate minority leader Mitch McConnel, New York Times profile March 16, 2010, quoted by Peter Grier in his Decoder column of March 29, 2010

“No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers”

2010-03-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

--- St Thomas Aquinas, quoted by Marc Ian Barasch in his "Searching for the Heart of Compassion", reprinted in The Best Buddhist Writing 2006, Melvin McLeod (Editor), p. 27

In the context of the Barasch essay:

Perhaps Thomas Aquinas was not so far off when he claimed, “No one becomes compassionate unless he suffers.” I take this less as a mandate for medieval masochism than an indecorous call to embrace our own authentic experience. If we’re not at home with the depth of our feelings, we’re likely to skirt the deep feelings of others.

There are links to on-line texts of Aquinas here, but the quote doesn't not resolve to one of these sources; the translation doesn't seem to be on-line.

"The anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy"

2010-03-25T09:38:00.000-07:00

--- Jonah Lehrer, summing up his piece "Depression's Upside", New York Times Magazine, February 25, 2010

The story is built around the "analytic rumination hypothesis" for depression advanced by Andrew Thompson and Paul Andrews. Here's the quote in the context of the penultimate paragraph:

This line of research led Andrews to conduct his own experiment, as he sought to better understand the link between negative mood and improved analytical abilities. He gave 115 undergraduates an abstract-reasoning test known as Raven’s Progressive Matrices, which requires subjects to identify a missing segment in a larger pattern. (Performance on the task strongly predicts general intelligence.) The first thing Andrews found was that nondepressed students showed an increase in “depressed affect” after taking the test. In other words, the mere presence of a challenging problem — even an abstract puzzle — induced a kind of attentive trance, which led to feelings of sadness. It doesn’t matter if we’re working on a mathematical equation or working through a broken heart: the anatomy of focus is inseparable from the anatomy of melancholy. This suggests that depressive disorder is an extreme form of an ordinary thought process, part of the dismal machinery that draws us toward our problems, like a magnet to metal.

"Anatomy of focus" refers to the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC), a part of the brain that seems to be important for maintaining attention (among other things). Lehrer reports that "[s]everal studies found an increase in brain activity (as measured indirectly by blood flow) in the VLPFC of depressed patients."

There are other good quotes near the end too. For example, after talking about the striking correlation between creative production and depressive disorders, Lehrer quotes neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen

Why is mental illness so closely associated with creativity? Andreasen argues that depression is intertwined with a “cognitive style” that makes people more likely to produce successful works of art. In the creative process, Andreasen says, “one of the most important qualities is persistence.” Based on the Iowa sample, Andreasen found that “successful writers are like prizefighters who keep on getting hit but won’t go down. They’ll stick with it until it’s right.” While Andreasen acknowledges the burden of mental illness — she quotes Robert Lowell on depression not being a “gift of the Muse” and describes his reliance on lithium to escape the pain — she argues that many forms of creativity benefit from the relentless focus it makes possible. “Unfortunately, this type of thinking is often inseparable from the suffering,” she says. “If you’re at the cutting edge, then you’re going to bleed.”

He also talks about "the virtue of self-loathing", one of the symptoms of depression, and quotes Roland Barthes: "A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem."

For a critique of Lehrer's piece, see Edward Champion's "Jonah Lehrer: A Malcolm Gladwell for the Mind", February 28, 2010.

“God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word

2010-03-20T15:00:00.000-07:00

--- theologian Paul F. Knitter, Without Buddha I could not be a Christian (2009), p. 15

Quote in context:

Marcus Borg has written a widely helpful book about the need for Christians to retrieve the correct understanding of Jesus, which, he claims, would be a much more appealing picture of Jesus. He titled the book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. I think the same can be said about the need many Christians feel to retrieve their mystical traditions: they need to become mystics again for the first time. Karl Rahner, one of the most respected Catholic theologians of the past century (and my teacher!), recognized this in a statement that has been repeated broadly: “In the future Christians will be mystics, or they will not be anything.”
...

When Buddha refused to talk about God in order to make way for the experience of Enlightenment, he was making the same point, but even more forcefully, that Rahner was getting at in his insistence that Christians must be mystics: “God” must be an experience before “God” can be a word. Unless God is an experience, whatever words we might use for the Divine will be without content, like road signs pointing nowhere. Buddha would warn Christians, and I believe Rahner would second the warning: if you want to use words for God, make sure that these words are preceded by, or at least coming out of, an experience that is your own. . . .

To put this more in our contemporary context, Buddha has reminded me and all of us Christians that any kind of religious life or church membership must be based on one’s own personal experience. It is not enough to say “amen” to a creed, or obey carefully a law, or attend regularly a liturgy. The required personal experience may be mediated through a community or church, but it has to be one’s own. Without such a personal, mystical happening, once cannot authentically and honestly call oneself religious.

"Microsoft is like a plumbing supply company that found itself running a chain of spas"

2010-03-18T16:03:00.000-07:00

--- Marc Smith, Chief Social Scientist, ConnectedAction, personal communication 7 March 2010, reproduced here with permission.

Quote in context:

But is Microsoft an engine that has disconnected the innovation drive train from the axle? Yes, probably. But the first to market, innovator role is not really what Microsoft is. Microsoft is like a plumbing supply company that found itself running a chain of spas. It really likes pipes more than people, and has to do customer facing things more than it likes.

"Loved data lives longer"

2010-03-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

--- Beth Noveck at a Long Now Foundation seminar, March 2010, as reported by Stewart Brand (see the "Summary" tab)

Quote in context:

"Loved data lives longer," Noveck declared. She encourages citizens to "adopt a dataset," and to demand ever wider release of government data troves. (One audience member requested that all the aerial photographs ever made by the US Geological Survey be digitized and published.) The Obama adminstration is finding that the whole process of opening up government digitally doesn't have to wait for pefection. It can move ahead swiftly on the Internet standard of "rough consensus and running code."

I also liked:

Noveck said the government is replacing its reflex "there's a form for that" habits with "there's an app for that," and a panoply of cloud-based apps...

"If a family cannot stay together because there is not enough work or money for them to survive otherwise, surely that is poverty"

2010-02-26T17:00:00.000-08:00

--- Jaman Matthews, in his report for Heifer on a visit to Jaltenango, a dusty outpost in rural Chiapas

Matthews writes:

"Poverty is an elusive concept to pin down. Most of us have a preconceived idea of what poverty looks like. The people in these coffee-growing communities didn’t fit those stereotypes—there were no skeleton-thin children, no one was dirty or ragged, the view down into the coffee plots was breathtaking. There were even a few vehicles in some of the villages.

"But all of these things hide the hardscrabble existence here. The vehicles are used to go to Jaltenango once a month for basic supplies, like beans and corn, not for joyriding. The children may not be thin, but they are often severely undernourished. And even though the villages are surrounded by coffee, we never had coffee in any of them. Families here do not, it seems, drink the product they grow any more than an Iowa corn farmer consumes what he grows. Coffee is the way they eke out a barebones survival."

"Google loves challenging old business models with new technology ideas"

2010-02-11T09:14:00.000-08:00

--- Mark Sullivan in his PC World piece on 10 Feb 2010 "Google Challenge to US Broadband Might Actually Change Things"

In context:

The announcement comes right on the heels of the federal government releasing the first round of funding for broadband networks to rural and underserved areas. It appears to be intended as an adjunct to the FCC’s own Broadband Plan, as if to say: “See, you can do it like this.”

Google loves challenging old business models with new technology ideas. Today’s announcement is the search giant’s opening salvo in a challenge to US broadband, which is monopolistic, slow and sees openness as a threat to profits.

...

I sincerely hope the tech and telecom communities rally around what Google is trying to do here. The planned fiber networks are not big enough to excite the suspicions among privacy conspiracy junkies that Google is only running the networks to collect more data about us, and as a new platform for its advertising business.

If the network goes national, those will be important questions to explore. For now, though, Google has a rare opportunity to put real pressure on large ISPs like AT&T and Comcast to sell more bandwidth for less money.

I can get behind that.

More a more neutral report, see the Wall Street Journal, "Google Jolts Telecom Rivals", 11 Feb 2010.

If nothing else, this is PR genius of the caliber we've come to expect of Google. Huge bang for little buck.

"The best way to achieve complete strategic surprise is to take an action that is either stupid or completely contrary to your self-interest"

2010-01-21T20:32:00.000-08:00

--- A sign then-Deputy National Security Advisor (and current Secretary of Defense) Robert Gates had on his desk at the time of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, according to Richard Haass in War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars, Simon & Schuster 2009, p. 59

Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers

2010-01-21T09:46:00.000-08:00

--- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild (1996) p. 169

Quote in context:

. . . in watching the ant [in a complicated path across a beach], we learn more about the beach than about what is inside the ant. And in watching people thinking in the wild, we may be learning more about their environment for thinking than about what is inside them. Having realized this, we should not pack up and leave the beach, concluding that we cannot learn about cognition here. The environments of human thinking are not “natural” environments. They are artificial through and through. Humans create their cognitive powers by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers. At present, so few of us have taken the time to study these environments seriously as organizers of cognitive activity that we have little sense of their role in the construction of thought.

"Sailors know that it is not the open ocean that sinks ships, it’s all that hard stuff around the edges"

2010-01-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

--- Edwin Hutchins, Cognition in the Wild, MIT Press 1995, p. 20

"Economists will have to learn to live with messiness"

2010-01-07T15:02:00.000-08:00

--- Nobel economics laureate Paul Krugman in a NY Times column "How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?", 2 September 2009.

After outlining the causes of economics' failure to foresee the crash, Krugman writes

It’s much harder to say where the economics profession goes from here. But what’s almost certain is that economists will have to learn to live with messiness. That is, they will have to acknowledge the importance of irrational and often unpredictable behavior, face up to the often idiosyncratic imperfections of markets and accept that an elegant economic “theory of everything” is a long way off. In practical terms, this will translate into more cautious policy advice — and a reduced willingness to dismantle economic safeguards in the faith that markets will solve all problems.

Towards the end of the piece he writes

Economics, as a field, got in trouble because economists were seduced by the vision of a perfect, frictionless market system. If the profession is to redeem itself, it will have to reconcile itself to a less alluring vision — that of a market economy that has many virtues but that is also shot through with flaws and frictions. The good news is that we don’t have to start from scratch. Even during the heyday of perfect-market economics, there was a lot of work done on the ways in which the real economy deviated from the theoretical ideal. What’s probably going to happen now — in fact, it’s already happening — is that flaws-and-frictions economics will move from the periphery of economic analysis to its center.

.... and

So here’s what I think economists have to do. First, they have to face up to the inconvenient reality that financial markets fall far short of perfection, that they are subject to extraordinary delusions and the madness of crowds. Second, they have to admit — and this will be very hard for the people who giggled and whispered over Keynes — that Keynesian economics remains the best framework we have for making sense of recessions and depressions. Third, they’ll have to do their best to incorporate the realities of finance into macroeconomics.

For an interesting discussion among Sante Fe Institute researchers prompted by this piece, see http://blog.santafe.edu/?p=150 (thanks to Rich Thanki for the link)

"Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse"

2010-01-05T17:55:00.000-08:00

--- journalist Murray Kempton (1917 - 1998), Part of Our Time: Some Ruins and Monuments of the Thirties, Modern Library Ed edition (November 24, 1998) ), A Prelude, p. 7

"Any experience deeply felt makes some men better and some men worse. When it has ended, they share nothing but the recollection of a commitment in which each was tested and each to some degree found wanting. They were not alike when they began, and they were not alike when they finished. T. S. Eliot says in one of his Quartets that time is no healer, because the patient is no longer here. The consequences of the journey change the voyager so much more than the embarking or the arrival."

Peter Pringle's obituary in the The Independent has another nice quote: "There's no excuse for kicking somebody unless he's up"

“Banks had lots of tools to create leverage, but not many to manage risk”

2010-01-02T14:29:00.000-08:00

--- VC Roger Portnoy quoted in "Silo but deadly", The Economist, December 5th 2009, on the role of IT systems in the financial crisis.

“Banks had lots of tools to create leverage, but not many to manage risk,” says Roger Portnoy of Daylight Venture Partners, a venture-capital firm that invests in risk-management start-ups.

The article goes further to report that some think IT played a more fundamental role in the crisis:

"Because things are so interconnected, largely thanks to technology, a problem in one part of the system can quickly lead to problems elsewhere. The global financial markets have evolved over the years into an inherently unstable network, says Till Guldimann, a strategist at SunGard, a software and IT services firm. The rapid unwinding of positions by ultra-fast quantitative-trading programs at the start of the credit crunch in August 2007 is one example of this cascading effect."

... though it may go deeper still:

"Many banks have become too complex to be managed properly, says Glenn Woodcock, a director at Andromeda Capital Management and a former head of credit-risk infrastructure at RBS. IT alone cannot fix that problem for them."

"There is a big shift from holding a phone to your ear to holding it in your hand"

2010-01-02T14:19:00.000-08:00

--- David Edelstein of the Grameen Foundation, quoted in "Beyond voice", part of The Economist's special report on telecoms in emerging markets, September 26, 2009

“There is a big shift from holding a phone to your ear to holding it in your hand,” says David Edelstein of the Grameen Foundation. “It opens the door to information services. It’s not the web, but it’s a web of services that can be offered on mobile devices.”

"the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians"

2009-12-30T15:02:00.000-08:00

--- Hal Varian, passim, e.g. interview with McKinsey Quarterly Jan 2009, "Hal Varian on how the Web challenges managers"

Quote in context:

I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it.

I think statisticians are part of it, but it’s just a part. You also want to be able to visualize the data, communicate the data, and utilize it effectively. But I do think those skills—of being able to access, understand, and communicate the insights you get from data analysis—are going to be extremely important. Managers need to be able to access and understand the data themselves.

Steve Lohr, "For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics", New York Times, August 5, 2009

"To predict economic agents’ behaviors an economic theory does not have to be true; it simply needs to be believed by everyone"

2009-12-03T10:50:00.000-08:00

--- Michel Callon paraphrasing a claim in G. R. Faulhaber and W.J. Baumol (1988) “Economists as Innovators: Practical Products of Theoretical Research,” Journal of Economic Literature 26:577-600.

Source: Michel Callon, “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?”, Chapter 11 in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa & Lucia Siu (eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the performativity of economics, Princeton University Press 2007 (includes Google Book Search), p. 322

In context:

To predict economic agents’ behaviors an economic theory does not have to be true; it simply needs to be believed by everyone. Since the model acts as a convention, it can be perfectly arbitrary. Even if the belief has no relationship with the world, the world ends up corresponding with it.We can thus consider that the famous Black and Scholes formula has no truth value, that it says nothing of real markets, and that it is simply a coordination tool that allows mutual expectations. It constitutes a false but effective representation, and can be seen as pure convention. This is what Faulhauber [sic] and Baumol suggest in their article.

"Patina is the value that age puts on an object"

2009-12-02T12:29:00.000-08:00

--- John Yemma, editor of the Christian Science Monitor, in his "open source" column for November 22, 2009, "On Thanksgiving: the memorial that time forgot"

Quote in context:

"Monuments are anchors in time. Epochs pass, weather erodes, people lose interest. This cannot be helped. But patina itself is worth appreciating. Patina is the value that age puts on an object. It’s what makes an antique antique. It is experience, maturity, the soft sheen of time. Patina wasn’t present at the spanking-new creation. It comes from a life lived."

“Development is a goal, not a tool”

2009-12-01T20:40:00.000-08:00

--- Sheila Herrling, Center for Global Development, quoted in a story by Jesse Zwick in The New Republic, "The Downside of 'Smart Power'", 30 November 2009, second page

Quote in context:

“Smart power,” of course, is a perfectly reasonable idea. But foreign aid is a zero-sum game. Elevating it into a central strategic instrument of our foreign policy means that something else--something noble and altruistic, something embedded in the historic mission of foreign aid--could soon be lost. Sheila Herrling of the Center for Global Development puts it succinctly: “Development,” she says, “is a goal, not a tool.” A longtime foreign aid observer relays that Clinton, aware of some of the simmering discontent at USAID, asked a group of aid experts before her confirmation what she could say or do to make the agency’s career civil servants excited again--to inspire them. She could start by making a difficult admission: that “smart power,” whatever its merits, comes with a genuine downside.

"Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form"

2009-11-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

--- The Economist, "The other-worldly philosophers", Jul 16th 2009

Quote in context:

Today’s economists tend to be open-minded about content, but doctrinaire about form. They are more wedded to their techniques than to their theories. They will believe something when they can model it.

"Who serves best doesn’t always understand"

2009-11-22T15:44:00.000-08:00

--- Czeslaw Milosz, line from the poem "Love" in the collection Rescue, quoted by A.F. Moritz in the essay "What Man Has Made of Man" in Poetry, November 2009

Quote in context

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills—
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves.
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

"Perspective / is another word for stasis"

2009-11-22T15:38:00.000-08:00

--- Gottfried Benn, lines from his poem "Static Poems", transl. Michael Hofmann, in Poetry, November 2009 p. 105

Quote in context:

Perspective
is another word for stasis:
you draw lines,
they ramify
like a creeper -
tendrils explode -
and they disburse crows in swarms
in the winter red of early dawns

"If [engineers] had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds"

2009-11-06T12:22:00.000-08:00

--- Vint Cerf speaking at OpenMobile Summit, San Francisco November 2009; quoted by The Register, "Vint Cerf mods Android for interplanetary interwebs", 5th November 2009

Quote in context:

So, Cerf and team booted TCP/IP from the heavens and build an interplanetary replacement they called the Delay-Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol. Cerf admits this isn't the most attractive moniker.

"Engineers are really good at labeling and branding things," said his sarcasm. "If we had named Kentucky Fried Chicken, it would have been Hot Dead Birds."

Unlike TCP/IP, DTN does not assume a continuous connection. When there are delays in interplanetary transmission, the new protocol forces each node to hang onto its packets until they can be safely transmitted. It's now under test with platforms speeding away from earth towards objeccts 80 or 90 light-seconds away.

Update 23 November, 2009: Mark Gordon at Microsoft notes the old ISDN joke: "If AT&T had named Sushi, it would have been CDF (Cold Dead Fish)."

"Impoliteness requires tailoring one's responses to each person in his own way"

2009-10-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

--- Gabriela Pessin, in a Home Forum column "Brusquely kind" in the the weekly print edition of the Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 2009 (not available on-line at time of posting).

Pessin tells of the tribulations with Israili civil servants as she struggled against a deadline to get her passport renewed. Here are the closing paragraphs:

During the long hours of the return flight I couln't help but reflect on what an odd place Israel is, located on that fuzzy border between the first and third worlds. In the United States, people typically aren't so rude to you, but then they also don't steer you to their friends in the bowels of the Central Post Office [to retrieve a mailed new passport hours before a flight departs].
But maybe the indifference to civility is part of a more genral indiference to bureaucracy, to the nameless, faceless rules of a system; after all, politeness means treating people all the same, while impoliteness requires tailoring one's responses to each person in his own way. And so maybe incivility is what it actually takes to respect you as an individual. And so maybe, just maybe, that's what it realy means to be polite.

"Solitude can wreck you, if you desire it only for your own sake"

2009-10-06T18:02:00.000-07:00

--- Thomas Merton, entry for February 26, in A Vow of Conversation: Journals 1964-65, in Thomas Merton: Spiritual Master, Lawrence S. Cunningham (ed.), Paulist Press: 1992, p. 193

In context:

    I see more and more that solitude is not something to play with. It is deadly serious, and much as I have wanted it, I have not been serious enough about it. It is not enough just to "like solitude" or love it even. Even if you like it, solitude can wreck you, I believe, if you desire it only for your own sake.
    So I go forward, and I don't believe I could ever go back (even interiorly I have reached a point of no return), but I go on in fear and trembling and often with a sense of lostness, trying to be careful what I do because I am beginning to see that every false step is paid for dearly.
   Hence, I fall back on prayer or try to. Yet no matter; there is great beauty and peace in the life of silence and emptiness. But to merely fool around with it brings awful desolation. When one is trifling, even the beauty of the life suddenly becomes implacable. Solitude is a stern mother who brooks no nonsense. And the question arises -- am I so full of nonsense that she will cast me out? I pray that she will not and I suppose that is going to take much prayer.

"Mastery is often simply staying on the path"

2009-09-16T08:34:00.000-07:00

--- Richard Strozzi-Heckler, In Search of the Warrior Spirit: Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Green Berets

Context (for more see Google Books, p. 75 )

"It looks easy, so why can't I do it?" When Andrews asks me this question he's reflecting the idealism and certainly [sic] of post-Second World War America, that any obstacle can be overcome by the step-by-step application of will, reason, sweat, and if necessary, massed force. As they struggle to learn this powerful but subtle martial art [aikido] they're having face a fundamental tenet of the warrior's path. They're learning that the path of the warrior is lifelong, and that mastery is often simply staying on the path.

"Doing econometrics is like trying to learn the laws of electricity by playing the radio"

2009-09-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

--- Economist Guy Orcutt, cited by Edward Leamer in “Let’s take the con out of econometrics” (PDF), American Economic Review 73(1), March 1983

Dictators ... rarely fall because they have too many enemies. They fall because they have too few friends left.

2009-09-04T11:21:00.000-07:00

--- Banyan opinion column, The Economist, August 15th 2009, a paraphrase of the conclusions of Marcus Mietzner's conclusions in Military Politics, Islam and the State in Indonesia: From Turbulent Transition to Democratic Consolidation (2008)

In full: "In the end, dictators, however unpopular, despotic and incompetent, rarely fall because they have too many enemies. They fall because they have too few friends left."

Like elaborately plumed birds…we preen and strut and display our t-values

2009-08-29T08:16:00.000-07:00

--- UCLA economist Edward Leamer, 1983, quoted in an excellent review of instrumental variables in The Economist,"Cause and defect", Aug 13th 2009.

The quote is from “Let’s take the con out of econometrics” (PDF), American Economic Review 73(1), March 1983. In full:

"This is a sad and decidedly unscientific state of affairs we find ourselves in. Hardly anyone takes data analyses seriously. Or perhaps more accurately, hardly anyone takes anyone else's data analyses seriously. Like elaborately plumed birds who have long since lost the ability to procreate but not the desire, we preen and strut and display our t-values."

The Economist article describes how "instrumental variables" have been used to address these problems, and reviews two recent articles criticixing these techniques. Angus Deaton of Princeton contends that using such instruments to estimate causal parameters is like choosing to let light “fall where it may, and then proclaim[ing] that whatever it illuminates is what we were looking for all along.”

The Economist's conclusion:

"This is too harsh. It is no doubt possible to use instrumental variables to estimate effects on uninteresting subgroups of the population. But the quarter-of-birth study, for example, shone light on something that was both interesting and significant... Proponents of instrumental variables also argue that accurate answers to narrower questions are more useful than unreliable answers to wider questions... A more legitimate fear is that important questions for which no good instrumental variables can be found are getting short shrift because of economists’ obsession with solving statistical problems."

Leamer is quite the wit. Here's another quip from about half-way through the paper: "This rhetoric is understandably tiring. Methodology, like sex, is better demonstrated than discussed, though often better anticipated than experienced. Accordingly, let me give you an example..."

Whatever purpose a piece of information may have been created and shared for, it will eventually be used for something else

2009-07-15T10:01:00.000-07:00

--- Steven Rambam, quoted in leader article on "The perils of sharing" by Andreas Kluth in The Economist's The World in 2008, p. 28

Kluth's conclusion:

"So there we are, a Google search away, for all to see in places and company we should not have been in, the unwitting backdrop of other people’s documentaries.

"The only remaining choice is whether or not to inject our own perspective, with our own media, into this never-ending stream of narratives, to preserve whatever control remains in presenting our own image. The wise will still share things about themselves in 2009. But they will become hyper-sensitive about sharing collateral information about others, in the hope that reciprocity and a new etiquette will eventually limit everybody's vulnerability, including their own. "

Trying to work out which banks are the world’s best is a bit like awarding the prize for prettiest war-torn village

2009-06-27T10:12:00.000-07:00

--- The Economist, "A short list", survey of the world's best banks, May 23rd 2009

Extended quote:

TRYING to work out which banks are the world’s best is a bit like awarding the prize for prettiest war-torn village. It is a title that carries little kudos. It is also likely to prompt further shelling. Winners of industry awards in the past three years include Ken Lewis, the chief executive of Bank of America, for banker of the year (2008); Société Générale for its risk management; and Angelo Mozilo of Countrywide, a failed mortgage lender, for a “lifetime of achievement”.

Still, the question is becoming more pertinent. After months of indiscriminate fear, widespread losses and government hand-holding, the banking industry is gradually stabilising. Money markets are steadily calming. American banks that got a clean bill of health in this month’s stress tests are queuing up to repay government money. A first wave of escapees is likely to include Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase. Those banks that emerge from this crisis with reputations and franchises strengthened will find it increasingly easy to raise funds, win clients, attract employees and buy assets.