Archive

Dec 31

A popular anti-religion argument says that science moves ever onward and constantly seeks development, whereas religion is dogmatic. However, although fixed thinking may get us nowhere fast, riding the wave of science and technology leaves us no time for contemplation. The pace of progress leaves us no time to think.

— Sam McAuliffe, The Urgency of Art

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…man is pre-eminently a creative animal, predestined to strive consciously for an object and to engage in engineering — that is, incessantly and eternally to make new roads, WHEREVER THEY MAY LEAD. But the reason why he wants sometimes to go off at a tangent may just be that he is PREDESTINED to make the road, and perhaps, too, that however stupid the “direct” practical man may be, the thought sometimes will occur to him that the road almost always does lead SOMEWHERE, and that the destination it leads to is less important than the process of making it, and that the chief thing is to save the well-conducted child from despising engineering, and so giving way to the fatal idleness, which, as we all know, is the mother of all the vices.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

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In the glorification of ‘work’ and the never-ceasing talk about the ‘blessing of labor’ I see . . . fear of everything individual. For at the sight of work—that is to say, severe toil from morning till night—we have the feeling that it is the best police, viz., that it holds everyone in check and effectively hinders the development of reason, of greed, and of desire for independence. For work uses up an extraordinary proportion of nervous force, withdrawing it from reflection, meditation, dreams, cares, love, and hatred

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak

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And not only we but the whole of Europe marvels, on such occasions, at our Russian passion: if one of us embraces Catholicism, then he’s bound to become a Jesuit, and of the most underground sort at that; if he becomes an atheist, he is bound to start demanding the eradication of belief in God by force, which means by the sword! Why is that, why is there such frenzy all at once? You really don’t know? Because he has found his fatherland, which he had missed here, and he rejoices; he has found the shore, the land, and he rushes to kiss it! It’s not only from vainglory, not only from nasty, vainglorious feelings that Russian atheists and Russian Jesuits proceed, but from spiritual pain, spiritual thirst, from the longing for a lofty cause, a firm shore, a native land, in which we’ve ceased to believe because we’ve never known it!

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

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It’s not wrong to make a list of things that you need to do, and then start doing those things. What’s unrealistic is believing that the list is right no matter what new information arises as you move through its action items. What’s wrong is viewing that list as your work, disconnected from a higher outcome. Countless studies have shown that when people are connected to a higher purpose, they do better work. They’re more motivated. They’re happier.

— Janice Fraser, Jason Fraser, and Eric Ries, Farther, Faster, and Far Less Drama

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“The routines of almost all famous writers, from Charles Darwin to John Grisham, similarly emphasise specific starting times, or number of hours worked, or words written. Such rituals provide a structure to work in, whether or not the feeling of motivation or inspiration happens to be present. They let people work alongside negative or positive emotions, instead of getting distracted by the effort of cultivating only positive ones. ‘Inspiration is for amateurs,’ the artist Chuck Close once memorably observed. ‘The rest of us just show up and get to work.”

— Oliver Burkeman, The Antidote

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I am inclined to see philosophy as arising from a basic aspect of our nature, a thought-drive we possess, the cognitive equivalent to the libido. This thought-drive, call it the epinoia (epino-ah), is an irreducible instinct within us to question, wonder, challenge, probe, explode, shake, shatter, rattle, prod, flip, whip, stretch… in a word, think. Whereas the libido seeks satisfaction, the epinoia, tireless and indefatigable, seeks the endless flight of thought. It never settles. It craves problems, seeks perplexities, and shows no interest in sound conclusions or tidy answers.

— David Birch, Pandora’s Book

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Knuth has stated that he feels that at the beginning of the 1970s, academics were good programmers and industry professionals were not. Yet during that decade, as the scope of software that industry wrote increased, the situation reversed itself, and by the end of the decade the academics had drifted out of sync with what was going on in industry and restricted their programming, and therefore their area of expertise, to smaller programs that were no longer useful for generating advice for industry.

— Adam Barr, The Problem With Software

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Lewis explains: How true membership in a body differs from inclusion in a collective may be seen in the structure of a family. The grandfather, the parents, the grown-up son, the child, the dog, and the cat are true members (in the organic sense), precisely because they are not members or units of a homogeneous class. They are not interchangeable. Each person is almost a species in himself….If you subtract any one member, you have not simply reduced the family in number; you have inflicted an injury on its structure.

— Alan Jacobs, How to Think

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…how absolutely deranged it was, I now thought, for adults to command, and oppress, and tyrannize a child so, with complete disregard for his human nature. And for what? For some poorly conceived designs they for some reason have on his life! Oh, how many lies they told me about school. How many lies and falsities! From my most tender childhood, I was told (both in school and at home) that my entire life depends on it: that the grades I get in my seventh, eighth, ninth grade classes would determine my entire future. Oh, how many irrational fears they drilled into my mind! That I’d never get into college, that I’d never get a high paying job, unless I worked, and struggled, and crawled through the tunnels of their school curriculum.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

Sep 09

Few of us want to be reminded that there is a hunk of dead animal on our plate when we are served a steak. Mostly, we protect ourselves by a coy use of language and an elaborate set of conventions that allow us to maintain a double standard. The true nature of meat eating, like the true nature of sex and excretion, is only easy to refer to implicitly, hidden in euphemistic synonyms and allusions: “veal cutlets,” “making love,” “going to the bathroom.” Somehow we sense that there is soul-killing going on in slaughterhouses, but our palates don’t want to be reminded of it.

— Douglas R Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett, The Mind’s I

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The Leviathan Boghos Artinian 100 words I, a human being, thrive On cells, a hundred trillion strong! They all must strictly obey Commands in the genetic tongue That I may comfortably live And unencumbered behave, While each cell I ruthlessly hold, Until the day it dies, a slave! Yet I fail to understand That I also must bear the pain, Someday, of strictly obeying The alien commands in my brain That a leviathan may live And unencumbered behave, While me he would ruthlessly hold Until the day I die, a slave!

— Anja Publications, Philosophy Now

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Better, surely, not to pretend to calculate the incalculable, not to pretend that there is an Archimedean point outside the world whence everything is measurable and alterable; better to use in each context the methods that seem to fit it best, that give the (pragmatically) best results; to resist the temptations of Procrustes; above all to distinguish what is isolable, classifiable and capable of objective study, and sometimes of precise measurement and manipulation, from the most permanent, ubiquitous, inescapable, intimately present features of our world, which, if anything, are overfamiliar, so that their ‘inexorable’ pressure, being too much with us, is scarcely felt, hardly noticed, and cannot conceivably be observed in perspective, be an object of study.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

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I, for instance, quite naturally want to live, in order to satisfy all my capacities for life, and not simply my capacity for reasoning, that is, not simply one twentieth of my capacity for life. What does reason know? Reason only knows what it has succeeded in learning (some things, perhaps, it will never learn; this is a poor comfort, but why not say so frankly?) and human nature acts as a whole, with everything that is in it, consciously or unconsciously, and, even if it goes wrong, it lives.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From the Underground

Aug 02

The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.

— Helen Pluckrose and James A. Lindsay, Cynical Theories

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What disturbs and renders unhappy … the age of youth … is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises the constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness of our dreams hover before us in capriciously selected shapes and we search in vain for their original … Much would have been gained if through timely advice and instruction young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.

— Alain De Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

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It is of course a fact that if art is love then art improves us morally, but this is, as it were accidental. The level at which that love works which is art is deeper than the level at which we deliberate concerning improvement. And indeed it is of the nature of love to be something deeper than our conscious and more simply social morality, and to be sometimes destructive of it. That is why all dictators, and would-be dictators… have mistrusted art

— Existentialists and Mystics, Iris Murdoch

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Everybody is by their nature always acting in their own best interest; and it’s only the erratic fluctuations of their human minds and the misleading beliefs they acquire in the course of their lives that lead them to their failures and unvirtuous actions. Thus, no person has any reason to feel shame, guilt, or reproach for anything he ever did, because at the time he always had a perfectly valid and justifiable reason for doing it.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

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Though undoubtedly correct, the sentence, “Oxygen was discovered,” misleads by suggesting that discovering something is a single simple act assimilable to our usual (and also questionable) concept of seeing. That is why we so readily assume that discovering, like seeing or touching, should be unequivocally attributable to an individual and to a moment in time. But the latter attribution is always impossible, and the former often is as well.

— Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

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Loss of group-centred belief renders life chaotic, miserable, intolerable; presence of group-centred belief makes conflict with other groups inevitable. In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures, partly to decrease the danger of group conflict. But we are increasingly falling prey to the desperation of meaningless, and that is no improvement at all.

— Jordan B. Peterson, Norman Doidge (Forward), Ethan Van Sciver (Illustrator), 12 Rules for Life

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A theorem is no more proved by logic and computation than a sonnet is written by grammar and rhetoric, or than a sonata is composed by harmony and counterpoint, or a picture painted by balance and perspective. Logic and computation, grammar and rhetoric, harmony and counterpoint, balance and perspective, can be seen in the work after it is created, but these forms are, in the final analysis, parasitic on, they have no existence apart from, the creativity of the work itself. Thus the relation of logic to mathematics is seen to be that of an applied science to its pure ground, and all applied science is seen as drawing sustenance from a process of creation with which it can combine to give structure, but which it cannot appropriate.

— George Spencer-Brown, Laws of Form

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I saw that Haller was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he hated and despised.

— Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

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Some of those people are vendors selling reuse-in-the-large support products. Others are academics who understand very little about application domains and want to believe that domain-specific approaches aren’t necessary. There is a philosophical connection between these latter people and the one-size-fits-all tools and methodologists. They would like to believe that the construction of software is the same no matter what domain is being addressed. And they are wrong.

— Robert L. Glass, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

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…it was Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, who first observed the phenomenon we now refer to as “compassion fatigue.” Human beings, he proposed, are normally inclined not only to imaginatively identify with their fellows, but as a result, to spontaneously feel one another’s joys and sorrows. The poor, however, are so consistently miserable that otherwise sympathetic observers are simply overwhelmed, and are forced, without realizing it, to blot out their existence entirely. The result is that while those on the bottom of a social ladder spend a great deal of time imagining the perspectives of, and genuinely caring about, those on the top, it almost never happens the other way

— David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules

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I believe that it is right and proper for me, as a human being, to have an interest in the future, and what human civilization becomes in the future. One of those interests is the human pursuit of truth, which has strengthened slowly over the generations (for there was not always Science). I wish to strengthen that pursuit further, in this generation. That is a wish of mine, for the Future. For we are all of us players upon that vast gameboard, whether we accept the responsibility or not. And that makes your rationality my business.

— Eliezer Yudkowsky, How to Actually Change Your Mind

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Punishment and rewards are two sides of the same coin. Rewards have a punitive effect because they, like outright punishment, are manipulative. “Do this and you’ll get that” is not really very different from “Do this or here’s what will happen to you.” In the case of incentives, the reward itself may be highly desired; but by making that bonus contingent on certain behaviors, managers manipulate their subordinates, and that experience of being controlled is likely to assume a punitive quality over time.

— Marianne Bellotti, Kill It With Fire

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Most people can learn to write a simple program in a few hours. Human beings are extremely good at languages, even weird, grammatically constrained, abstract things like a programming languages. That isn’t the problem. In fact, the ease with which most people can pick up a few concepts that allows them to write a few lines of code is a different kind of problem altogether, in that it is sufficiently simple to lull people into a false sense of their own capabilities.

— David Farley, Modern Software Engineering

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This diseased form of thinking was primarily caused by improper childrearing: inculcated in the child early on by the very people whose words were to be taken as categorical fact—his parents, his teachers, his religious leaders. The child was never given a chance to think for himself, to trust his own judgment and experience. Instead, he was coerced by lies, threats, and punishment to accept on authority, without rational explanation or reference to reality, all sorts of religious notions and cultural prohibitions—which became his superego. And if he happened to escape the supernatural clutches of religion, the same task would almost certainly be accomplished in his nearly decade-and-a-half of compulsory schooling, where acquiring a superego essentially becomes the child’s full-time job. There he is force-fed a veritable glut of arbitrary information that he has neither the time, nor the first-hand experience to understand fully, nor the desire to learn in the first place—and with the inevitable result that he will categorize and memorize instead of learn, and acquire a floating, top-down superego instead of an experientially-based, bottom-up knowledge.

— Roman Gelperin, The Master Mind of the Self-Actualizing Person

Apr 22

…three quarters of Americans hold at least one paranormal belief. Here are some figures from the first decade of our century:

Possession by the devil, 42 percent
Extrasensory perception, 41 percent
Ghosts and spirits, 32 percent
Astrology, 25 percent
Witches, 21 percent
Communicating with the dead, 29 percent
Reincarnation, 24 percent
Spiritual energy in mountains, trees, and crystals, 26 percent
Evil eye, curses, spells, 16 percent
Consulted a fortune-teller or psychic, 15 percent…

— Steven Pinker, Rationality

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The spiritualisation of sensuality is a great triumph over Christianity. A further triumph is our spiritualisation of enmity. This consists in our profound understanding of the value of having enemies: in short, our doing and deciding the opposite of what people previously thought and decided … Throughout the ages the church has wanted to destroy its enemies: we, the immoralists and anti-Christians, see it as to our advantage that the church exists … Even in the field of politics, enmity has become spiritualised. Almost every party sees that self-preservation is best served if the opposite number does not lose its powers. The same is true of Realpolitik. A new creation, such as the new Reich, needs enemies more than it does friends: only by being opposed does it feel necessary; only by being opposed does it become necessary. Our behaviour towards our ‘inner enemy’ is no different: here, too, we have spiritualised enmity; here, too, we have grasped its value.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

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[Deductive thinking] is a form of torture for the imaginatively gifted, the very totalitarianism of thought, one line being made to march strictly in step behind the other, all leading inexorably to a single undeviating conclusion. A proof out of Euclid recalls to my mind nothing so much as the troops goose-stepping before the Supreme Dictator. I have always delighted in my mind’s refusal to follow a single line of any mathematical explanation offered to me. Why should these exacting sciences exact anything from me? Or as Dostoevsky’s Underground Man shrewdly argues, “Good God, what do I care about the laws of nature and arithmetic if, for one reason or another, I don’t like these laws, including the ‘two times two is four’?” Dostoevsky spurned the hegemaniacal logic and I can do no less.

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

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The natural enemies of this spirit are cleverness and specialisation: hence the contempt so rightly shown for, in the Roman world, experts and technicians – the Graeculus esuriens – the remote but unmistakable ancestors of the sharp, wizened figures of the modern Alexandrian Age – the terrible Eighteenth Century – all the avocasserie and écrivasserie, the miserable crew of attorneys and scribblers, with the predatory, sordid, grinning figure of Voltaire at their head, destructive and self-destructive, because blind and deaf to the true word of God.

— Isaiah Berlin, Henry Hardy, and Michael Ignatieff, The Hedgehog and the Fox

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The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom–Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

— Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels , The Communist Manifesto

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How much energy do they have to fight for or defend the fact that 2 + 2 = 4 (the arithmetic axiom most people think of)? Usually they observe that they have very little energy to fight for the rightness of their belief. Why? From our perspective, it’s because they know they are right and don’t need to defend this law as though their identity or ego depended on it. Next, we ask the same leaders to bring to mind an “issue” that they are fighting to be right about at work or in their private lives. It doesn’t take them long to find one. When we invite them to notice the difference between their need to defend, justify, and explain why they are right about this issue and their need to defend 2 + 2 = 4, they often have an epiphany.

— Jim Dethmer, Diana Chapman, and Kaley Klemp, The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership

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If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

— G. K. Chesterton , Orthodoxy

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…people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower one, ordinary people, who are, so to speak, material serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment. The subdivisions here are naturally endless, but the distinctive features of both categories are quite marked: people of the first, or material, category are by nature conservative, staid, live in obedience, and like being obedient. In my opinion they even must be obedient, because that is their purpose, and for them there is decidedly nothing humiliating in it. Those of the second category all transgress the law, are destroyers or inclined to destroy, depending on their abilities. The crimes of these people, naturally, are relative and variegated; for the most part they call, in quite diverse declarations, for the destruction of the present in the name of the better.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

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In some ways, programming is like painting. You start with a blank canvas and certain basic raw materials. You use a combination of science, art, and craft to determine what to do with them. You sketch out an overall shape, paint the underlying environment, then fill in the details. You constantly step back with a critical eye to view what you’ve done. Every now and then you’ll throw a canvas away and start again. But artists will tell you that all the hard work is ruined if you don’t know when to stop. If you add layer upon layer, detail over detail, the painting becomes lost in the paint.

— Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, The Pragmatic Programmer

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…there is nothing more vexing, for instance, than to be rich, of respectable family, of decent appearance, of rather good education, not stupid, even kind, and at the same time to have no talent, no particularity, no oddity even, not a single idea of one’s own, to be decidedly “like everybody else.” There is wealth, but not a Rothschild’s; an honorable family, but which has never distinguished itself in any way; a decent appearance, but very little expression; a proper education, but without knowing what to apply it to; there is intelligence, but with no ideas of one’s own; there is a heart, but with no magnanimity, etc., etc., in all respects. There are a great many such people in the world and even far more than it seems; they are divided, as all people are, into two main categories: one limited, the other “much cleverer.” The first are happier. For the limited “usual” man, for instance, there is nothing easier than to imagine himself an unusual and original man and to revel in it without any hesitation.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

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The history of Earth up until now has been a history of optimizers spinning their wheels at a constant rate, generating a constant optimization pressure. And creating optimized products, not at a constant rate, but at an accelerating rate, because of how object-level innovations open up the pathway to other object-level innovations. But that acceleration is taking place with a protected meta level doing the actual optimizing.

— Robin Hanson, Eliezer Yudkowsky, The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate

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