“aphorisms”
111 posts under this tag.
Who of all the Wise could have foreseen it?
Or, if they are wise, why should they expect to know it, until the hour has struck?
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
Foretelling MUST be part of any worthwhile understanding.
(We can all come up on demand with plausible histories after the fact
and “description—often bad description—hiding behind obfuscatory rubbish.”)
Speculation’s to finance, what experimentation’s to science: THE TEST.
No one salubriously rich can claim to understand finance.
Whoever REALLY understands it is welcome to big bucks any day.
Heard that Douglas Adams’s creation story?
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Same thing may happen with finance:
Any understandable glimmer of it is too good an opportunity not to be instantly complicated away in the efforts to milk it.
This all but an instance of a bigger theory that claims:
your inability to foretell things foretelling abler (smarter) than you.
The future, society, others, and even you, among such things.
You don’t write for the past, who can’t read you.
Only in tangent do you write for the present, gone already.
Writing is not speaking, you speak for the present, you write for the future.
Reactions, eventually, come.
David Friedman ELZR introduces a fascinating classification of human cooperation in The Machinery of Freedom ELZR. There’s
force (imposing my end on you),
trade (“I’ll help you achieve your end if you help me achieve mine”),
and love (“making my end your end”).
The definition of love alone is, I think, a great achievement. It surely doesn’t include everything we mean by that impossibly burdened word (it doesn’t mention romance, liking or sex) but it does reveal one of love’s most important yet often implicit threads. It is abstract yet the more likely we are to call a love pure, the more likely it is about A caring about B for B’s sake alone.
An interesting exercise came to mind after reading the classification: What human activity/field corresponds to each kind of human cooperation?
The first two kinds are straightforward loosening words up a bit: Politics is the exercise of force. Economics is the exercise of trade. With love, I stumbled for the longest time. I have an answer now.
The exercise of love is… technology. A tool is the purest embodiment of love, of making someone else’s end your end. That’s why technology is so ambiguous, its ends are its users’ ends. Giving you a tool is the ultimate act of love, the more so the more control of it I give you, because by doing that I make my end your end, whatever your end may be—defending your life or stealing. Think of the geeks that cobbled up the internet, ignoring wtf the thing would be used for, coding only so that it would allow for it.
Don’t dismiss this as one geek’s techno-euphoria. There’s something deep in here. Technology is the exercise of love. “If you want to do good, work on the technology, not on getting power.” Nothing less than the meaning of our lives could be here.
Life Results from the Non-Random Survival of Randomly Varying Replicators.
My answer to life, the universe, and everything:
Randomness begets persistence
For among things that vary a lot,
and vary varyingly (= non-independently = causally),
what varies little remains (duh!)
For among things that persist,
what copies itself is an outbreak
Replication begets complexity
For among the ways to copy oneself,
the more successful ones are among the more complex
(for there are many, many more complex ways than simpler ones)
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.
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.
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.
Human beings are not just more mouths to feed, but are productive and inventive minds that help find creative solutions to man’s problems, thus leaving us better off over the long run… Every time a calf is born, the per capita GDP of a nation rises. Every time a human baby is born, the per capita GDP falls?
Julian Simon
Jump Point’s presentation the other day neither captivated nor disappointed me. Author Tom Hayes rapid-fired commonplaces for every enticing bit. About to forget it as yet one more glib futurist book, I saw it again today at my B & N, added it to my skimming pile (oh, the joys of American bookstores: they’re even better places for free reading than public libraries), and stumbled on a quote that took my heart away:
 ..they simply believed anything was possible and that the path forward would reveal itself eventually. When they hit a wall, they turned to the Internet, to the crowd, for help.
Their story is not an uncommon one. Everywhere you look, you can see entrepreneurs and true believers hurling themselves into the unknown, fortified only with a faith that the “net” will catch them, that small acts by many everyday people can be as useful as the influence of the connected and powerful.
To the Internet-based cognitive tools that are changing our lives — Wikipedia, Google, and the others of their kind, now and in the future.
his phrase. In 20 something words he nails down the present and future I want to contribute to, belong to.
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