Saturday, November 26, 2022

anxious meat puppets tranquillised by culturally constructed trivialities

--- Sheldon Solomon, quoted in How do we make the most of our time? The power of confronting death, New Scientist, 15 June 2022

In context:

Subconscious fears about death drive much of human thought and behaviour, according to psychology’s terror management theory. “The idea is that we would be overwhelmed with existential terror if we didn’t have some way to manage it,” says Sheldon Solomon, a psychologist at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. And we manage it, the idea goes, by doing things that give us a sense of meaning and value, from believing in the afterlife to creating art.

For Solomon, this leads to a startling conclusion: that we are all just “anxious meat puppets tranquillised by culturally constructed trivialities”. But while Solomon and his colleagues have shown that subtle reminders of death make people more likely to cling to their own world view and discriminate against outsiders, there is also a bright side to this awareness of the inevitability of death.

Saturday, November 19, 2022

a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman

 --- Rupert Murdoch, quoted in "Theranos Investors React With Sadness, Satisfaction" by Christopher Weaver in the WSJ, 18 Nov 2022.

From the piece:

Investors in Theranos Inc. reacted to the sentence with sadness, embarrassment and some satisfaction.

“Of course it was fraud,” said Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal, in an email after the sentencing. “But I only have myself to blame for not asking a lot more questions. One of a bunch of old men taken in by a seemingly great young woman! Total embarrassment.”

For the fine line between fraud and folly, cf. this excerpt:

Early investor Marc Ostrofsky, a venture capitalist, said he didn’t believe Ms. Holmes set out to commit fraud.

“I don’t think she started out to be a dishonest person,” Mr. Ostrofsky said. “I think Silicon Valley, fake it till you make it, is where she ended up.”

See also "The Risky Business of Sam Bankman-Fried" by Ben Cohen, WSJ, 14 Nov 2022

There is much that remains unknown about the meltdown, and one big question for the investigators figuring out what happened is whether it was folly or fraud—a cautionary tale of excess risk or an empire built on a house of cards.

Monday, November 14, 2022

one big question ... is whether it was folly or fraud

 --- Ben Cohen, in his Nov 14, 2022 story for the WSJ, "The Risky Business of Sam Bankman-Fried"

From the story:

There is much that remains unknown about the meltdown, and one big question for the investigators figuring out what happened is whether it was folly or fraud—a cautionary tale of excess risk or an empire built on a house of cards.

"Folly or fraud" is often at issue tricksters, with some leaning to folly (Coyote), others to fraud (Reynard the Fox), and yet others where it's not clear (Loki).

Wednesday, November 02, 2022

the organism will behave as it damn well pleases

--- This is attributed to Joel Garreau on quotefancy

“The Harvard Law of Animal Behavior holds that under controlled experimental conditions of temperature, time, lighting, feeding, and training, the organism will behave as it damn well pleases.”

It's widely seen on the internet in variant forms, e.g. this from Philip Ball on Aeon: "Under carefully controlled experimental circumstances, the animal behaves as it damned well pleases."

Brembs in "Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates" in Proc Biol Sci. 278(1707), doi: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2325, cites to: Grobstein P. 1994. Variability in behavior and the nervous system. In The encyclopedia of human behavior (ed. Ramachandran V. S.), pp. 447–458 New York, NY: Academic Press, but I think this is to further support the claim the quotation is used to illustrate.