There is no question that ideas and artifacts evolve, in the sense that they will start varying from one another, and some will be selected in preference to others, and then transmitted to a new generation. Most people assume that this cultural “evolution” is simply an extension of human evolution. After all, they argue, ideas and objects could not survive without us, and therefore they could not have an independent evolutionary history. But that is like saying that humans are part of the evolution of plants, since we could not survive without them. It is true that memes need our minds to exist and evolve, but then so do we require air, water, and photosynthesis, among other things, for our survival. Therefore it does not seem that memes are any more dependent on their environment than we are.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving SelfAM
thought memes more than a cool metaphor before. Now I’m scared.
Each person creates the world he or she lives in by investing attention in certain things, and by doing so according to certain patterns. The world constructed on the blueprints provided by the genes is one in which all of a person’s attention is invested in furthering the agenda of “reproductive fitness.” This is a simple goal: How can I get enough out of the environment to make sure that I reproduce and that my children will also have children? In less complex organisms, like many species of insects, practically the entire life span is dedicated to the project of laying a clutch of eggs; promptly afterward, the parents expire. Like every other organism, the butterfly has evolved to see only those things that will either help or hinder the survival of its offspring. Its world is made up of flowery shapes that provide nectar, and shapes that resemble predators that are best avoided. Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, The Evolving SelfAM
Flow was one of the best books I’ve ever read. I’m halfway through its sequel, The Evolving self, and I can already say the same for it. I’m already having trouble remembering meself before I started reading it—it’s one of those books that stretches and rewrites you as you read it. It’s also deeper than Flow, more speculative, darker—the whole first half has been about the (inevitable) obstacles to human freedom.
After reading Flow I felt confident happiness, joy, flow, would always be at hand, always within me. Yet I also realized that happiness, joy, and flow were not enough. The Evolving Self is about what’s missing.
Enough is enough. I don’t overmuch care for my looks but as Scott Adam says: “physical appearance is for the benefit of others.” It’s been years now and them comedones (white- and blackheads), papules, pustules, nodules, cysts, and milia ain’t getting any better by themselves. I’ve buried my pimpled head long enough!
I’ve tried several treatments over the years but nothing has really made any difference. Now, I’m going to start following the regimen suggested at Daniel Kern’s Acne.org, where I’ve found hope and, to my surprise, perhaps the best online store I know of.
More than a store, it’s a community and a resource for people fighting acne. A real community and a real resource, not like those crappy, dishonest spamsites parasiting the web. It’s usable and helpful, aesthetically pleasing and modern yet not flashy. Huge effort has been put into countless details across the website—you can tell by being pleasantly surprised at every turn. It’s enormously didactic, deploying at once both excellent copy, ingenious photos, superb diagrams, detailed videos, in-depth tests, and subtle yet effective graphic design.
Overall, the most amazing thing is that in this cynical spam-full age, you (at least I) come to believe Daniel Kern honestly cares about fighting acne.
So, check out Acne.org if you have acne, if you’re interested in online commerce/communities, or if you’re interested in the future of retail medicine.
(Peter Morville narrates an interesting, similar experience finding a kooky cure to his back pain thru the web in Ambient Findability, p 163)
..she believed that houses were meant to be thought of as vehicles—physically fixed, but logically mobile..
Greg Egan, Permutation City
It is possible to believe that all the past is but the beginning of a beginning, and that all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn. It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening… All this world is heavy with the promise of greater things, and a day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
H. G. Wells
Es posible creer que todo el pasado es solo el principio del principio, y que todo lo que es y ha sido es solo el crespusculo del amanecer. Es posible creer que todo lo que la mente humana ha logrado jamas es solo el suenho antes del despertar… Todo este mundo esta cargado con la promesa de cosas mas grandes, y el dia llegara, un dia en la interminable sucesion de dias, cuando seres, seres ya latentes en nuestros pensamientos y escondidos en nuestras ingles, habran de erguirse sobre esta tierra como se yergue uno sobre un banquillo, y habran de reirse y estirar sus manos entre las estrellas.
First read it at Alcor’s epilogue. It has kept me in thrall since.
(Alcor’s website, apropos, has a wonderful, content-rich website. See, for instance, their detailed FAQs on cryonics or Mike Darwin’s rousing, impassioned Why we are cryonicists)
It’s been a while now since I read this Reason interview to Peter Thiel but I’m still moved by it. The purpose of life is life. How mindblowing a concept, huh?
Thiel: One of the things that’s very misleading about acceleration and exponential growth is that it’s slow at first and then it’s fast, and so the future happens more slowly than people expect and then it happens more quickly.
reason: There’s another popular narrative for the 21st century that says humanity is going to wreck the planet. Are the environmentalist doomsayers right?
Thiel: My sense is that they’re not right. I’m not an expert on it, but what I think is different from climate-change catastrophe vs. the Singularity is that climate seems like such a pedestrian thing to talk about. You talk about it every day. There’s a tendency to overdramatize the climate, and it’s something everybody can have opinions about. So I don’t think there’s a cognitive bias where people are incapable of imagining the world’s climate changing. That seems like a very easy thing for people to imagine, and maybe it’s also an easy thing for people to get hysterical about. On the other hand, computers running the world or this radical progress of technology —that’s something where I think there’s just no imagination at all.
reason: Do you consider yourself a transhumanist?
Thiel: The problem with the label is that it suggests that we should run away from being human. Take the question of aging. If you define that as the essence of being human, then transhumanists are anti-aging and therefore you try to transcend this human limitation. I don’t think that death and life are inextricably interconnected in some sort of Eastern mystical sense in which for everything white there’s something black and there’s always a yin/yang type of thing. Every myth on this planet tells us the purpose of life is death, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the purpose of life is life.
There are many useful tips for improving your conversation, from the “take advantage of freely offered details” to the “ask open-ended questions”, but the true secret of it, I think, was offered by Scott Adams in his wonderful little book, God’s Debris:
“What topic interests you more than any other?”
“Myself, I guess,” I confessed.
“Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics. Your awkward silences can be solved by asking simple questions about the person’s life.”
“That would be totally phony,” I said. “First of all, it would be like interrogating him. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly pretend to be interested in the answers. If he turns out to be some shoe salesman living with his mother in Albany, my eyes will glaze over.”
“ It would seem phony to you while you asked the questions, but it would not seem that way to the stranger. To him it is an unexpected gift, an opportunity to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures: talking about oneself. He would become more animated and he would instantly begin to like you. You would seem to be a brilliant and talented conversationalist, even if your only contribution was asking questions and listening. And you would have solved the stranger’s fear of an awkward silence. For that he will be grateful.”
“That solves the stranger’s problem, but I have to listen to this guy drone on about himself. The cure is worse than the disease.”
“Your questions to the stranger are only the starting points. From there you can steer him toward the thing you care about most—yourself.”
“Wouldn’t he want to talk about himself instead of me?”
“When you find out how others deal with their situations it is automatically relevant to you,” he said. “There will always be parallels in your life. Find out what you and he have in common, then ask how he likes it, how he deals with it, and if he has any clever solutions for it. Perhaps you both have long commutes, or you both have mothers who call too often or you both ski. Find that point of common interest and you will both be talking about yourself to the delight of the other.”
Also valuable is this sideline:
“You think casual conversation is a waste of time.”
“Sure, unless I have something to say. I don’t know how people can blab about nothing.”
“Your problem is that you view conversation as a way to exchange information,” he said.
“That’s what it is,” I said, thinking I was pointing out the obvious.
“Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect.
Philosophical experiment: everytime you hear a purpose or goal, rephrase it in terms of the underlying need or desire using the word “itch”. Report.
could is bigger than is
math is bigger than physics
science is the attempt to find among the could what is
PS1: We need a word for philosophical stanzas, for loosely sequential aphorisms.
PS2: Twitter and Jaiku are the best named webapps ever. Making their naming even more remarkable, the service they so coolly describe, microblogging, is so new and difficult to explain.
Have only read 3 quotes of it and it may already be one of my favorite books ;)
Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
There’s a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that. No rules, no limits.
Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.
As part of our WUXMs (Weekly User Experience Meetups, a tiny event of fine people), Chris crafted Tonight Radio, a very cool mashup to listen to the bands playing in town tonight, this week, this month; the idea is to make it easier to find and sample new cool bands to go watch live.
I was going to wait announcing it until I got my Caltrain timetable redesign finished but today Tonight Radio won mashup of the day and I couldn’t hold any longer.
For the longest time back in Mexico I had this idea of turning one of the rooms in the house into a media room but I could never explain, let alone convince, anyone else in the house. I was thus happily surprised with this article in the NYT on how pimped up, hi-tech rec rooms are coming into their own. The encroachment of media—technology mediated culture—on our civilization, and particularly our generation, is nothing short of amazing.
The Fowlers worked with Ms. Kole’s firm to transform their den with a wide-screen TV, pool table, loungy furniture and a workstation with computers. “It’s so different than when I was growing up,” said Ms. Fowler. “I never wanted to be caught dead at home.”
Dana Cuff, a professor of architecture and urban planning at U.C.L.A., sees several factors behind teenagers’ willingness to stay home. “There is a rise in home technology, all your friends are online, and there are far fewer safe, interesting public spaces to hang out in,” she said. “All of these things come together, and parents start creating houses within houses for their teens.”
Surprisingly deep insights can be had ruminating about, you know, stuff.
...life is not about stuff; it’s about possibilities, which the right tools can enable.
Imagine the life you want to live. I cannot think of a sentence that has had more impact on the lives of people I have worked with. ... When clutter fills your home, not only does it block your space, but it also blocks your vision.
Get rid of the trash to make room for the treasures. Let the things that are important take center stage.
The biggest change in attitude this book made in my life was to teach me not to generate false relevance by “organizing” stuff I don’t want or will never need. Organization is what you do to stuff that you need, want, or love – it’s not what you do to get useless stuff out of sight or to manufacture makebelieve meaning.
For my sister, Alex, who will start her Economics major this July
Economists are philosophers of human action.
They’re close to psychologists, neurologists, sociologists, anthropologists, and ethicists.
But psychologists focus on the mind behind the human action, neurologists focus on the underlying brain, sociologists on the surrounding society, anthropologists on the enveloping culture. Ethicists focus on the aesthetics of human action, on what human action should be.
Economists, on the other hand, focus on the actions themselves, on trying to understand them in their own terms. They ask questions like:
What patterns does human action follow? What different kinds can we usefully distinguish? Why are these actions taken? What are the goals behind these actions? What would the consequences be of these actions? Why do these actions have these consequences? In other words, what is the interplay between goals, conditions, actions, and consequences? If someone took these actions what actions are others expected to take? How will these actions affect others? What are the best actions to take given these goals? How best to organize and coordinate human action? What are the limits of human action? How to improve human action?
Free trade is when a trade doesn’t need the consent of anyone but the traders.
A trader is an owner of property to be traded.
The above definitions after this inspiring but somewhat muddled definition of free trade. I particularly like the second, satellite definition because it safeguards the first: If you want to contort a party into a trade and still call it free, having to specify exactly what it is this party owns can make the contortion clearer—all sorts of patronizing, noble-sounding words can be used to camouflage deception, but to own is a very strong word that makes us pay attention and rightly so.
It’s claimed that government is a legitimate party in sex trade (say, prostitution) because it has to defend public morals, clients and prostitutes, but what is it that gov’t owns? Clients’ and prostitutes’ bodies and money? Public morals? Gov’t is also claimed a legitimate party to international trade (say, immigration) in the name of protecting domestic industry, but what is it that gov’t owns? Domestic industry? Employers’ or employees’ time and money?
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