p. 5 And I think quite a lot of people find the years straight out of college to be some of the hardest in life. All the educational framework which you've used to hold yourself up, and which in large part you've defined yourself by, is taken away and you're like a climbing rose without a trellis. And you either lie on the ground and rot or allow yourself to be pruned and get turned into a rosebush which can stand its own integrity.
p. 5 Suffice it to say, from that point on things began to improve. By which I don't mean that I jumped straight out of the [post-graduation/what-to-do-with-my-life] trough and shot up the greasy pole of success again, nor that I just exchanged low spirits for high spirits. I began to realize that hills and dales are equally impostors - like Kipling's triumph and disaster. Success can't keep its promises and failure can't hold its ground. One shouldn't be bamboozled by either state. The important thing is not to be in a certain state, but to be a certain kind of person in whichever state you find yourself. Sure, I think one has a duty to do as much as one can to fulfill one's potential, to strive for success, certainly to do good and avoid evil, but the outcome of one's efforts is of secondary importance. To quote a certain wizard's advice to a Mr. Underhill (significant name) who was lamenting that he lived in dark days: "All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us." Or to paraphrase Mother Teresa: We are not called to be successful; we are called to be faithful.
p. 7 At graduation I thought I'd arrived. Having done all I was told I should accomplish by way of earning a good degree from a good school, I thought I could expect life to unfurl smoothly before me in a series of ever more pleasant and successful scenes. It took me quite a while to realize that this wasn't to be my lot, that this is the lot of nobody, and that life actually proceeds according to what C.S. Lewis calls the "law of undulation." G.K. Chesterton called it the rolling English road.
Saturday, June 27, 2015
Monday, June 22, 2015
The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason, r. Jun. 2015
p. 14 As for study, did not our wise teacher teach us that learning was of two kinds: the one kind being the things we learned and knew, and the other being the training that taught us how to find out what we did not know?
p. 16 And when youth comes to age for advice he receives the wisdom of years. But too often does youth think that age knows only the wisdom of days gone, and therefor profits not. But remember this, the sun that shines today is the sun that shone when thy father was born, and will still be shining when thy last grandchild shall pass into the darkness.
p. 17 The thoughts of youth are bright lights that shine forth like the meteors that oft make brilliant the sky, but the wisdom of age is like the fixed stars that shine so unchanged that the sailor may depend upon them to steer his course.
p. 22 You have learned your lesson well. You first learned to live upon less than you could earn. Next you learned to seek advice from those who were competent through their own experiences to give it. And, lastly, you have learned to make gold work for you.
p. 24 When I set a task for myself, I complete it. Therefore, I am careful not to start difficult and impractical tasks, because I love leisure.
p. 26 A small return and a safe one is far more desirable than risk.
p. 26 Enjoy life while you are here. Do not overstrain or try to save too much. If one-tenth of all you earn is as much as you can comfortably keep, be content to keep this portion. Live otherwise according to your income and let not yourself get niggardly and afraid to spend. Life is good and life is rich with things worthwhile and things to enjoy.
p. 37 Which desirest thou the most? Is it the gratification of thy desires of each day, a jewel, a bit of finery, better raiment, more food; things quickly gone and forgotten? Or is it substantial belongings, gold, lands, herds, merchandise, income-bringing investments? The coins thou takest from thy purse bring the first. The coins thou leavest within it will bring the latter.
p. 46 Better by far to consult the wisdom of those experienced in handling money for profit. Such advice is freely given for the asking and may readily posses a value equal in gold to the sum thou considerest investing. In truth, such is its actual value if it save thee from loss.
p. 47 To a man's heart it bring gladness to eat the figs from his own trees and the grapes of his own vines. To own his own domicile and to have it a place he is proud to care for, putteth confidence in his heart and greater effort behind all his endeavors. Therefore, do I recommend that every man own the roof that sheltereth him and his.
p. 53 Preceding accomplishment must be desire. Thy desires must be strong and definite. General desires are but weak longings. For a man to wish to be rich is of little purpose. For a man to desire five pieces of gold is a tangible desire which he can press to fulfillment.
p. 97 Our wise acts accompany us through life to please us and to help us. Just as surely, our unwise acts follow us to plague and torment us.
p. 105 If you desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend's burdens upon thyself.
p. 113 I like not idle gold, even less I like too much of risk.
p. 116 Then be not swayed by foolish sentiments of obligation to trust thy treasure to any person. If thou wouldst help thy family or thy friends, find other ways than risking the loss of the treasure. Forget not that gold slippeth away in unexpected ways from those unskilled in guarding it. As well waste thy treasure in extravagance as let others lose it for thee.
p. 154 It was like having an adventure to make the change [to a cheaper lifestyle]. We enjoyed figuring this way and that, to live comfortably upon that remaining seventy percent.
p. 167 Some men hate [work]. They make it their enemy. Better to treat it like a friend, make thyself like it. Don't mind because it is hard. If thou thinkest about what a good house thou build, then who cares if the beams are heavy and it is far from the well to carry the water for the plaster…. Remember, work, well-done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a better man.
p. 16 And when youth comes to age for advice he receives the wisdom of years. But too often does youth think that age knows only the wisdom of days gone, and therefor profits not. But remember this, the sun that shines today is the sun that shone when thy father was born, and will still be shining when thy last grandchild shall pass into the darkness.
p. 17 The thoughts of youth are bright lights that shine forth like the meteors that oft make brilliant the sky, but the wisdom of age is like the fixed stars that shine so unchanged that the sailor may depend upon them to steer his course.
p. 22 You have learned your lesson well. You first learned to live upon less than you could earn. Next you learned to seek advice from those who were competent through their own experiences to give it. And, lastly, you have learned to make gold work for you.
p. 24 When I set a task for myself, I complete it. Therefore, I am careful not to start difficult and impractical tasks, because I love leisure.
p. 26 A small return and a safe one is far more desirable than risk.
p. 26 Enjoy life while you are here. Do not overstrain or try to save too much. If one-tenth of all you earn is as much as you can comfortably keep, be content to keep this portion. Live otherwise according to your income and let not yourself get niggardly and afraid to spend. Life is good and life is rich with things worthwhile and things to enjoy.
p. 37 Which desirest thou the most? Is it the gratification of thy desires of each day, a jewel, a bit of finery, better raiment, more food; things quickly gone and forgotten? Or is it substantial belongings, gold, lands, herds, merchandise, income-bringing investments? The coins thou takest from thy purse bring the first. The coins thou leavest within it will bring the latter.
p. 46 Better by far to consult the wisdom of those experienced in handling money for profit. Such advice is freely given for the asking and may readily posses a value equal in gold to the sum thou considerest investing. In truth, such is its actual value if it save thee from loss.
p. 47 To a man's heart it bring gladness to eat the figs from his own trees and the grapes of his own vines. To own his own domicile and to have it a place he is proud to care for, putteth confidence in his heart and greater effort behind all his endeavors. Therefore, do I recommend that every man own the roof that sheltereth him and his.
p. 53 Preceding accomplishment must be desire. Thy desires must be strong and definite. General desires are but weak longings. For a man to wish to be rich is of little purpose. For a man to desire five pieces of gold is a tangible desire which he can press to fulfillment.
p. 97 Our wise acts accompany us through life to please us and to help us. Just as surely, our unwise acts follow us to plague and torment us.
p. 105 If you desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend's burdens upon thyself.
p. 113 I like not idle gold, even less I like too much of risk.
p. 116 Then be not swayed by foolish sentiments of obligation to trust thy treasure to any person. If thou wouldst help thy family or thy friends, find other ways than risking the loss of the treasure. Forget not that gold slippeth away in unexpected ways from those unskilled in guarding it. As well waste thy treasure in extravagance as let others lose it for thee.
p. 154 It was like having an adventure to make the change [to a cheaper lifestyle]. We enjoyed figuring this way and that, to live comfortably upon that remaining seventy percent.
p. 167 Some men hate [work]. They make it their enemy. Better to treat it like a friend, make thyself like it. Don't mind because it is hard. If thou thinkest about what a good house thou build, then who cares if the beams are heavy and it is far from the well to carry the water for the plaster…. Remember, work, well-done, does good to the man who does it. It makes him a better man.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, r. May 2015
p. 17 Time is relative, said Heraclitus a long time ago, and distance a function of velocity. Since the ultimate goal of transport technology is the annihilation of space, the compression of all Being into one pure point, it follows that six-packs [of beer] help.
p. 35 He had gazed upon this scene a hundred times in his life so far; he knew that he might have only a hundred more.
p. 40 The brightest thing in Abbzug's dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good to do.
p. 60 "The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness."
p. 62 Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.
p. 63 Tho entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition.
p. 65 The river in its measureless sublimity rolled softly by, whispering of time. Which heals, they say, all. But does it? The stars looked kindly down. A lie. A wind in the willows suggested sleep. And nightmares. Smith pushed more drift pine into the fire, and a scorpion, dormant in a crack deep in the wood, was horribly awakened, too late. No one noticed the mute agony. Deep in the solemn canyon, under the fiery stars, peace reigned generally.
p. 154 "You're a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds."
p. 237 While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see.
p. 336 What do we really know? … The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.
p. 35 He had gazed upon this scene a hundred times in his life so far; he knew that he might have only a hundred more.
p. 40 The brightest thing in Abbzug's dome was a brain. She was too wise to linger long with any fad, though she tested them all. With an intelligence too fine to be violated by ideas, she had learned that she was searching not for self-transformation (she liked herself) but for something good to do.
p. 60 "The wilderness once offered men a plausible way of life," the doctor said. "Now it functions as a psychiatric refuge. Soon there will be no wilderness."
p. 62 Far beyond those galloping galaxies, or perhaps all too present to be seen, lurked God. The gaseous vertebrate.
p. 63 Tho entertainment palled. Fatigue like gravitation pulled at limbs and eyelids. As they had come so they departed, first Abbzug, then the two women from San Diego. The ladies first. Not because they were the weaker sex - they were not - but simply because they had more sense. Men on an outing feel obliged to stay up drinking to the vile and bilious end, jabbering, mumbling and maundering through the blear, to end up finally on hands and knees, puking on innocent sand, befouling God's sweet earth. The manly tradition.
p. 65 The river in its measureless sublimity rolled softly by, whispering of time. Which heals, they say, all. But does it? The stars looked kindly down. A lie. A wind in the willows suggested sleep. And nightmares. Smith pushed more drift pine into the fire, and a scorpion, dormant in a crack deep in the wood, was horribly awakened, too late. No one noticed the mute agony. Deep in the solemn canyon, under the fiery stars, peace reigned generally.
p. 154 "You're a verbal cripple. You use obscenities as a crutch. Obscenity is a crutch for crippled minds."
p. 237 While outside in the fields of desert summer the melons ripened at their leisure in the nest of their vines, and a restless rooster, perched on the roof of the hencoop, fired his premature ejaculation at the waning moon, and in the pasture the horses lifted noble Roman heads to stare in the night at something humans cannot see.
p. 336 What do we really know? … The world of dreams, the agony of love and the foreknowledge of death. That is all we know. And all we need to know? Challenge that statement. I challenge that statement. With what? I don't know.
Friday, May 1, 2015
The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, r. Apr. 2015
p. 1 Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allow you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books.
p. 11 History and societies do not crawl. They makes jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Ye we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.
p. 48 Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar.
p. 94 A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together - which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
p. 119 My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.
p. 133 I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs…. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid tunneling.
p. 144 Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to process them.
p. 187 Always remember that "R-square" is unfit for Extremistan; it is only good for academic promotion.
p. 193 …the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we project it as another yesterday.
p. 194 …an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions - yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.
p. 198 History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help with the future, without some caution…. The empirical doctor's approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much - but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that.
p. 210 Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decision around that.
p. 211 This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
p. 217 Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).
p. 227 But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will always be there…. The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth - unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.
p. 241 I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, "virtue lies in moderation."
p. 255 My erudite and polymathic father liked the company of extremely cultured Jesuit priests. I remember these Jesuit visitors occupying my chair at the dining table. I recall that one had a medical degree and a PhD in physics, yet taught Aramaic to locals in Beirut's Institute of Eastern Languages. His previous assignment could have been teaching high school physics, and the one before that was perhaps in the medical school. This kind of erudition impressed my father far more than scientific assembly-line work.
p. 256 The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation…. In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.
p. 268 What I am talking about is opacity, incompleteness of information, the invisibility of the generator of the world. History does not reveal its mind to us - we need to guess what's inside of it.
p. 289 Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers like to call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.
p. 290 A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library, as in the joke by Daniel Dennett.
p. 296 I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures - the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts.
p. 297 Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behaviour, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
p. 297 I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception…. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportion…. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth - remember you are a Black Swan.
p. 300 After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novel of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.
p. 307 …almost all academic papers are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students.
p. 312 First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives) - and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness. The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.
p. 313 Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have several years of income in cash before taking any personal risk - exactly my barbell idea of Chapter 11, in which one keeps high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks but with a small portion of the portfolio.
p. 316 To those who say "We have no proof we are harming nature," a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either,"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
p. 319 This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive…
p. 319 …people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial.
p. 323 One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
p. 326
p. 328 I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress - another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.
p. 330 So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem - harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is on not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.
p. 333 Indeed, the intelligent, curious, and open-minded amateur is my friend. A pleasant surprise for me was to discover that the sophisticated amateur who uses books for his own edification, and the journalist, could understand my ideas much better than professionals. Professional readers, less genuine, either read too quickly or have an agenda.
p. 334 …many readers (say, those who work in forecasting or banking) do not understand that the "actionable step" for them is simply to quit their profession and do something more ethical.
p. 334 …as almost all business books can be reduced to a few pages without any loss of their message and essence; novels and philosophical treatments cannot be compressed.
p. 334 …evolution does not work by teaching, but destroying.
p. 336 For I had undergone a difficult psychological moment, after the publication of The Black Swan, what the French call traversée du désert, when you go through the demoralizing desiccation and disorientation of crossing a desert in search of an unknown destination, or a more or less promised land. I had a rough time, shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" about the hidden risks in the system, and hearing people ignoring the content and instead just criticizing the presentation, as if they were saying "your diction in shouting 'Fire!' is bad." For example, the curator of a conference known as TED (a monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers) complained that my presentation style did not conform to his taste in slickness…
p. 338 When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
p. 361 It is much more sound to take risks you can measure than to measure the risks you are taking.
p. 362 David's comments also inspired me to focus more on iatrogenics, harm caused by the need to use quantitative models.
p. 368 How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.
p. 368 Science, particularly its academic version, has never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertising of its own limits. The reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports - following the right steps to become "the Einstein of Economics" or "the next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.
p. 371 Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.
p. 371 Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. Psychologists tell us that getting rich does not bring happiness - if you spend your savings. But if you hide it under the mattress, you are less vulnerable to a Black Swan.
p. 371 Overspecialization is not a great idea. Consider what can happen to you if your job disappears completely. Someone who is a Wall Street analyst moonlighting as a bellydancer will do a lot better in a financial crisis than someone who is just an analyst.
p. 377 This is my Plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination. I felt robust.
p. 378
p. 11 History and societies do not crawl. They makes jumps. They go from fracture to fracture, with a few vibrations in between. Ye we (and historians) like to believe in the predictable, small incremental progression.
p. 48 Let me insist that erudition is important to me. It signals genuine intellectual curiosity. It accompanies an open mind and the desire to probe the ideas of others. Above all, an erudite can be dissatisfied with his own knowledge, and such dissatisfaction is a wonderful shield against Platonicity, the simplifications of the five-minute manager, or the philistinism of the overspecialized scholar.
p. 94 A school allows someone with unusual ideas with the remote possibility of a payoff to find company and create a microcosm insulated from others. The members of the group can be ostracized together - which is better than being ostracized alone. If you engage in a Black Swan-dependent activity, it is better to be part of a group.
p. 119 My being here is a consequential low-probability occurrence, and I tend to forget it.
p. 133 I propose that if you want a simple step to a higher form of life, as distant as you can get, then you may have to denarrate, that is, shut down the television set, minimize time spent reading newspapers, ignore the blogs…. This insulation from the toxicity of the world will have an additional benefit: it will improve your well-being. Also, bear in mind how shallow we are with probability, the mother of all abstract notions. You do not have to do much more in order to gain a deeper understanding of things around you. Above all, learn to avoid tunneling.
p. 144 Remember that we treat ideas like possessions, and it will be hard for us to process them.
p. 187 Always remember that "R-square" is unfit for Extremistan; it is only good for academic promotion.
p. 193 …the relationship between the past and the future does not learn from the relationship between the past and the past previous to it. There is a blind spot: when we think of tomorrow we do not frame it in terms of what we thought about yesterday on the day before yesterday. Because of this introspective defect we fail to learn about the difference between our past predictions and the subsequent outcomes. When we think of tomorrow, we project it as another yesterday.
p. 194 …an element in the mechanics of how the human mind learns from the past makes us believe in definitive solutions - yet not consider that those who preceded us thought that they too had definitive solutions. We laugh at others and we don't realize that someone will be just as justified in laughing at us on some not too remote day.
p. 198 History is useful for the thrill of knowing the past, and for the narrative (indeed), provided it remains a harmless narrative. One should learn under severe caution. History is certainly not a place to theorize or derive general knowledge, nor is it meant to help with the future, without some caution…. The empirical doctor's approach to the problem of induction was to know history without theorizing from it. Learn to read history, get all the knowledge you can, do not frown on the anecdote, but do not draw any causal links, do not try to reverse engineer too much - but if you do, do not make big scientific claims. Remember that the empirical skeptics had respect for custom: they used it as a default, a basis for action, but not for more than that.
p. 210 Indeed, the notion of asymmetric outcomes is the central idea of this book: I will never get to know the unknown since, by definition, it is unknown. However, I can always guess how it might affect me, and I should base my decision around that.
p. 211 This idea that in order to make a decision you need to focus on the consequences (which you can know) rather than the probability (which you can't know) is the central idea of uncertainty.
p. 217 Note that scholars are judged mostly on how many times their work is referenced in other people's work, and thus cliques of people who quote one another are formed (it's an "I quote you, you quote me" type of business).
p. 227 But I find the emphasis on economic inequality, at the expense of other types of inequality, extremely bothersome. Fairness is not exclusively an economic matter; it becomes less and less so when we are satisfying our basic material needs. It is pecking order that matters! The superstars will always be there…. The disproportionate share of the very few in intellectual influence is even more unsettling than the unequal distribution of wealth - unsettling because, unlike the income gap, no social policy can eliminate it.
p. 241 I always remember my father's injunction that in medio stat virtus, "virtue lies in moderation."
p. 255 My erudite and polymathic father liked the company of extremely cultured Jesuit priests. I remember these Jesuit visitors occupying my chair at the dining table. I recall that one had a medical degree and a PhD in physics, yet taught Aramaic to locals in Beirut's Institute of Eastern Languages. His previous assignment could have been teaching high school physics, and the one before that was perhaps in the medical school. This kind of erudition impressed my father far more than scientific assembly-line work.
p. 256 The scientific association with a big idea, the "brand name," goes to the one who connects the dots, not the one who makes a casual observation…. In the end it is those who derive consequences and seize the importance of the ideas, seeing their real value, who win the day. They are the ones who can talk about the subject.
p. 268 What I am talking about is opacity, incompleteness of information, the invisibility of the generator of the world. History does not reveal its mind to us - we need to guess what's inside of it.
p. 289 Philosophers like to practice philosophical thinking on me-too subjects that other philosophers like to call philosophy, and they leave their minds at the door when they are outside these subjects.
p. 290 A scholar should not be a library's tool for making another library, as in the joke by Daniel Dennett.
p. 296 I worry far more about the "promising" stock market, particularly the "safe" blue chip stocks, than I do about speculative ventures - the former present invisible risks, the latter offer no surprises since you know how volatile they are and can limit your downside by investing smaller amounts.
p. 297 Snub your destiny. I have taught myself to resist running to keep on schedule. This may seem a very small piece of advice, but it registered. In refusing to run to catch trains, I have felt the true value of elegance and aesthetics in behaviour, a sense of being in control of my time, my schedule, and my life. Missing a train is only painful if you run after it! Likewise, not matching the idea of success others expect from you is only painful if that’s what you are seeking. You stand above the rat race and the pecking order, not outside of it, if you do so by choice.
p. 297 I am sometimes taken aback by how people can have a miserable day or get angry because they feel cheated by a bad meal, cold coffee, a social rebuff, or a rude reception…. We are quick to forget that just being alive is an extraordinary piece of good luck, a remote event, a chance occurrence of monstrous proportion…. Stop looking the gift horse in the mouth - remember you are a Black Swan.
p. 300 After a long but soothing lachrymal episode, Yevgenia thought of the characters in the rainy novel of Georges Simenon and Graham Greene. They lived in a state of numbing and secure mediocrity. Second-rateness had charm, Yevgenia thought, and she had always preferred charm over beauty.
p. 307 …almost all academic papers are made to bore, impress, provide credibility, intimidate even, be presented at meetings, but not to be read except by suckers (or detractors) or, even worse, graduate students.
p. 312 First, Mother Nature likes redundancies, three different types of redundancies. The first, the simplest to understand, is defensive redundancy, the insurance type of redundancy that allows you to survive under adversity, thanks to the availability of spare parts. Look at the human body. We have two eyes, two lungs, two kidneys, even two brains (with the possible exception of corporate executives) - and each has more capacity than needed in ordinary circumstances. So redundancy equals insurance, and the apparent inefficiencies are associated with the costs of maintaining these spare parts and the energy needed to keep them around in spite of their idleness. The exact opposite of redundancy is naïve optimization.
p. 313 Felix qui nihil debet goes the Roman proverb: "Happy is he who owes nothing." Grandmothers who survived the Great Depression would have advised the exact opposite of debt: redundancy; they would urge us to have several years of income in cash before taking any personal risk - exactly my barbell idea of Chapter 11, in which one keeps high cash reserves while taking more aggressive risks but with a small portion of the portfolio.
p. 316 To those who say "We have no proof we are harming nature," a sound response is "We have no proof that we are not harming nature, either,"; the burden of proof is not on the ecological conservationist, but on someone disrupting an old system. Furthermore we should not "try to correct" the harm done, as we may be creating another problem we do not know much about currently.
p. 319 This makes me reflect on the foolishness of thinking that books are there to be read and could be replaced by electronic files. Think of the spate of functional redundancies provided by books. You cannot impress your neighbors with electronic files. You cannot prop up your ego with electronic files. Objects seem to have invisible but significant auxiliary functions that we are not aware of consciously, but that allow them to thrive…
p. 319 …people like to go to a precise destination, rather than face some degree of uncertainty, even if beneficial.
p. 323 One useful trick, I discovered, is to avoid listening to the question of the interviewer, and answer with whatever I have been thinking about recently. Remarkably, neither the interviewers nor the public notices the absence of correlation between question and answer.
p. 326
p. 328 I lack what the biologist Robert Sapolsky calls the beneficial aspect of acute stress, compared to the deleterious one of dull stress - another barbell, for no stress plus a little bit of extreme stress is vastly better than a little bit of stress (like mortgage worries) all the time.
p. 330 So The Black Swan is about human error in some domains, swelled by a long tradition of scientism and a plethora of information that fuels confidence without increasing knowledge. It covers the expert problem - harm caused by reliance on scientific-looking charlatans, with or without equations, or regular noncharlatanic scientists with a bit more confidence about their methods than the evidence warrants. The focus is on not being the turkey in places where it matters, though there is nothing wrong in being a fool where that has no effect.
p. 333 Indeed, the intelligent, curious, and open-minded amateur is my friend. A pleasant surprise for me was to discover that the sophisticated amateur who uses books for his own edification, and the journalist, could understand my ideas much better than professionals. Professional readers, less genuine, either read too quickly or have an agenda.
p. 334 …many readers (say, those who work in forecasting or banking) do not understand that the "actionable step" for them is simply to quit their profession and do something more ethical.
p. 334 …as almost all business books can be reduced to a few pages without any loss of their message and essence; novels and philosophical treatments cannot be compressed.
p. 334 …evolution does not work by teaching, but destroying.
p. 336 For I had undergone a difficult psychological moment, after the publication of The Black Swan, what the French call traversée du désert, when you go through the demoralizing desiccation and disorientation of crossing a desert in search of an unknown destination, or a more or less promised land. I had a rough time, shouting "Fire! Fire! Fire!" about the hidden risks in the system, and hearing people ignoring the content and instead just criticizing the presentation, as if they were saying "your diction in shouting 'Fire!' is bad." For example, the curator of a conference known as TED (a monstrosity that turns scientists and thinkers into low-level entertainers, like circus performers) complained that my presentation style did not conform to his taste in slickness…
p. 338 When you walk the walk, whether successful or not, you feel more indifferent and robust to people's opinion, freer, more real.
p. 361 It is much more sound to take risks you can measure than to measure the risks you are taking.
p. 362 David's comments also inspired me to focus more on iatrogenics, harm caused by the need to use quantitative models.
p. 368 How do you live long? By avoiding death. Yet people do not realize that success consists mainly in avoiding losses, not in trying to derive profits.
p. 368 Science, particularly its academic version, has never liked negative results, let alone the statement and advertising of its own limits. The reward system is not set up for it. You get respect for doing funambulism or spectator sports - following the right steps to become "the Einstein of Economics" or "the next Darwin" rather than give society something real by debunking myths or by cataloguing where our knowledge stops.
p. 371 Remember that the burden of proof lies on someone disturbing a complex system, not on the person protecting the status quo.
p. 371 Redundancy (in terms of having savings and cash under the mattress) is the opposite of debt. Psychologists tell us that getting rich does not bring happiness - if you spend your savings. But if you hide it under the mattress, you are less vulnerable to a Black Swan.
p. 371 Overspecialization is not a great idea. Consider what can happen to you if your job disappears completely. Someone who is a Wall Street analyst moonlighting as a bellydancer will do a lot better in a financial crisis than someone who is just an analyst.
p. 377 This is my Plan B. I kept looking at the position of my own grave. A Black Swan cannot so easily destroy a man who has an idea of his final destination. I felt robust.
p. 378
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, r. Apr. 2015
p. 36 What sticks to memory, often, are those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end:
p. 71 When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
p. 81 To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.
p. 122 "Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear."
p. 158 ...it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up certain others.
p. 184 Everything was too ordinary. A quiet sunny day, and the field was not the field I remembered. I pictured Kiowa's face, the way he used to smile, but all I felt was the awkwardness of remembering.
p. 184 There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.
p. 230 The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
p. 246 I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is a Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
p. 71 When a guy dies, like Curt Lemon, you look away and then look back for a moment and then look away again. The pictures get jumbled; you tend to miss a lot. And then afterward, when you go to tell about it, there is always that surreal seemingness, which makes the story seem untrue, but which in fact represents the hard and exact truth as it seemed.
p. 81 To generalize about war is like generalizing about peace. Almost everything is true. Almost nothing is true. At its core, perhaps, war is just another name for death, and yet any soldier will tell you, if he tells the truth, that proximity to death brings with it a corresponding proximity to life. After a firefight, there is always the immense pleasure of aliveness. The trees are alive. The grass, the soil—everything. All around you things are purely living, and you among them, and the aliveness makes you tremble. You feel an intense, out-of-the-skin awareness of your living self—your truest self, the human being you want to be and then become by the force of wanting it. In the midst of evil you want to be a good man. You want decency. You want justice and courtesy and human concord, things you never knew you wanted. There is a kind of largeness to it, a kind of godliness. Though it’s odd, you’re never more alive than when you’re almost dead. You recognize what’s valuable. Freshly, as if for the first time, you love what’s best in yourself and in the world, all that might be lost.
p. 122 "Not a minister," he said, "but I do like churches. The way it feels inside. It feels good when you just sit there, like you're in a forest and everything's really quiet, except there's still this sound you can't hear."
p. 158 ...it occurred to me that the act of writing had led me through a swirl of memories that might otherwise have ended in paralysis or worse. By telling stories, you objectify your own experience. You separate it from yourself. You pin down certain truths. You make up certain others.
p. 184 Everything was too ordinary. A quiet sunny day, and the field was not the field I remembered. I pictured Kiowa's face, the way he used to smile, but all I felt was the awkwardness of remembering.
p. 184 There were birds and butterflies, the soft rustlings of rural-anywhere.
p. 230 The thing about a story is that you dream it as you tell it, hoping that others might then dream along with you, and in this way memory and imagination and language combine to make spirits in the head. There is the illusion of aliveness.
p. 246 I'm young and happy. I'll never die. I'm skimming across the surface of my own history, moving fast, riding the melt beneath the blades, doing loops and spins, and when I take a high leap into the dark and come down thirty years later, I realize it is a Tim trying to save Timmy's life with a story.
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, r. Apr. 2015
p. 28 Pozzo: I too would be happy to meet him. The more people I meet the happier I become. From the meanest creature one departs wiser, richer, more conscious of one's blessings.
p. 73 Vladimir: And where were we yesterday evening according to you? Estragon: How would I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void.
p. 77 Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians.
p. 90 Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.
p. 103 Pozzo: …. They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
p. 105. Vladimir: …. But habit is a great deadener.
p. 73 Vladimir: And where were we yesterday evening according to you? Estragon: How would I know? In another compartment. There's no lack of void.
p. 77 Estragon: We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist? Vladimir: (impatiently). Yes yes, we're magicians.
p. 90 Vladimir: Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! (Pause. Vehemently.) Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed.
p. 103 Pozzo: …. They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it's night once more.
p. 105. Vladimir: …. But habit is a great deadener.
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
O Vendedor de Sonhos: O Chamado por Augusto Cury, l. abr. 2015
p. 96 “— Show? Cada dia é um show, cada dia um espetáculo. Só não o descobre quem está mortalmente ferido pelo tédio. O drama e a comédia estão em nosso cérebro. Basta despertá-los.”
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