Magic without magic

 --- John Wheeler, via a Nautilus animation of comments by Robbert Dijkgraaf

From an obituary, "Magic without Magic: John Archibald Wheeler (1911-2008)" by @curiouswavefn

Only Wheeler could have introduced paradoxical and yet meaningful phrases like "mass without mass". In celebration of his sixtieth birthday, physicists produced a volume dedicated to him with a title that appropriately captured the essence of his thinking- "magic without magic". 

The 1972 festschrift: Magic without magic: John Archibald Wheeler;: A collection of essays in honor of his sixtieth birthday (amazon).

although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things

 --- Miri Rubin, on the BBC In Our Time episode Medieval Pilgrimage, at timecode 11:00

In context - responding to a question from Melvyn Bragg about the role of relics, and the power associated with them

From very early on, the very idea of a sacrament means that deep in Christianity is the belief that although grace is ineffable, grace travels through material things.

the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized

 --- Noam Chomsky, Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy (2007), p. 126

In context: 

With the Cold War no longer available, it was necessary to reframe pretexts not only for intervention but also for militarized state capitalism at home. The Pentagon budget presented to Congress a few months after the fall Of the Berlin Wall remained largely unchanged, but was packaged in a new rhetorical framework, presented in the National Security Strategy of March 1990. One priority was to sup- port advanced industry in traditional ways, in sharp violation of the free market doctrines proclaimed and imposed on others. The National Security Strategy called for strengthening "the defense industrial base" (essentially, high-tech industry) with incentives "to invest in new facilities and equipment as well as in research and development." As in the past, the costs and risks of the coming phases of the industrial economy were to be socialized, with eventual profits privatized, a form of state socialism for the rich on which much of the advanced US economy relies, particularly since World War Il, but with precedents in the advanced economies back to the early days of the industrial revolution." In the past several decades, Pentagon funding for research and development has declined, while support through the National Institutes of Health and other "health-related" components of the state sector has increased, as the cutting edge of the economy of the future shifts from electronics- to biology-based industry. The longtime chairman of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan and other ideologues may hail the wonders of "entrepreneurial initiative," "consumer choice," and "free trade," but those who channel public funds to development of the economy and those who profit from these decisions know better.

Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature

 --- Kermit Pattison, in Fossil Men: The Quest for the Oldest Skeleton and the Origins of Humankind Hardcover (2020, p. 360), via Stephanie Hanes's review in the CS Monitor, December 2020.

In context

The Royal Society conference began to expose the battle lines around the oldest family skeleton. Those guided by genetics and primatology used living apes to make logical inferences about our common ancestors. ("I have no more direct access to the last common ancestor than anyone else in this room," McGrew explained to the audience. "So we have to model. We're forced to do so.") In contrast, those guided by fossils took a ground-up approach— bones revealed what really happened. Those two mind-sets placed faith in different lines of evidence, made different assumptions, and inevitably reached different conclusions. In the first approach, the relationships between humans and apes were irrefutable, but the form of their common ancestors remained conjectural. In the fossil-based method, bones provided rock-hard evidence of past forms, but their places in the family and relationships to humans could only be surmised. Both sides fought to make their work relevant to human origins—and Ardi [a 4.4-million-year-old female skeleton, short for Ardipithecus ramidus] became the flashpoint. 

In short, it was a classic clash of scientific worldviews. Science is not just a quest for new facts; it also is a contest between rival models for interpreting nature. In his 1962 milestone The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, historian Thomas Kuhn introduced the idea of the scientific paradigm—the set of theories and methods that …

Another excerpt the Stephanie Hanes points to, on p. 399-400

One of Ardi 's main lessons is that the simplistic narratives contrived to fill gaps in the fossil record often turn out to be wrong. Consensus can be a poor predictor of who turns out to be right in science. The most enduring work is that which describes things never seen before—human anatomy, fossils of extinct animals, ape behaviors, genetic code, ancient ecosystems, and more—without distorting that novelty to conform to the expectations of the era. But we humans hunger for more than just pure description—we search for meaning and emotionally satisfying endings, and that's when we run astray, because our reach for narrative often exceeds our grasp of facts. In the struggle to comprehend the unfamiliar, we invoke familiar analogies, but nature usually turns out to be more complex than what we imagine in our little brains. The only way to know for sure is to discover.

 

Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no"

 --- Ian Betteridge, a British technology journalist, writing in 2009, referring to a much older concept; cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Betteridge, from TechCrunch: Irresponsible journalism, archived 

This story is a great demonstration of my maxim that any headline which ends in a question mark can be answered by the word "no." The reason why journalists use that style of headline is that they know the story is probably bullshit, and don’t actually have the sources and facts to back it up, but still want to run it.

See the Wikipedia article for earlier mentions, including Hinchliffe's Rule.

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces

 --- ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson (e.g. Goodreads); haven't tracked down the source

The Gods we worship write their names on our faces; be sure of that. And a man will worship something ... That which dominates will determine his life and character. Therefore it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.

A picture has been said to be something between a thing and a thought

 --- Samuel Palmer, British landscape painter, etcher, and printmaker, via the Ashmolean Museum Instagram feed, 27 Jan 2021

A self-portrait of Palmer in the Ashmolean
that was painted when he was nineteen

For more quotes by Palmer, see AZ Quotes

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler

 --- Tony Stark, in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015); the archetypal tech entrepreneur on his relationship to leadership (archetypally, the Ruler)

From https://www.quotes.net/mquote/974240 

Maria Hill:

All set up boss.

Tony Stark:

Actually he's the boss.

[points to Captain America]

Tony Stark:

I just pay for everything and design everything, make everyone look cooler.

Serial faileur

 --- Pierre de Vries, Blogger "About Me" statement until Jan 7, 2021

Full description

Serial faileur. Not good enough at particle physics; quit venture capital; dropped out of art school; left the software industry; got bored with technology policy. Currently thinking about high tech and myth.

potency as a source of meaning and [a] potential for zealotry are naturally correlated

 --- Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (2020), p. 177

Quote in context: after citing critiques by Andrew Sullivan in New York magazine and David French in the National Review:

Yet social justice's most fervent critics, in their knee-jerk derisions of it as a ridiculous cult, fail to realize quite how right they are. Social justice is a religion, and—as with any other religion—its potency as a source of meaning and its potential for zealotry are naturally correlated. Which is to say, as a religion, social justice works. It works not merely in the sense that a lot of people take it very seriously and react angrily when people misuse its sacred terms (as Sullivan and French imply), but also in a much more fundamental and potentially constructive way. It has done what so much of anodyne, classical liberalism has failed to do. It has imbued the secular sphere with meaning. It has reenchanted a godless world.

Cui bono?

 --- attributed to Lucius Cassius by Cicero, according to Wikipedia:

L. Cassius ille, quem populus Romanus verissimum et sapientissimum iudicem putabat, identidem in causis quaerere solebat, cui bono fuisset?

Lucius Cassius, whom the Roman people used to regard as a most honest and most wise judge, was in the habit of asking time and again in lawsuits: "to whom might it be for a benefit?"

—Cicero: Pro Roscio Amerino, §§ 84, 86 

Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason

 --- John Keats, in a letter to his brothers, George and Thomas, on 22 December 1817, as cited by a Wikipedia article (accessed 12/29/2020):

I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.

Keats, John (1899). The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats, Cambridge Edition. Houghton, Mifflin and Company. p. 277. ISBN 978-1-146-96754-9.

Be pitiful [i.e. kind], for every man is fighting a hard battle

 --- John Watson aka Ian MacLaren, according impressive sleuthing by Quote Investigator, June 2010.

From the Quote Investigator article, which traced it back to the late 19th century (and not to Plato or Philo of Alexandria):

Another citation in 1898 provides the name of a publication in Britain that published the message of MacLaren. The name “MacLaren is spelled “Maclaren” in this cite also [CM]:

“Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle,” was the tender Christmas message sent by Ian Maclaren to the readers of The British Weekly.

An extended discussion of the theme of the aphorism is present in a book published under MacLaren’s real name John Watson in 1903. The book section is titled “Courtesy” [HV]:

This man beside us also has a hard fight with an unfavouring world, with strong temptations, with doubts and fears, with wounds of the past which have skinned over, but which smart when they are touched. It is a fact, however surprising. And when this occurs to us we are moved to deal kindly with him, to bid him be of good cheer, to let him understand that we are also fighting a battle; we are bound not to irritate him, nor press hardly upon him nor help his lower self.

(The  abbreviations in square brackets are references in the article.)

More recent versions reflect contemporary language preferences, e.g. this from the Seattle Times in 1984:

“Be kind. Everyone you meet is carrying a heavy burden.”

Reading enriches the mind, conversation makes it nimble, and writing makes it precise

 --- Francis Bacon, as paraphrased by Paul Diduch in "Culture Wars in Rome" course description, May 2019 (pdf); the original in "Of Studies" is "reading makes a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man."

From The Essays of Counsels, Civil and Moral: 

Of Studies

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. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience. Crafty men contemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them; for they teach not their own use; but that is a wisdom without them, and above them, won by observation. Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know, that he doth not. Histories make men wise; poets witty; the mathematics subtile; natural philosophy deep; moral grave; logic and rhetoric able to contend. Abeunt studia in mores. Nay, there is no stond or impediment in the wit, but may be wrought out by fit studies; like as diseases of the body, may have appropriate exercises. Bowling is good for the stone and reins; shooting for the lungs and breast; gentle walking for the stomach; riding for the head; and the like. So if a man's wit be wandering, let him study the mathematics; for in demonstrations, if his wit be called away never so little, he must begin again. If his wit be not apt to distinguish or find differences, let him study the Schoolmen; for they are cymini sectores. If he be not apt to beat over matters, and to call up one thing to prove and illustrate another, let him study the lawyers' cases. So every defect of the mind, may have a special receipt. 

It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless

 --- Martin Luther King Jr., address at Western Michigan University, December 18, 1963

Excerpt

Now the other myth that gets around is the idea that legislation cannot really solve the problem and that it has no great role to play in this period of social change because you've got to change the heart and you can't change the heart through legislation. You can't legislate morals. The job must be done through education and religion.

Well, there's half‐truth involved here. Certainly, if the problem is to be solved then in the final sense, hearts must be changed. Religion and education must play a great role in changing the heart.

But we must go on to say that while it may be true that morality cannot be legislated, behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me but it can keep him from lynching me and I think that is pretty important, also. [APPLAUSE]

So there is a need for executive orders. There is a need for judicial decrees. There is a need for civil rights legislation on the local scale within states and on the national scale from the federal government.  

Boeke en lees versit tentpenne in die kop

 --- Clinton V du Plessis, by tydpunt 12:55 in 'n RSG Skatkis-program "Voetsoldaat van die vers", 'n program oor hom, via Taaldinge potgooi 24 Mei 2020.

Everyone is a fan of free speech until they have some users

 --- Benedict Evans, quoted in a CS Monitor explainer, ‘Free speech social media’? Three questions about Parler, Nov 2020

Excerpt

Q: Can you really post anything? 

No. The company says they follow the Federal Communications Commission’s guidelines on violent or obscene speech. In a post on Parler, Mr. Matze outlined the “very few basic rules”: No pornography, no death threats, and, he wrote, no “posting pictures of your fecal matter in the comment section.”

Parler claims to give users the power to moderate their feeds but experts point out that it more or less operates like a regular social media company. Parler makes it clear in the user agreement it retains the right to terminate an account or remove content for any reason. While debunked claims about voter fraud and QAnon theories are flourishing unchecked, and white supremacist and anti-Semitic ideas are not hard to find, some liberal users have reported being banned from the site after criticizing the company’s legal practices.

Benedict Evans, an independent tech analyst, says crackdowns are expected on any growing platform. “Everyone is a fan of free speech until they have some users,” he says.

The beaver told the rabbit as they stared at the Hoover Dam: No, I didn't build it myself, but it's based on an idea of mine

 --- widely ascribed to Charles H. Townes; h/t Matt Ridley, on the EconTalk podcast, Aug 31, 2020

From the podcast transcript:

Matt Ridley: Yes. And the way I distinguish [invention and innovation] is that when a new device is invented, it also has to be made available, affordable, and reliable, and that process is innovation. And it's often much harder work than the original invention. Coming up with the first prototype is sometimes the easy bit. Turning it into something that people want and people can afford, and that people can get ahold of is really tough work.

There's a lovely story that Charles Townes, the inventor of the laser, used to tell, which rather nicely illustrates the difference between invention and innovation. He said, there's a beaver and a rabbit looking at the Hoover Dam and the beaver says to the rabbit, 'No, I didn't build it, but it is based on an idea of mine.'

It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

 --- William Shakespeare, from Macbeth, spoken by Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

Via Wikipedia

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death.

Out, out, brief candle!

Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing.

Belonging is stronger than facts

 --- Zeynep Tufekci, in "How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump," MIT Technology Review, August 2018 (via L M Sacasas, "Narrative Collapse: An Addendum")

From the piece

While algorithms will often feed people some of what they already want to hear, research shows that we probably encounter a wider variety of opinions online than we do offline, or than we did before the advent of digital tools. Rather, the problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone. It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one. In sociology terms, we strengthen our feeling of “in-group” belonging by increasing our distance from and tension with the “out-group”—us versus them. Our cognitive universe isn’t an echo chamber, but our social one is. This is why the various projects for fact-checking claims in the news, while valuable, don’t convince people. Belonging is stronger than facts.

people scaled for comedy trying to live in a world still ruled by the gods of tragedy

 --- A. P. Burnett's blurb writer, quoted by Richard Rutherford in his General Introduction to Medea and Other Plays: Medea/ Alcestis/The Children of Heracles/ Hippolytus (2003), Penguin Classics. 

Here's Rutherford (text at Erenow.com)

The Iphigenia at Aulis is a fast-moving and constantly attention-grabbing play, but one in which the high seriousness of the Aeschylean ode is dissipated, and the tragic sacrifice becomes wasteful self- deception. As A. P. Burnett put it: ‘In these plays the poet shows men scaled for comedy trying to live in a world still ruled by the gods of tragedy.’ 

The source is given in the accompanying footnote as, "From the jacket blurb of Catastrophe Survived (Oxford 1977)." The text from Google Books, for the 1985 edition, is:

Examining the seven Euripidean tragicomedies, this book contends that the plays' plots--compounded as they are of the opposite elements of good fortune and catastrophe--result from experimentation with a new form intended to express a characteristically Euripidean view of reality. The plays involve people scaled for comedy trying to live in a world ruled by the gods of tragedy, making efforts sometimes noble, sometimes sordid, but in the end, essentially futile. Burnett shows how Euripides manipulates traditional scenes, diverting and frustrating the expectations aroused in his audience and transforming their simple pity and terror into a response that is conscious, complex, and inescapably disturbing.

一山还有一山高

 --- Chinese saying (Google Translate)

Via ShinikenHarui in the comment section of the TwoSetViolin episode World Class Prodigy Violinist Chloe Chua Gives TwoSet a Violin Lesson, Sep 2020, translated as "there's always another mountain taller".

For a few more translations, see a page on Baidu ("天外有天，一山还比一山高" 的英语翻译). The full saying seems to be "天外有天，一山还比一山高”, "There is a sky outside the sky, and a mountain is higher than a mountain" (according to Google Translate)

Old men ought to be explorers

 --- T.S. Eliot, from East Coker, second of the Four Quartets

The last stanza:

Old men ought to be explorers

Here and there does not matter

We must be still and still moving

Into another intensity

For a further union, a deeper communion

Through the dark cold and empty desolation,

The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters

Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.

if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst

 --- Thomas Hardy, in In Tenebris - II.

The fourth and final stanza

Let him in whose ears the low-voiced Best is killed by the clash of the First,
Who holds that if way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst,
Who feels that delight is a delicate growth cramped by crookedness, custom and fear,
Get him up and be gone as one shaped awry; he disturbs the order here. 

For just this poem, pulled from the compendium given above, see here.

My favourite results were those that didn’t quite look like something I’d made, yet felt like something I meant

 --- Gaby Wood, in LRB Podcast Gaby Wood: How to Draw an Albatross, June 16, 2020, a reading of her piece "Diary," London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 12 · 18 June 2020

In describing her attempts to use a camera lucida:

The drawings were semi-conscious, made at great speed in order to record an illusion, the way you might wake up and try to write down what had happened in a dream. My favourite results were those that didn’t quite look like something I’d made, yet felt like something I meant.

Another nice quote comes from her description of etching practice

As a novice etcher, I have spent quite a bit of time thinking about ‘states’. Although I’d seen references to an etching’s state – ‘second state of four’, ‘fifth state’ and so on – I hadn’t really taken in what it meant. When you make an etching you tend to work on it in layers, and often over a long period. Painters do that too, but when you’re etching the only way to see the result is to print it (apart from anything else, the print is backwards in relation to the plate). The finished plate, which can be used for hundreds of near identical prints, will have produced printed records of its younger selves, or ‘states’. Of course, you don’t have to call your early trials ‘states’ – you could just call them rubbish and throw them in the bin. But artists often make editions of different states, and collectors might acquire several of them. There’s an acknowledgment, when dealing with this medium, that one image is haunted by its ancestors or alternates.

Here's the image of the albatross from the LRB piece

we're aestheticizing our own destruction

 --- Tara Isabella Burton, in conversation with Richard Aldous about her new book, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, The American Interest podcast June 2020.

From timecode 19:56

There's a phenomenon I've seen since Trump was elected, but also anytime something bad or surreal happens in the news, the sort-of Twitter meme becomes, "Well, this season of America is terrible, this season of America has jumped the shark, can you believe the writers added this plot twist?" And it's a joke, but I think it reveals something very real, which is the sense of, you know, we're aestheticizing our own destruction, as Walter Benjamin might say.

According to Wikipedia, Benjamin said that "fascism tends towards an aestheticization of politics", in the sense of a spectacle in which it allows the masses to express themselves without seeing their rights recognized, and without affecting the relations of ownership which the proletarian masses aim to eliminate. Benjamin said, in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935), ch.XIX/Epilogue:

Fascism attempts to organize the newly proletarianized masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. (...) Mankind, which in Homer’s time was a spectacle for the Olympian gods, has become one for itself. (...) Communism responds by politicizing art.

At 3:38, Richard Aldous notes that she sums up the key elements of religion as meaning, purpose, community, and ritual.

a company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. ... AI is ... our id writ large

 --- Elon Musk, on JoeRogan Experience #1169,  

Time code 00:14:52

JR: How far away are we from something that's really truly sentient?

EM: Well, I mean, you could argue that any group of people, like a company is essentially a cybernetic collective of people and machines. That's what a company is. And then, there are different levels of complexity in the way these companies are formed. And then, there's a sort of like a collective AI in the Google, sort of, Search, Google Search, you know, where we're all sort of plugged in as like nodes on the network, like leaves on a big tree. And we're all feeding this network with our questions and answers. We're all collectively programming the AI. And Google, plus all the humans that connect to it, are one giant cybernetic collective. This is also true of Facebook, and Twitter, and Instagram, and all the social networks. They're giant cybernetic collectives.

Time code 00:17:18

EM: But the AI is informed strangely by the human limbic system. It is, in large part, our id writ large.

JR: How so?

EM: We mentioned all those things, the sort of primal drives. There's all of the things that we like, and hate, and fear. They're all there on the internet. They're a projection of our limbic system. That's true.

JR: No, it makes sense. And the thinking of it as a -- I mean, thinking of corporations, and just thinking of just human beings communicating online through these social media networks in some sort of an organism that's a -- It's a cyborg. It's a combination. It's a combination of electronics and biology.

EM: Yeah. This is -- In some measure, like, it's to the success of these online systems. It's sort of a function of how much limbic resonance they're able to achieve with people. The more limbic resonance, the more engagement.

JR: Whereas, like one of the reasons why probably Instagram is more enticing than Twitter.

EM: Limbic resonance.

The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant

--- Ascribed to Albert Einstein. QuoteInvestigator makes a strong case that "this saying was derived from the words of Bob Samples who was presenting his individual analysis of Albert Einstein. . . . the ascription to Einstein is spurious."

From the QuoteInvestigator page, here's the root excerpt from Bob Samples, The Metaphoric Mind: A Celebration of Creative Consciousness (1976), p. 26

The metaphoric mind is a maverick. It is as wild and unruly as a child. It follows us doggedly and plagues us with its presence as we wander the contrived corridors of rationality. It is a metaphoric link with the unknown called religion that causes us to build cathedrals — and the very cathedrals are built with rational, logical plans. When some personal crisis or the bewildering chaos of everyday life closes in on us, we often rush to worship the rationally-planned cathedral and ignore the religion. Albert Einstein called the intuitive or metaphoric mind a sacred gift. He added that the rational mind was a faithful servant. It is paradoxical that in the context of modern life we have begun to worship the servant and defile the divine.

the lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes the wrong one

--- St. Augustine, Sermons, CLXIX, quoted by Francis Bacon in The New Organon, Section LXI.

From Francis Bacon: A Selection of His Works, edited by Sidney Warhaft, College Classics in English,

Macmillan, 1982, p. 343

And this is so far well, inasmuch as it leaves the honour of the ancients untouched. For they are no wise disparaged, the question between them and me being only as to the way. For as the saying is, the lame man who keeps the right road outstrips the runner who takes the wrong one. [fn 12, St. Augustine, Sermons, CLXIX] Nay, it is obvious the when a man runs the wrong way, the more active and swift he is the further he will go astray.

Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right

--- Jeff Bezos, in testimony to the House Judiciary committee, Antitrust sub-committee on July 29, 2020, on the topic Online Platforms and Market Power, Part 6: Examining the Dominance of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, from his witness statement (pdf)

Excerpt

In addition to good luck and great people, we have been able to succeed as a company only because we have continued to take big risks.  To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.  Outsized returns come from betting against conventional wisdom, but conventional wisdom is usually right.  

between jargon and platitudes, I prefer jargon

--- Roland Barthes, quoted by Michael Wood in The Meaninglessness of Meaning, London Review of Books, Vol. 8 No. 17, 9 October 1986

From the piece

His first published piece of writing was on Gide’s Journal, and, asked if he knew Gide, Barthes replies that he saw him only once, from a distance, at the Lutétia: ‘he was eating a pear and reading a book.’ What interested him about Gide? Barthes’s answer might be taken as a swift epitaph on himself, four brief sentences wonderfully afloat on all they don’t say: ‘He was a Protestant. He played the piano. He talked about desire. He wrote.’

An earlier, more militant remark is worth pondering too: ‘between jargon and platitudes, I prefer jargon.’ Of course we fervently hope that is not the choice, but if it were? ‘It’s shameful to judge someone on his vocabulary,’ Barthes adds.

magic is ... any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system

--- Christopher Fennell, quoted in "Searching for the Witches’ Tower," Archaeology Magazine, November/December 2019, p. 37 (web version, p. 4)

From the article

Another explanation for the Pendle witch trials may lie in forgotten folk practices that often go unmentioned in official historical documents. Seventeenth-century Britons were mostly illiterate, lived by the rhythm of the agricultural calendar, and fought illness without the assistance of modern medicine. For decades, many historians subscribed to the notion that as Christianity replaced indigenous pagan religious systems in the British Isles from the late Roman period onward, magical superstition died out. Archaeologists, however, do find objects, markings, inscriptions, and other evidence of rituals and practices that should, they say, be considered magical. “When people start talking about magical invocations, they rarely try to define magic,” says archaeologist Christopher Fennell of the University of Illinois. “One definition of magic is that it is any kind of personal supplication from a once-dominant religious system which got pushed off center stage by a new system.” Christianity, Fennell says, by way of example, marginalized paganism in England, but individual rituals surviving from those belief systems continued to be carried on in private spaces.

our sense of our relationships with the past has to be one that’s capable of including contradiction

--- Fintan O'Toole, in the Talking Politics podcast episode Britain Wrestles with its Past, 24 June 2020.

From the conversation, with time codes in square brackets (44 MB mp3)

[17:08] The question then, it seems to me, is, do you just join in then, with kicking Churchill because he’s being grotesquely misused by Johnson or Trump, and say, Well, this is the time to kick him when he’s down; or should democrats be saying, Well, actually what Churchill tells us is that history is a complicated thing. [17:31] You know, that actually identity is complicated, that our sense of our relationships with the past has to be one that’s capable of including contradiction.

The residents of Babylon in the first millennium B.C. saw themselves as facing their past and walking backward into the future

--- Jarrett A. Lobell, "Magical Beasts of Babylon," Archaeology Magazine, November/December 2019

Opening lines of the article:

The residents of Babylon in the first millennium B.C. saw themselves as facing their past and walking backward into the future. In the Akkadian language of ancient Mesopotamia, the word panu, or "face," relates to the past, whereas "behind" is a word associated with the future.

This reminded me of  the finding that in the Aymara language, "FUTURE IS BEHIND EGO and PAST IS IN FRONT OF EGO" according to a 2010 paper by Núñez and Sweetser; for more, see the 2006 UCSD press release Backs to the Future.

The fear of machines outsmarting us, ...—I don’t think that’s new

--- Urs Fischer, in conversation with Natasha Stagg, Gagosian Quarterly, Winter 2018

From the interview:

Natasha Stagg There does seem to be a common fear of technology and machine learning, though—that it will outsmart you eventually.

Urs Fischer Yeah, good. I mean, we’re not that smart to begin with.

NS But we’re creating the machine, so we don’t want to be outsmarted by it.

UF Our species creates all sorts of things, but look at what else we do: we tap into natural resources like there’s no tomorrow, knowing it’s bad for us as a species and for the rest of life on this planet. But we do it with very elaborate, smart machines. . . . There are a lot of things we do that we don’t want to talk about because we don’t like the solutions. We procreate like crazy, creating more of us, caring about the ones close to us but not about a bigger picture. We just mess everything up. How smart are we? I tend to think that we’re idiots. We’re smart enough to do things but too dumb to understand what we do. The fear of machines outsmarting us, the feeling, the emotional side of this—I don’t think that’s new. The world has always been ending. The apocalypse is as old as history, just with different ingredients.

IMHO, the world has always been ending because our lives are always ending; the apocalypse is personal before it’s collective. 

I’m willing to believe that the fear of machines outsmarting us isn’t new either, since it’s human to fear being outsmarted, primarily by other humans and then by anything else that our hyper-active innate agency detectors identify. If the fear is perennial, presumably the optimism is, too.

Employing evidence to make policy is an unnatural act

--- Robert Shea, in conversation with Bob Hahn on the Two Think Minimum podcast, "Robert Shea on Evidenced Based Policy’s Impact and Potential," June 29, 2020,

From the transcript:

Hahn: So how does that differ from how things work in Washington or other places around the world today? I mean, don’t politicians and civil servants use evidence? What’s the big deal here?

Shea: Yeah, you must’ve gotten this a lot too when you told people you worked on the commission on evidence-based policymaking, oh my god, we need a commission for that? That’s not what we do every day? No, employing evidence to make policy is an unnatural act. Today, politics, emotion, anecdote are more likely to drive policy than evidence. This whole movement, the evidence movement is all about trying to more and more get policymakers to look at data and evidence, and use it in their policy making.

[Labels] are ways for us to categorize and simplify our lives in ways we shouldn't actually simplify our lives

--- Víkingur Ólafsson, in an interview for Deutsche Grammophon, on the launch of his  Debussy-Rameau albmu, 3 June, 2020

Excerpt from timecode 3:28:

I don't think about labels at all, I mean like musical labels. I'm not talking about Deutsche Grammophon. I'm talking about Neoclassical or Classical or even Baroque or Impressionism or Jazz or Rock or Pop or whatever – it doesn't mean anything to me - all those stamps. They are completely outside of the music. They are ways for us to categorize and simplify our lives in ways we shouldn't actually simplify our lives because music is much more complex than that.

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul

Khalil Gibran, from "On Reason and Passion"

Excerpts

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.

If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.

For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.

...

Among the hills, when you sit in the cool shade of the white poplars, sharing the peace and serenity of distant fields, and meadows—then let your heart say in silence, “God rests in reason.”

And when the storm comes, and the mighty wind shakes the forest, and thunder and lightning proclaim the majesty of the sky,—then let your heart say in awe, “God moves in passion.”

How we teach is what we teach

--- John H McArthur, quoted by Michael Roberto in Lecture 1, The Art of Critical Decision Making, The Great Courses, timecode 32:13

... that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened

--- Jonathan Shainin, in conversation with David Runciman and Helen Thomas, Talking Politics podcast #248, 4 June 2020, "Facts vs Opinions"

Excerpt, with approximate <time code> in angle brackets

<37:17> We have a settled model, a kind of classical model, so to speak, of how the facts, the news, and the demos interact with one another. And I think that settled model is now very antiquated, and I’m not sure we have a new model that adequately conveys the kind of chaos and instability in the relationship between those three elements. And so I think journalism feels more urgent to many people than it ever has before, in terms of, you’ve got it on your phone, you’ve got it on social media, people are talking about it all the time, people are talking about the news. And yet, that urgency is accompanied by a sort-of diminished authority because there is no one consensually agreed version of what just happened, in the way that an earlier iteration, journalists had a kind of functional monopoly on describing the world to their audience. […] <38:47> You had kind of a consensus about a stable way of representing the world, and I don’t think it exists anymore. And I think it's a real challenge, because I think this constant skepticism, or doubts, or even cynicism, about the extent to which we can produce a representation of what's happening out there in the world. And I think what you see, particularly when you look at questions of race in America, for instance, you get into another for of thinking about representation, which is, who are the journalists who are telling this story.

And here's Helen, following up at <39:32> 

I think that the - what's happening in America at the moment - does run into the limits of the analytical mode [of opinion writing]. Sometimes I think that's been true about Trump since the beginning. There's something about his presidency, where the analytical mode just seems inadequate to try to get to grips in any moral sense with what has been happening, and that is particularly true now. I think in terms of what's been going on for over the last week, and partly the analytical mode is sort-of near exhausted, because there's something almost I think religious about what is happening and that that means that trying to sort-of use conventional political language to try to say something about it doesn't really work. It can risk coming over as simple indifference, and that's simply not what's required in this situation. 

Words are to a lawyer what mathematics is to a physicist

--- Owain Blackwell, in "Words are Chameleons: The Languages of Law," Oxford Reference, 20 March 2019

Excerpts:

Words are to a lawyer what mathematics is to a physicist. That being the case, if an observer watched the goings on of, say, the Court of King’s Bench in the 15th century, they might wonder how the legal system could work at all, for they would be hearing words in three languages.

...

So can we contrive a system in which all words are defined and all nuances banished? It is but a pipe dream. For, as Justice Holmes observed: ‘A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.’ Furthermore, it would be a grim day for lawyers if such a dream could be realized. One is reminded of the toast first given at Sergeants Inn in 1756 by Mr Wilbraham, and since then much repeated: ‘Gentleman, to the glorious uncertainty of the law.’ For it is that very uncertainty—uncertainty, usually, over the meaning of words— by which lawyers earn their keep.

Everybody has the same size box

--- Michael Hsu, quoted in Business Travel Won’t Be Taking Off Soon Amid Coronavirus, Wall Street Journal, 15 June 2020

From the article

Michael Hsu, chief executive of Kimberly-Clark Corp., the maker of Cottonelle toilet paper, said he has found Zoom calls more effective than some in-person meetings with his executive team. In face-to-face executive roundtables, people fidget and look at their phones, he said, but on Zoom people are forced to be attentive. Mr. Hsu said he also finds such meetings to be more “egalitarian” because no one is at the head of the table, so executives speak up more often and more candidly.

“Everybody has the same size box,” he said.

Rome added political genius to Greek artistic genius

--- Paul Veyne, in an interview with François Busnel in L'Express, 12 January 2005

In context:

F. B. Le poète Horace avait-il raison d'affirmer que «la Grèce conquise a conquis son sauvage vainqueur puisqu'elle apporte chez lui les arts»?

P.V. Oui, certainement. Mais Rome a ajouté au génie artistique grec le génie politique: l'autorité et le sens de la règle du jeu en politique sont romains. Et cette règle du jeu s'est perpétuée jusqu'à nous. Son principe est très simple: une grande collectivité obéit certes aux clans et aux pouvoirs sociaux mais il faut aussi suivre un certain nombre de règles de droit public. 

Every gift comes with sacrifice. There is always something demanded.

--- Joy Harjo, in a CSMonitor Q&A, April, 2020

In context:

Q: How would you describe the gift of poetry?

Every gift comes with sacrifice. There is always something demanded. To take care of the gift of poetry demands listening, even when it seems as if there is nothing or no one there. It remembers listening to history and beyond history. It means walking a road of language alone, until you teach someone how to hear you. My mission is to take care of the gifts that I carry, to develop and feed them, and then to share them. We must all take care of our respective gifts, because with them we will find the answers to our problems. With poetry, we can sometimes sing the answers. 

I've always wanted to be exempt from meaning, the way one is exempt from military service

--- Roland Barthes, quoted by Michael Wood around timecode 17:24 in an LRB conversation with Adam Shatz (May 2020)

From the transcript:

Adam Shatz: ... something that is central to Barthes’s thinking, which is this discomfort with meaning. He described meaning at some point, I think, as sticky. Heavy, sticky. He didn’t like it. What was that about?

Michael Wood:  He says at one point – it’s a phrase I’ve always liked – I’ve always wanted to be exempt from meaning the way one is exempt from military service. It’s required – you can’t actually get out of military service if that’s the law of your country. You could be some kind of protester, you could be a conscientious objector, but he doesn’t want to be a conscientious objector. He wants a certain kind of exemption from meaning, or at least a rest from meaning. I think that is, in a way, a kind of French illness or a French worry. It’s a natural thing to say, I think if you’re French, that meaning is rather regimented, it’s official, there’s a standard version of it. I’m not sure that any English speaker ever quite feels that about meaning.

I think this is from "Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes," judging by the only other reference a quick search turned up: a 1977 review by Frank Kermode in the New York Times. Here's the excertp:

Barthes is an extraordinary virtuoso though people who read him in English—a language, incidentally, in which he takes very little interest—may be skeptical about this remark. It remains true. Highly original, extremely fertile and inventive, he really does represent, in a peculiarly qualified way, a new kind of writing, and he continually discovers new ways of writing about writing. He is not a philosopher, not a linguist not a poet, not a novelist and even not an essayist. His ideal “text” is not controlled by an author at all. He “dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning (as one is from military service),” and the ideal text would also be without meaning and without style. Yet he is, and knows he is, a conscious stylist and heavy with meanings.

According to the biography in Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Howard, Barthes was indeed exempted from military service in 1937 (aged 22). I couldn't confirm the quote using the Amazon "Look inside" function, but the phrase "dreams of a world which would be exempt from meaning" apparently occurs on page 87 of the 2010 paperback edition.

When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around

--- Milton Friedman (2009) Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, p.14, University of Chicago Press 

Quote according to AZquotes:

Only a crisis - actual or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

All models are wrong, but some are useful

--- George Box, Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building, Technical Summary Report #1954, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Mathematics Research Center, May 1979 (h/t David Weinberger for the reference)

Some more great passages by Box, also via Weinberger, from George E. P. Box, Science and Statistics, Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 71, No. 356 (Dec., 1976), pp. 791-799, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2286841

...he must not be like Pygmalion and fall in love with his model.

2.3 Parsimony

Since all models are wrong the scientist cannot obtain a "correct" one by excessive elaboration. On the contrary following William of Occam he should seek an economical description of natural phenomena. Just as the ability to devise simple but evocative models is the signature of the great scientist so overelaboration and overparameterization is often the mark of mediocrity.

2.4 Worrying Selectively

Since all models are wrong the scientist must be alert to what is importantly wrong. It is inappropriate to be concerned about mice when there are tigers abroad.

2.5 Role of Mathematics in Science

Pure mathematics is concerned with propositions like "given that A is true, does B necessarily follow?" Since the statement is a conditional one, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth of A nor of the consequences B in relation to real life. The pure mathematician, acting in that capacity, need not, and perhaps should not, have any contact with practical matters at all.

In applying mathematics to subjects such as physics or statistics we make tentative assumptions about the real world which we know are false but which we believe may be useful nonetheless. The physicist knows that particles have mass and yet certain results, approximating what really happens, may be derived from the assumption that they do not. Equally, the statistician knows, for example, that in nature there never was a normal distribution, there never was a straight line, yet with normal and linear assumptions, known to be false, he can often derive results which match, to a useful approximation, those found in the real world.

It follows that, although rigorous derivation of logical consequences is of great importance to statistics, such derivations are necessarily encapsulated in the knowledge that premise, and hence consequence, do not describe natural truth. It follows that we cannot know that any statistical technique we develop is useful unless we use it. Major advances in science and in the science of statistics in particular, usually occur, therefore, as the result of the theory-practice iteration...

All photographs are accurate. None of them is the truth.

--- Richard Avedon (attributed passim, couldn't confirm source), via Gagosian on Instagram

The more I think about it, the more fatuous (or do I mean specious?) this quote seems. 

No photograph is "the truth," but then, nothing is (to a modern, or certainly a postmodernist).

So what if he'd said, "All photographs are accurate. None of them is true"? That seems a bit more accurate to me. But then consider the first part: "All photographs are accurate." 

If accurate means correct in all details (cf. Lexico), then this is false since many photos - especially in fashion magazines! - are doctored in some way, from soft focus to color correction to airbrushing Trotsky out of a the photo of Lenin's speech in Sverdlov Square.

Now, to the extent that Trotsky was no longer an important figure in Soviet history after the rise of Stalin, editing him out of the photo was true in its context. Which takes us around 180 degrees to, "No photographs are accurate. All of  them are the truth."

A language is a dialect with an army and navy

--- popularized by Max Weinreich (see Wikipedia discussion), via Rita Tan

Weinreich's story about it, per Wikipedia

A teacher at a Bronx high school once appeared among the auditors. He had come to America as a child and the entire time had never heard that Yiddish had a history and could also serve for higher matters.... Once after a lecture he approached me and asked, 'What is the difference between a dialect and language?' I thought that the maskilic contempt had affected him, and tried to lead him to the right path, but he interrupted me: 'I know that, but I will give you a better definition. A language is a dialect with an army and navy.' From that very time I made sure to remember that I must convey this wonderful formulation of the social plight of Yiddish to a large audience.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne

--- Geoffrey Chaucer, "The life so short, the craft so long to learn", the first line of the Parlement of Foules (Wikipedia), quoted by Hilary Mantel in The Mirror & the Light, according to Helen Thomas in the Talking Politics podcast "In Praise of Hilary Mantel" (at 38:53)

I feel as if I've at last tracked down the origin of my favorite saying by my father, "Too soon old, too late smart."

From Mantel, p. 321

Sometimes Henry says to him, ‘Still at the antique letters, Lord Cromwell? What did you learn today?’ 

He says, ‘I learned that ars longa, vita brevis: I learned how to say it in Greek.’ 

‘That is Hippocrates,’ Henry says. ‘He tells us, life is short and our task so great that we will die before we can . . .’

The king breaks off. It is an offence for his subjects to speculate about his death or predict it, but it is not an offence for him to speak of it himself; yet he looks chary, as if he thinks it should be. ' "Life is short and art is long, the opportunity sudden and fleeting: experiment dangerous, judgement difficult." I think I have the sense of it.’ 

He bows. ‘I am the better instructed, sir.’ 

Daily, daily, one must practise the courtier’s art, and nightly, the art of governance: and never get it right. Chaucer says it in our own English tongue. ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’

I was embarrassed that I hadn't realized that it all goes back to "ars longa, vita brevis." Hippocrates's original is wonderful.