John Lyne

John Lyne

Aircraft Performance Engineer

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booknotes

History

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A collection of notes from books read on history.

Psychology

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A collection of notes from books read on pyschology.

Eastern Philosophy

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A collection of notes from books read on eastern philosophy including buddhism, buddhist psychology, buddhist philosophy, and confucian philosophy.

The Coddling of the American Mind

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The Coddling of the American Mind by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff, 2018

This book touches on the recent developments in some American universities, and tries to identify some of the causal mechanisms that give rise to the “… new problems on campus, [which] have their origins in three terrible ideas that have become increasingly woven into American childhood and education: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker; always trust your feelings; and life is a battle between good people and evil people. These three Great Untruths contradict basic psychological principles about well-being and ancient wisdom from many cultures. Embracing these untruths—and the resulting culture of safetyism—interferes with young people’s social, emotional, and intellectual development. It makes it harder for them to become autonomous adults who are able to navigate the bumpy road of life.”

Elephant in the Brain

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Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

A book about psychological truths that we tend to pretend don’t exist but are more or less obvious, much like the saying “the elephant in the room”. Hence the title, the elephant in the brain.

The Evolution of God

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The Evolution of God by Robert Wright

This book sees how religion evolved alongside humans, from hunter gatherer tribes to civilizations. More emphasis on the monotheist Abrahamic religions.

Guns, Germs, and Steel

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Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

This book explores the question of why some regions of the world developed and expanded faster than others.

Happiness Hypothesis

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Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt

A book about happiness that uses a clever metaphor to describe the conflict between primitive motives and conscious thought.

The Brothers Karamazov

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The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • “It sometimes happens that [the odd man] bears within himself the heart of the whole, while the other people of his epoch have all for some reason been torn away from it for a time by some kind of flooding wind.”
  • Fyodor’s first wife was well-off, while he was not. Narrator suggests Adelaida was an echo of foreign influence, a mind imprisoned, wanting to assert her feminine independence and go against social conventions, despite the despotism of her relatives. Fyodor latched on for the potential of social status. Neither loved each other, both using each other to satiate their respective desires for anti-conformity (Adelaida) and status (Fyodor)
  • When Adelaida left him, Fyodor gleefully recounted his woes to all. “One would think you had been promoted, you’re so pleased despite all your woes!”
  • In most cases, people, even wicked people, are far more naive and simple-hearted than one generally assumes. And so are we.
    • Wickedness stems from banal ignorance
  • Fyodor abandoned his first son, not out of malice, but simply because he totally forgot about him
  • “Who was apparently not wicked but had become a most insufferable crank from sheer idleness.”
  • “…that eternally needy and miserable mass of our students of both sexes who…habitually haunt the doorways of various newspapers and magazines…to invent anything better than the eternal repetition of one and the same plea for copying work or translations from the French.”
  • “The question of atheism…of the Tower of Babel built precisely without God, not to go from earth to heaven but to bring heaven down to earth.”
    • The issue with bringing heaven to earth, is that it runs counter to the theme of delayed gratification that the concept of heaven attempts to instil in followers. Heaven is like a macro-level delayed gratification mechanism, urging people to forego selfish urges in promise of blissful paradise—yet this paradise realistically lies within the future generations of the social group. When we try to bring blissful paradise to earth with no faith, the future risks crumbling in the wake of hedonic indulgence—hell. Faith is our ability to look ahead, and if we don’t look ahead, we get nowhere.
  • “Perhaps…this tested and already thousand year old instrument for the moral regeneration of man from slavery to freedom and to moral perfection may turn into a double edged weapon, which may lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride—that is, to chains and not freedom.”
    • Like Buddhas story of self-indulgence to self-mortification
  • “The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lies…does not discern any truth either in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others.”
  • “It sometimes feels very good to take offense…he likes feeling offended…and thus he teaches the point of real hostility.”
  • About a doctor: “the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular.”
  • “And avoid fear, though fear is simply the consequence of every lie.”
    • A precondition to fear is uncertainty, and we sometimes fill in that uncertainty with a more certain and fearsome outcome. This is the lie.
    • Are there honest fear responses? If I see a venomous snake, is being fearful of that signal honest?…the fear is still predicated on a projection into the future, I suppose, that the snake could harm me, but it hasn’t harmed me yet. Even if it bites me, I may become scared of the consequences, but that’s because I don’t know what will happen (uncertainty). Fear depends on a projection, and that projection is always a lie, an abstraction, a fiction.
  • Ivan proposes against separation of church and state. Suggests that the state should end by being accounted worth of becoming the church, from a lower to higher type.
  • At the time in Russia, criminals were punished mechanically, cut off like an infected limb for the preservation of society. Ivan suggests the state should strive towards the idea of regeneration of man anew, of their restoration and salvation.
  • The elder claims the mechanical punishment option is not punishment, it only chafes the heart. The real punishment lies in the acknowledgment of one’s own conscience.
  • You will behold great sorrow, and in this sorrow you will be happy…seek happiness in sorrow.
  • Mitri to Alyosha: “the terrible thing is that beauty is not only fearful but also mysterious. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.”
    • Selfish urges battling with communal urges — both urges exist, selfish being more rewarding in the present (tangible and familiar), communal being more rewarding in the future (less tangible, feels more godly and ethereal)
  • Do they truly love? Or do they simply love their own virtue?
  • “In our great intelligence, we’ve stopped flogging our peasants, but they go on whipping themselves.”
  • Father Paissy in a remark about growing scientific interest: “…after hard analysis, the learned ones…have absolutely nothing left of what was once holy. But they have examined the parts and missed the whole, and their blindness is even worthy of wonder. Meanwhile the whole [Christianity] stands before their eyes as immovably as ever, and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
  • Fyodor Pavlovich: “wickedness is sweet: everyone denounces it, but everyone lives in it, only they do it on the sly and I do it openly. And for this sincerity of mine, the wicked ones all attack me”
  • “But you need him in order to continually contemplate your high deed of faithfulness, and to reproach him for his unfaithfulness. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there is much humility and humiliation in it, but all of it comes from pride…”
  • “Schoolchildren are merciless people: separately they’re God’s angels, but together, especially in school, they’re quite often merciless.”
  • “For the daughter—love, and for the mother—death.” o In reference to Madame Khokhlakov’s greed for her daughter, and unwillingness to let her crippled daughter marry Alyosha. Her daughter depends on her, and once she no longer depends on her mother, for where can the mother find her worth?
  • “The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and guileless, while reason hedges and hides. Reason is a scoundrel, stupidity is direct and honest.”
    • Reason involves nuance, making it complex and elusive. Stupidity takes shortcuts, slashing away at nuance, making things easier to understand but often less true.
  • “It is precisely the defencelessness of these creatures the tempts the torturers, the angelic trustfulness of the child, who has nowhere to turn and no one to turn to.”
  • “If I wanted to understand something, I would immediately have to betray the fact, but I’ve made up my mind to stick to the fact…”
  • “For nothing has ever been more insufferable for man than freedom! But do you see these stones in this bare, scorching dessert? Turn them into bread and mankind will run after you like sheep, grateful and obedient, though eternally trembling lest you withdraw your hand and your loaves cease for them…”
  • “No science will give them bread as long as they remain free, but in the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us: ‘Better that you enslave us, but feed us.’ They will finally understand that freedom and earthly bread in plenty for everyone are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share among themselves.”
  • There is no more ceaseless or tormenting care for man, as long as he remains free, than to find someone to bow down to as soon as possible. But man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable [to all of man] …for it must happen all together. And this need for communality of worship is the chief torment of each man individually, of mankind as a whole, from the beginning of the ages. In the cause of universal worship, they have destroyed each other with the sword.”
  • “Without a firm idea of what he lives for, man will not consent to live and will sooner destroy himself than remain on earth, even if there is bread all around him.”
  • “There is nothing more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing more tormenting either…There are three powers…capable of conquering and holding captive forever these feeble rebels, for their own happiness—these powers are miracle, mystery, and authority.”
  • “If in the name of heavenly bread thousands follow you, what will become of the millions of creatures not strong enough to forgo earthly bread for the sake of the heavenly?…the weak too are dear to us…depraved and rebels, but in the end it is they who will become obedient. They will marvel at us…because we…have agreed to suffer freedom and to rule over them [ouch]—so terrible will it become for them in the end to be free!”
  • “Since man cannot bear to be left without miracles, he will go and create miracles for himself, his own miracles of quacks, or women’s magic, though he be rebellious, heretical, and godless a hundred times over.” o Modern examples are astrology, tarot cards, and politics
  • “You [Jesus] did not come down [from the cross] because, again, you did not want to enslave man by a miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous. You thirsted for a love that is free, and not for the servile raptures of a slave before a power that has left him permanently terrified.”
  • “Mankind in its entirety has always yearned to arrange things so that they must be universal. There have been many great nations…but the higher these nations stood, the unhappier they were, for they were more strongly aware than others for the need for a universal union of mankind.”
  • “Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into such a maze, and confront them with such miracles and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves [because they only have the power to bring themselves down]; others, unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third, feeble and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: ‘Yes, you were right…save us from ourselves.’”
  • “For he is accustomed to relying only on himself, he has separated his unit from the whole, he has accustomed his soul to not believing in people’s help, in people or in mankind, and now only trembles lest his money and acquired privileges perish.”
  • “Everywhere now the human mind has begun laughably not to understand that a man’s true security lies not in his own solitary effort, but in the general wholeness of humanity.”
  • “For the world says: ‘You have needs, therefore satisfy them…Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even increase them’—this is the current teaching of the world. And in this they see freedom. But what comes of this right to increase one’s needs? For the rich, isolation and spiritual suicide; for the poor, envy and murder.”
  • “We are assured that the world is becoming more and more united…by the shortening of distances, by the transmitting of thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a union of people. Taking freedom to mean the increase and prompt satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they generate many meaningless and foolish desires, habits, and the most absurd fancies in themselves. They live only for mutual envy, for pleasure-seeking and self-display…I ask you: is such a man free?”
  • “The idea of serving mankind, of the…oneness of people, is fading…for how can one drop one’s habits, where will this slave go now that he is so accustomed to satisfying the innumerable needs he himself has invented?…They have succeeded in amassing more and more things, but have less and less joy.”
  • “If you love each thing, you will perceive the mystery of God in things. Once you have perceived it, you will begin tirelessly to perceive more and more each day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an entire, universal love.”
    • Being present and attentive about life’s intricacies. There lies an eternity in every grain of sand, every bird’s chirp, every gentle smile. If you can’t see the eternity, you aren’t looking deeply enough
  • “My young brother asked forgiveness of the birds: it seems senseless, yet it is right, for all is like an ocean, all flows and connects; touch it in one place and it echoes at the other end of the world.”
  • “Let it be madness to ask forgiveness of the birds, still it would be easier for the birds, and for a child, and for any animal near you, if you yourself were more gracious than you are now, if only by a drop, still it would be easier.”
    • When those ridicule the practice of non-harm by the Buddhists, who refuse to even harm an insect, this is what I think of. If we can learn to love even pesky insects, reducing our disgust and hatred of them, we reduce the chances of that hatred and disgust being directed toward fellow humans
  • “By shifting your own laziness and powerlessness into others, you will end by sharing in Satan’s pride and murmuring against god.”
    • Radiate selflessness, not selfishness.
  • “If the wickedness of people arouses indignation and insurmountable grief in you, to the point that you desire to revenge yourself upon the wicked, fear that feeling most of all.”
  • “The righteous man departs, but his light remains…Your work is for the whole, your deed is for the future.”
    • This light that he leaves behind is heaven—a better place to live.
  • “What is hell? The suffering of being no longer able to love.”
  • “But Rakitin, who could be quite sensitive in understanding everything that concerned himself, was quite crude in understanding the feelings and sensations of his neighbours—partly because of his youthful inexperience, and partly because of his great egoism.”
  • “One should forgive pathetic phrases, one must. Pathetic phrases ease the soul, without them men’s grief would be too heavy.”
  • When Mitya is being questioned and has to remove his clothes: “If everyone is undressed, it’s not shameful, but when only one is undressed and the others are all looking—it’s a disgrace!”
    • How I felt on a bus ride in Seattle, near the end of the pandemic, when I forgot a mask (regardless, the mandate had recently lifted) and everyone had still worn a mask, so that I was the only maskless—“undressed”—person on the bus. The social pressure I felt was unbearably crushing. Lol
  • To suffer and be purified by suffering
  • “Because what is virtue?—answer me that, Alexei. I have one virtue and a Chinese has another—so it’s a relative thing. Or not?..I just keep wondering how people can live and think nothing about these things.” - Mitya to Alyosha
  • The same people who naively neglect forces larger than themselves are most prone to being thrust around by those forces. Ivan is a man of science, striving towards objective truth and ridiculing the unknown. But his naive rejection of the unknown leaves him vulnerable to his passions, which ironically makes the journey to truth much more difficult
  • “You’re too intelligent, sir. You love money…you also love respect, because you’re very proud, you love women’s charms exceedingly, and most of all you love loving in peaceful prosperity, without bowing to anyone.”
  • “If everything on earth were sensible, nothing would happen.”
  • “Without suffering, what pleasure would there be in [life]—everything would turn into an endless prayer service: holy, but a bit dull.”
  • Mentions of a legend in which a philosopher doubtful of the afterlife, who mentions the lights will simply go out at death, is sentenced in the afterlife to walk in the dark for a quadrillion kilometres.
    • Metaphorically, those who are dismissive about sin, not fearful of consequences beyond their own life, are leaving society in the dark, bound to walk aimlessly for a quadrillion kilometres. Faith in something larger provides the guiding light; lack of faith leaves us aimless. Note that this does not imply that we must believe in a supernatural afterlife, rather we must recognize that life continues after us, and we can provide to that afterlife rather than burden it.
  • Ivan’s spiritual ambivalence eats away at him. He yearns for the certainty of faith found in the devout, seemingly ignorant, and spiritually blissful followers (like the plump wife of a merchant)
  • “Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward. Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire.”
    • Each of our lives may be momentary, but they are part of a larger symphony. Seeing it as momentary—divorced from prior or future generations—is a mistake, an oversimplification. You couldn’t exist without your ancestors, and the future couldn’t exist without you, and if you believe in making the world better, you have a duty to serve the past, present, and future.
  • “God, in whom he did not believe, and his truth were overcoming his heart, which still did not want to submit…He will either rise into the light of truth, or…perish in hatred, taking revenge on himself and everyone for having served something he does not believe in.”
  • Regarding Dmitri’s trial turnout: “Hysterical, greedy, almost morbid curiosity could be read on [the ladies’] faces.” Dostoevsky does a great job at highlighting the comical yet concerning female urge for gossip and drama.
  • “The contemptuously curious eyes fixed upon her by our scandal-loving public.”
  • “For now we are either horrified or pretend that we are horrified, while, on the contrary, relishing the spectacle, like lovers of strong, eccentric sensations that stir our cynical and lazy idleness, or, finally, like little children waving the frightening ghosts away, and hiding our heads under the pillow until the frightening vision is gone, so as to forget it immediately afterwards in games and merriment.”
  • We were no different in the late 1800s. Gobbling up stories of suffering with relish and a hint of concern and forgetting them shortly after.
  • “Everything contrary to the idea of a citizen, a complete, even hostile separation from society: ‘Let the whole world burn, so long as I am all right.’”
  • “There are souls that in their narrowness blame the whole world. But overwhelm such a soul with mercy, give it love, and it will…expand and show how merciful God is, and how beautiful and just people are.”

Cosmos

Published:

Cosmos, Carl Sagan

Introduction

  • Science is delightful; evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding—those who better understand are more likely to survive.

    Chapter 1: The shore of the cosmic ocean

    Chapter 2: One voice in cosmic fugue

  • On the plant and animal relationship: “What a marvellous cooperative arrangement—plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet wide mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometres away.”
  • DNA knows what to do, RNA conveys the instructions of the DNA to the rest of the cell (to make proteins?)
  • If the mutation rate is too high, we lose the inheritance of four billion years of painstaking evolution. If too low, variation may be too low to adapt to a changing environment. Life requires a precious balance between mutation and selection
  • In all life, nucleic acid is used for heredity (DNA), proteins are used for the enzymes that control cell chemistry (as per messenger RNA instructions received from DNA).
    • Nucleic acid information is translated into protein information

      Chapter 3: The harmony of worlds

  • Martin Luther described Copernicus as “an upstart astrologer…[who] wishes to reverse the science of astronomy. But sacred scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still, and not the Earth.”

    Chapter 4: Heaven and Hell

  • Planets in our solar system have near circular orbits—not as elliptical as comets, say—because of a sort of planetary selection. Elliptical orbits would have had higher likelihood of collision, stymying the formation of planets. Wider, more circular orbits allowed amalgamation of matter with lower likelihood of collision.
  • “Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits.”
  • “The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but is not the path to knowledge.”

    Chapter 5: Blues for a red planet

  • Strong passions fray the tolerance for ambiguity, which is essential for science
  • “The twin human passions for Euclidean geometry and territoriality.”

    Chapter 6: Travelers’ tales

  • Leuwenhook and Huygens, products of Netherlands explorative and entrepreneurial era, were early discoverers of microscopic organisms (animalcules). Their work grandfathered germ theory and much of modern medicine, but their motives were merely related to tinkering with recently developed technology
    • The benefits a technology brings need not be realized upon the technology’s discovery. Technology can bring about unforeseen downstream effects, which can be beneficial or harmful.
  • Jupiter is nearly a star and may as well be considered one if we consider its infrared radiation. Jupiter generates 2x more energy than it receives from the sun.
    • If there were two stars in our solar system, we could have had no night-time. In this kind of world, would sleep be required? Would sleep-states be rationed throughout “days”? The notion of day would change to whatever salient energy patterns arise due to our planet’s rotation and translation. How would evolution unfurl without night-time?

      Chapter 7: The backbone of night

  • “When…he ascribes to his gods the production of some phenomenon…does he, in fact, do anything more than substitute for the darkness of his own mind, a sound to which he has been accustomed to listen with reverential awe?” - Paul Heinrich Dietrich
  • Early Greeks believed the first being was Chaos (corresponding to the phrase in Genesis “without form”). Then, Ionians argued Nature exhibits order: there are regularities in Nature that permit its secrets to be unveiled. This ordered character of the universe was called Cosmos.
  • “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things.” -Hippocrates, ~500BC

    Chapter 8: Travels in space and time

  • “Space and time are interwoven. We cannot look out into space without looking back into time.”

    Chapter 9: The lives of the stars

  • Supernovae occur at the end of a star’s life, where stellar mass is violently ejected into space. During this ejection, thermonuclear reactions in the stellar interior fuse smaller atoms into larger atoms—this is where hydrogen combines into helium, then carbon, then oxygen, and so on until silicon and iron. We are formed by these atoms as well—we were birthed by the death of a star once located somewhere in our galaxy.
  • Heavier atoms, like gold and uranium, are formed in the violent explosions of supernova. This high local pressure and temperature can fuse heavier atoms together. Embedded in uranium is the energy of a distant supernova that birthed the matter that forms Earth. Incredible.
  • Almost all life is solar powered. Even mutation itself is solar powered—cosmic rays create mutations which cause hereditary variation
  • Normally atoms in kind are repelled by their electron fields and protons. Why don’t the protons in their nucleus repel each other? Neutrons apparently serve to bind the protons together, like a nuclear clamp
  • When temperatures and pressures are high enough, enough energy is provided to overcome the nuclear aversion between atoms and fuse them together, creating larger atoms
  • Larger stars (3-5x) than the sun experience higher pressure and temperatures, thus consuming nuclear fuel at a higher rate. The lifetimes of larger stars tend to be much shorter (order of a few million years) until they die, explode, and fraction into smaller solar systems with smaller stars. Our sun is one of those smaller stars, and its long life is one of the reasons life has been able to evolve to a point where we can understand the stars themselves.
  • When even larger stars (>10x sun) die, their implosion generates a black hole, whose gravity is so immense that even light cannot escape. The gravity causes three-dimensional space time to sink within itself, generating a fourth dimension unbeknownst to us.

    Chapter 10: The edge of forever

  • If the universe is expanding, as observed by prevalent elongated—red—spectra, then why aren’t we the center about which everything is expanding? The answer may lie in a fourth dimension.
  • Say the three dimensions observable to us are akin to a two-dimensional plane on a sphere, observable to two-dimensional folk. We may occupy a surface of a four-dimensional hypersphere, unaware of the fourth dimension as the 2D folk are unaware of the third. And if our hypersphere is expanding, the surface fabric of space time we occupy would be expanding in all directions.

    Chapter 11: The persistence of memory

  • The brain is a very big place in a very small space. It has the informational equivalent of 10^14 bits, information which could fill some twenty million volumes, as many as the world’s largest libraries

    Chapter 12: Encyclopedia galactica

    Chapter 13: Who speaks for earth?

  • Subtle consequences of nuclear war (beyond immediate blast and radiation)
    • Ozone depletion in high atmosphere due to combustion of nitrogen, increasing solar UV radiation. Skin cancer risk increase, crops decimated, and microorganisms killed—some of which could sit at the base of the ecological pyramid
    • Dust and ash would reflect sunlight, cooling the planet and disrupting agricultural crops
    • Birds are more vulnerable to radiation than insects. With less insectivores, plagues would be imminent as insect populations explode
    • Immunological function is hindered by radiation, making the few survivors more vulnerable to diseases
  • When our well-being is threatened and our illusions challenge, some of us fly into a murderous rage. Sagan suggests the same thing happens at the nation scale, and that conflict is coerced by a few power/profit hungry entities
  • Some estimate that roughly half of scientists and high technologists are employed full or part time on military matters. They’re offered power, money, accolades, and secrecy, which obviously attracts
  • This secrecy is a challenge, however, because not even civilians can monitor the going-ons of their militaries. If we do not know what our militaries do, how can we stop them? “And with the rewards so substantial, with the hostile military establishments beholden to each other in some ghastly mutual embrace, the world finds itself drifting toward the ultimate undoing of the human enterprise.”
  • Every major power has a justification for its production and stockpiling of weapons. These justifications often presume cultural defects of enemies (as opposed to us fine fellows) or the intentions of others (but never ourselves) to conquer the world.
  • “Superstition is cowardice in the face of the Divine.” - Theophrastus
  • To not confuse what things are with how we wish they’d be
  • Only here, on this planet, do humans likely exist. We are a raw as well as an endangered (due to ourselves) species. In the cosmic perspective, humans are precious. So, if a human disagrees with you, let them live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another
  • If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened to include the entire global human community. Many nations will find this unpleasant, fearing the loss of power. But it is this or extinction.

Atomic Habits

Published:

Atomic Habits, James Clear

Chapter 1: The fundamentals: why tiny changes make a big difference

  • Good, and bad, habits compound. Good habits gain exponentially, though there is a period of ramp up where little improvements can be seen. Persistency is required to reach the larger gradient, i.e., when your marginal habits start to pay off
  • Systems are more important than goals. Focusing on lifting a specific weight is less important than improving technique and making sure you don’t miss a day at the gym. Use goals for setting a general direction and use systems for making progress
  • You don’t rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems

    Chapter 2: How your habits shape your identity

  • Focus on changing your identity rather than your outcomes, e.g., the goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader
  • “I’m terrible with directions; I’m not a morning person; I’m always late” are all repeated stories we tell ourselves that act as barriers to positive change. This is identity conflict, where attachment to a particular version of your identity hinders change. Identity is transient, not static.
  • “Each action you take is a vote for the person you wish to become”
  • “Are you becoming the person you want to become?”

    Chapter 3: Build better habits in 4 steps

  • Habits proceed in 4 steps: cue, craving, response, and reward
  • If a behaviour is insufficient in any of these stages, it will not become a habit. No cue means the habit never starts. No craving means no motivation to act. A difficult behaviour means you won’t be able to respond to it. No satisfaction of desire, i.e., reward, then there’s no reason to do it again
  • How to create a good habit:
    • Make it obvious (cue)
    • Make it attractive (craving)
    • Make it easy (response)
    • Make it satisfying (reward)
  • How to break a bad habit:
    • Make it invisible (cue)
    • Make it unattractive (craving)
    • Make it difficult (response)
    • Make it unsatisfying (reward)

      The 1st law: Make it obvious

      Chaper 5: The best way to start a new habit

  • People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. This is known as implementation intention
  • I will [BEHAVIOUR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. The most important cues are time and location.
  • Diderot effect: obtaining a new possession often creates a spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases. Diderot was a French philosopher that suddenly became rich due to a generous donation. He bought a elegant robe, but nothing else matched it so he had to spend more and more money upgrading the rest of his belongings
  • Habit stacking is a positive version of the Diderot effect: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
  • Be specific with your habit stacking directions, e.g., “After I finish my morning tea, I will meditate.”

    Chapter 6: Motivation is overrated; environment often matters more

  • It is easier to build new habits in new environments where you don’t have to fight against old cues
  • Make good cues obvious in your environment, and hide bad cues
  • Delegate specific spaces in your home to specific habits. This chair for reading, the kitchen for cooking, the bed for sleeping, etc.

    Chapter 7: The secret of self control

  • Self control is a short term strategy, not a long one. Modify your environment such that you don’t need to exercise self control in the first place
  • To break bad habits, reduce your exposure to their cues. Remove the cues from your environment

Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: Complexity Theory

Published:

Worlds Hidden in Plain Sight: Complexity Theory, David Krakauer

  • “Convenient idealizations that throw the complex baby out with the merely complicated bathwater” — idealizations approach complex systems by removal of complex features, but the magic and realism of the system is lost in the process
  • In a biological organism’s life, they learn and adapt to their environment, attempting to maximize fitness (or equivalently minimize losses) given the complex array of components making up that environment. During this learning process, it’s challenging for the player to know whether once a peak is reached, if it is the global optimum for that organism or whether they can maximize further. Much like if I own a stock and it levels out, I don’t know whether it’s peaking or not so I may decide to sell
  • Generalizing in life involves sampling many outcomes; resulting in a longer training process, more exposure to error, yet improving the possibility of reaching higher peaks. This is a crude process and reaching the absolute peak in any domain is unlikely due to the coarseness of the learning rate. Specializing involves sampling less outcomes and trudging higher towards a local optimum and realizing its fullest local potential. Reaching the peak is made possible due to the granularity of the learning rate; but it’s also more likely to leave you at a local, rather than global, optimum of fitness.
    • Specializers: small learning rate, more likely to penetrate deeper towards a local optimum, but also more likely to get stuck at a local optimum
    • Generalists: large learning rate, less likely to penetrate deep into a optimum, but more likely to escape a local optimum
    • The optimal strategy likely lies in the middle, where an adaptive learning rate is used
  • Observations from the natural world are mapped by humans into mathematical formulations. Patterns observed in the real world get encoded into symbols and strings of formal logical structure. Meaning is restricted to the natural world, formal systems have no way of synthesizing meaning, they just represent it symbolically.
  • Complexity is subjective, a random rock to your typical observer can be thrown, broken, or moved—that’s about it. But a rock to a geologist can be carbon dated and analyzed materialistically. What was simple to one was complex to another.
  • Developing a complexity theory requires formalizing intuitive notions about complexity into symbols and syntax. The subjective nature of complexity makes this challenging, thus the search for a general model that connects and equates subjective formulations is needed

The Enchiridion

Published:

The Enchiridion, Epictetus

  • Confine aversion only to objects which are contrary to the natural use of your faculties (i.e., to injury, to malnutrition, etc.) and which you have in your control. If you are averse to things outside of your control (i.e., sickness, death, and poverty), you will be wretched.
  • Suppress desire, for if you desire what is not in your control you must necessarily be disappointed; and if you desire what is in your control, by nature of it being a desire, it is not yet in your possession
  • Use only the actions of pursuit and avoidance; yet use them gently and with reservation
  • When you are going about any action, remind yourself what nature the action is; e.g., if you go to bathe, keep your mind in a state conformable to nature, then if any hindrance arises during bathing you can say “I not only wanted to bathe, but to keep my mind in a state conformable to nature, and I will not keep it if I am bothered at things that happen.”
    • This coincides with Buddhist philosophy, where a large emphasis is placed on being present (similar to this notion of conformance to nature). If you get annoyed when something doesn’t go your way, it is because you are attached to a particular outcome—or in the Greek case you desire what is not in your control, which is destined for disappointment
  • The uninstructed will lay the fault of their bad condition upon others, the novice instructed will lay the blame on themselves, the perfectly instructed will place the place blame on nobody
  • When you are prideful, and say “I have a handsome horse”, know that what you are proud of is only the good of the horse. What then, is your own?
    • The modern equivalent of this is people being prideful of their luxurious possessions, i.e., their cars, their properties, etc. If one exerts meaningful effort into constructing these things, it is laudable and is worth praise; yet if they simply route money earned from elsewhere it seems less worthy of praise…should it be?
  • “Don’t demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well.”
  • Don’t think of things as lost (in the context of losing something you love, i.e, a loved one or your youth), think of them instead as returned. You don’t own what you can’t control, be grateful for it while it’s there but accept it when it goes.

Flights of Fancy

Published:

Flights of Fancy, Richard Dawkins

  • Bats evolved with echolocation to locate flying prey, increasing their sampling frequency of clicks as they home in on a target. Moths evolved ears tuned to just the right pitch to hear bat shrieks
  • Moths may be furry to dampen the acoustics sent out by bats. Likewise, moths have small fork-like scales on their wings that resonate with bath ultrasound in such a way to disappear off the bat radar
  • Insects move their wings via a hinge-like mechanism on the upstroke, pulling the hinge down so that the wing moves up. To generate the downstroke, a muscle erects the thorax, lifting the thorax up so that the wing pulls down
  • Within a bat’s webbing are rows of thin thread-like muscles, thought to be derived from the same muscles that all mamas have in their skin for erecting hairs, such as when we get goosebumps. Goosebumps are a remnant feature from when our ancestors had more hair, erecting hairs when we got cold to trap warm air within the layer of hair. Getting goosebumps has also been shown to stimulate more hair growth in mice, acting as a signal to generate thicker coats to protect from the cold

The Great Leveler

Published:

The Great Leveler, Walter Scheidel

Introduction: The challenge of inequality

  • The four horsemen of leveling: mass mobilization warfare, transformative revolution, state failure, and lethal pandemics
  • Ways in which to measure inequality:
    • Gini coefficient: measures extent to which the distribution of income or material assets deviate from perfect equality. Perfect equality: Gini=0, one person controls everything: Gini=1
    • Percentage share of total income or wealth: i.e top 1% share higher incomes or assets than other 99% * Gini computes overall degree of equality, percentage shares describe the shape of the distribution
  • Income prior to taxes and public transfers is known as “market” income, income after transfers is called “gross” income, and income net of all taxes and transfers is defined as “disposable” income
  • Most of this book refers to “market” income, taxes and transfers are hard to trace depending on the society
  • Why does economic inequality matter?
  • It can hinder economic growth; lower disposable income inequality has been found to lead to faster economic growth and longer growth phases
  • The credit bubble that helped trigger the 2008 recession was in part due to low income households drawing on readily available credit, from the wealthy at the top, to borrow for the sake of keeping up with consumption patterns of more affluent groups
  • Under conditions where lending is more restrictive, wealth inequality also disadvantages low income groups as it blocks their access to credit
  • In developed countries, higher inequality is associated with less economic mobility across generations. Higher income families get access to better education, residential segregation sees public services disproportionally attracted to affluent areas
  • High levels of inequality are correlated with lower levels of self-reported happiness, but not so much health. This makes sense, as happiness can be hindered by discouraging social comparison

    Part 1: A brief history of inequality

    Chapter 1: The rise of inequality

  • Our ancestors, Australopithecus, from 3 to 4 million years ago were more sexually dimorphic, with male body mass advantages of over 50%. Evolution attenuated this sexual inequality both among males and between the sexes
  • As our brains and physiology changed, physical differences made less of an impact on inequality. As lower status men could form coalitions and make weapons to battle from afar (rocks, spears, bows), which played an equalizing role in the physical sense, but privileging knowledge/skill over size
  • In a site north of Moscow, dated from about 30000-40000 years go, the remains of a man and two children were found buried with loads of ivory beads and more, with estimates of the time required to make all these objects at 2-5 years. Despite this, social and economic inequality in the paleolithic era likely remained sporadic and transient
  • The Holocene era brought with it temperate conditions, allowing for the thriving of humans and most life in general. This allowed Homo sapiens to rely on local concentrations of resources, occupational specialization grew, strictly defined asset ownership developed as well as the perimeter defence of territory, and intense competition between groups that led to enslavement of captives (the Chumash of the California coast in year 500-700 were found to do this)—all fostering social hierarchy and inequality
  • Two crucial determinants of inequality: ownership rights in land and livestock, and the ability to transmit wealth from one generation to the next
  • The different types of wealth: embodied (genetic), relational (partners in labor), and material. In foragers, embodied wealth is more important; whereas in herders and farmers material wealth is most important
  • Transmissibility of wealth is about twice as high for farmers and herders than for foragers, and the material possessions available to them were more suitable for transmission
  • Inequality and its persistence over time is the result of 3 factors:
    • The relative importance of different classes of assets
    • How suitable they are for passing on to others
    • The actual rates of transmission
  • If wealth is passed on between generations, random shocks related to health, parity, and returns on capital that would typically rebalance resource distribution is instead dampened. Resources accumulate over time rather than redistributing elsewhere
  • Agricultural development in societies, i.e., ways in which to develop and maintain wealth surplus, foster political inequality in these societies. A historical survey found that 86 percent of Native American societies (out of 258) surveyed found that those lacking significant surplus production also lacked signs of political inequality
  • 80% of hunter gatherer societies had no ruling class, whereas 75% of agrarian societies do. Agrarian societies with wheat, rather than, say, roots, are more conducive to political rule as grain is more suitable for long term storage
  • In early societies/chiefdoms, state-directed allocation of material resources converted political inequality into income and wealth inequality, as political elite and administrators were allocated more materials (land, labor (slaves), etc.)

    Chapter 2: Empires of inequality

  • The Han dynasty (200BCE-200CE) and Roman Empire (200BCE-200CE) feature historical accounts of inequality.
  • In the Han dynasty, the elite, aristocrats, government officials, and war officials normally earned status and resources via land ownership. They would regularly employ tactics to evade taxes (e.g., falsifying census records, creating fake names, collect taxes from tenants and pay less than received and pocket and pocket the difference).
  • Attempts to equalize power from elite to lower class were attempted throughout the dynasty, however, these attempts waned over time and discontinuities in leadership would disrupt them as well
    • There would sometimes be a change of elite rule, due to warfare or internal politics, but the wealth at the top would mostly be redistributed to those next in line
  • In the Roman Empire, wealthy elites and retired war senators would accumulate properties—normally at the expense of the middle class, shoving them downwards towards the lower class. Property and material assets would concentrate towards these few over time, serving to increase polarity between the lower and upper rungs of the wealth ladder
  • Within these examples, imperial income inequality could be hindered only through conquest, state failure, or wholesale systems collapse—all violent upheavals. Despite some attempts, peaceful ways of combatting inequality have not made a meaningful impact in these historical accounts
  • In premodern societies, very large fortunes regularly owed more to political power than to economic prowess. This could be somewhat managed by the state rulers’ abilities and willingness to engage in tyrannical intervention

    Chapter 3: Up and down

  • After the fall of the Roman rule, state collapse served to redistribute wealth throughout Europe and counter-act inequality
  • Prior to the Black Death, a millennia later, Europe was more developed and unequal than it had been since the Roman Empire. General stability and development lay fertile ground for increased inequality
  • This changed when the Black Death struck in 1347, which is estimated to have killed more than 25% of the European population by 1400. As a result, labor became scarce and unskilled labor and farm wages increased 2X. Commoners, from England to Egypt, enjoyed better diets and grew taller bodies
  • In late medieval-early modern Europe, urban regions suffered from more inequality (compared to rural regions) due to: greater division of labor, differentiation in skills and incomes, spatial concentration of elite households, and the inflow of poorer migrant workers
  • According to a Florentine census of 1427, wealth inequality correlated with the scale of urbanism—the larger the city the larger the wealth inequality

    Part 2: War

    Chapter 4: Total war

  • After defeat in World War Two, Japan underwent significant wealth leveling. Throughout the war the Japanese government directed resources (labor and capital) towards war efforts, impacting the top 1% the most. After the war, hyper-inflation devalued the capital owned by the top 1%, and exterior forces attempted to maintain a wider distribution of wealth
  • Post war, American occupation enforced the democratization of Japanese economic institutions. They postulated that low distributions of wealth to Japanese industrial workers and farmers hindered domestic consumption and led to overseas economic expansionism. Massive taxes were imposed on the affluent, where the assets themselves were taxed rather than income.
  • Unionization that was absent pre-war returned post war, providing improved benefits and a general consensus on wage structures for employees

    Chapter 5: The great compression

  • Fiscal leveling constitutes of three main ingredients during war time: military mass mobilization, progressive enhancement of tax rates, and targeting of elite wealth of top income
  • While mass conscription applied to most, the wealthy normally got off due to age or privilege and stood to profit from commercial involvement in the war industry. Thus, countries like the UK, United States, and Canada imposed significant taxes on the incomes and estates of the rich as a means to keep things fair and ensure national cohesion
  • More autocratic nations like Germany and Russia opted to borrow or print money to sustain war efforts, this however led to hyperinflation, which eventually ended up compressing inflation by reducing the value of the capital of the elites (?)

Meditations

Published:

Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

  • Three disciplines: perception, action, and will
    • Perception: requires that we maintain objectivity of thought—that we see things dispassionately
      • This involves avoidance of inappropriate value judgements, such as designating things as good or evil. The things aren’t the problem, but the interpretations we place on them are. This is similar to emptiness in Buddhism. We assign an essence to things and thus interpret them as attractive or unattractive
    • Action: active cooperation with the world, with fate, and above all with other human beings. We were made not for ourselves but for others (agree), and our nature is fundamentally unselfish* (I don’t completely agree with this)
    • Will: we control our actions and are responsible for them—if we act wrongly, we harm ourselves. Likewise, if someone or something else harms us, they are harming themselves and not us, the victim. Acts of nature such as fire or illness, can only harm us if we see them as harmful
  • Seeing things for what they are and accepting them, is something Epictetus calls “the art of acquiescence”
  • Objective judgement, unselfish action, and willing acceptance of all external events. These three points are a recurring theme in Marcus’ writings
  • “The best revenge is not to be like that”
  • “To accept without arrogance, and let go with indifference”
  • “The sense he gave of staying on the path rather than being kept on it”
    • This is similar to the dog running alongside the wagon rather than being dragged by it, the wagon being logos. Those who feel helpless about life and settle into this mode get the sense that there’s no point in trying if the cards are stacked against them. There’s more room for growth than what they can see and limits they can reach. Giving up removes the possibility of seeing where those limits can take you
  • Mentions that wrongdoing done over pleasure is worse than that over anger. The angry wrongdoer is a victim of his anger, but the man doing it for pleasure is motivated by desire
    • Don’t quite agree with this. Anger is also motivated by desire, an attraction towards an angry state. Both are motivated by desire, and thus both are victims. Buddha once said that anger is like an arrow with a poisoned root with a honeyed tip
  • Emphasis on being honest and present in one’s thoughts. If the mind is preoccupied with something you wouldn’t be comfortable speaking about, when those ask what you’re thinking about you will answer dishonestly—so be disciplined with your thoughts
  • Be ready to reconsider your position, when someone can set you straight or convert you to his. Conversion should always rest on a conviction that it’s right, or benefits others. Not because it’s more appealing or more popular
  • When something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself is no misfortune at all, to endure it and prevail is good fortune
  • If you resist the temptation to feel victimized—to feel harmed—then harmful things can’t happen to you, only things
  • Be tolerant of others, but strict with yourself
  • The best revenge is not to be like that
  • When asked to write out a name, would you clench your teeth and groan as you write it? When faced with responsibilities, approach them as you would writing a name, methodically and one letter at a time. Don’t get dissuaded by the text itself—complete it one task at a time
  • We tend not to waste much time concerning ourselves with our height or width, spatial dimensions of our bodies (these days a little more so, with weight issues associated with caloric abundance). So why should we concern ourselves with the temporal dimension of our body, i.e., how long we live? Accept the limits placed on the body.
  • The importance of detaching from our body’s urges, to resist impulses and sensations. Thoughts seek to be their master, not their subject. Thoughts were created for this use.
    • Interesting. Frontal lobe development, contributing to logical calculus and delayed gratification, evolved such that our survival wouldn’t be impinged by short term gratification—i.e., indulgence in impulsive behaviour
  • Actions and perceptions need to aim at:
    • Accomplishing practical ends
    • The exercise of thought
    • Maintaining a confidence found on understanding
      • in Buddhism action is understood as having three aspects: thinking, speaking, and acting (doing something). Some similarities here
  • When bothered by those behaving poorly in pursuit of pleasure, money, or status—reflect on when you thought like that. Recognize that they are acting out of compulsion, and attempt to remove the compulsion if you can

Understanding Our Mind

Published:

Understanding Our Mind, Thich Nhat Hanh

  • Store consciousness stores and preserves all the seeds of our experiences, where seeds represent everything we have ever done, experienced, or perceived. These are “subjects” of consciousness
  • The seeds make up store consciousness and can be distinguished from the store, but the store is dependant on the seeds, thus the seeds are also “objects” of consciousness
  • The ways in which we act plant seeds for how we behave in the future. If you plant wheat, wheat will grow. If you act in a wholesome way, you will be happy. If you act in an unwholesome way, you will water seeds of craving, anger, and violence in yourself and others
  • When we perceive an object, we see its “sign” (I like signature more). As per Buddhism there are 3 pairs of signs of phenomena:
    • Universal and particular: universal signatures are generic labels (e.g., a house) and particular signatures are more specific (e.g., the brick, wood, nails, etc. that make up individual houses)
    • Unity and diversity: all houses are part of the designation “house”, but there are countless variations between the collection of individual houses
    • Formation and disintegration: a house could be in the process of being built (formation), but is also already in the process of decay, being weathered by its surroundings (disintegration)
      • Seeing these signatures are the basis of the teachings of interbeing
  • It is easy to confuse our mental image, our signature of something, with its reality. The way to avoid misperceptions is through mindfulness: deliberate investigation of our perceptions, poking and prodding until we approach the true nature of a perception
  • When we have a false perception and continue to maintain it, we hurt ourselves and others. In fact, people kill one another over their competing perceptions of the same reality
  • Individual and collective seeds: the collective consciousness is made up of individual consciousnesses, and an individual conscious is formed by the collective conscious. This is the nature of interbeing
  • Looking deeply into an atom, we bow our heads in awe. And yet with our friend/significant other sitting next to us we think we already know everything about them
  • Walking at dusk, we see a long stringy object, and thinking it’s a snake we get scared. Upon shining a light on the object, we realize it was just rope. Our fear was the product of a misperception, not seeing something for what it truly was. We do this in life as well, misperceiving constructed perceptions as truth, avoiding deep deliberation of what we’re assuming
  • Impermanence and nonself are essentially the same thing, both meaning the absence of a separate, fixed self. Impermanence looks at this temporally, nonself looks at this spatially. The idea of a discrete self is incompatible with a continuous world
  • The true nature of consciousness is neither individual nor collective. We are simultaneously individual and collective. I am a unique biological pattern, that was formed by the collective consciousness of my family, the earth, and the cosmos. This collective consciousness is produced by many individuals. Interdependence.
  • Manas provides energy for ignorance, thirst, and craving. It also serves as the “survival instinct”, providing reflexive reactions to stimuli. It operates in the realm of representations, and thus cannot touch the realm of things-in-themselves (truth). The attachment of manas in a self is based on an image it has created.

The Moral Animal

Published:

The Moral Animal by Robert Wright

Part 1: Sex, romance, and love

Chapter 2: Male and Female

  • Due to reproductive organ asymmetries, it’s in the male’s advantage to pretend to be highly fit, and in the female’s advantage to spot false advertising
  • Females of most species are coy, somewhat resistant to mating with males, whereas men are more liberal with sexual partners. Coyness is rewarding in the Darwinian sense, because the males that surpass that resistance, either verbally or physically, are more likely to have more fit offspring

    Chapter 3: Men and Women

  • Flowers and other tokens of affection are more prized by women as it signals generosity, trustworthiness, and most importantly an enduring commitment
  • High male parental investment has made males evolve to compete for scarce female eggs, but females have also evolved to compete for scarce male investment
  • 85% (~900/1100) societies around the world have been polygamous—that is, they have permitted men to have multiple wives. The majority of men, however, were likely monogamous as they couldn’t afford multiple wives, but the high-status males are allowed to if they can provide for the families

    Chapter 4: The marriage market

  • Marriage favours lower class men. Women, who would otherwise marry up the hierarchy and split resources of a high-status male with other women, are forced to stick with a male mate at a similar spot in the hierarchy
  • Institutionalized marriage thus doesn’t serve women near the bottom of the hierarchy. They may have to stay with a bum rather than obtain resources from a well-off man. Low status males in this case may have more to benefit from marriage
  • Without institutionalized marriage, many low status males will be alone, upset, and likely become violent. Married men are less likely to commit crime—this could be because men who wouldn’t commit crime in the first place tend to get married, but marriage also settles the man down
  • Western culture now has a serial monogamous nature, where divorce is prevalent. This leaves children without their natural parents, and step-parents often care little for step-children, hindering development and lowering the quality of guidance for children from broken families
  • Unstratification of social status could help curb the decrease in monogamy; if resources are allocated more equally, women are less likely to have their eye on men up the echelon, as the echelon will be more balanced. Political and social inequality leads to allocation of multiple women to a high-status man, and more upset, low status males as a result

    Chapter 6: The Darwin plan for marital bliss

  • Male sexual fantasies tend to be mostly visual in nature, whereas females tend to include tender touching, soft murmurs, and other hints of future investment
  • Some approach divorce with the mindset that they married the “wrong” person and next time they’ll get it right, but divorce statistics say otherwise. “The triumph of hope over experience”
  • How moral codes arise: people tend to pass moral judgements that help move their genes to the next generation. Thus, a moral code is a compromise among competing spheres of self-interest, each acting to mold the code to its own ends

    Part 2: Social cement

    Chapter 7: Families

  • Some parent-offspring conflict arises since children share 50% of genes with siblings, so put simply its in their best interest to favour themselves at 2-to-1 odds than their siblings. Whereas parents share genes equally with all offspring, so it could be in their best interest to treat each child equally. These broad differences in self interest could be the source of some child-parent conflict
  • Parents may have reasons to prefer some offspring over others, a pretty daughter in a poor family likely has a better chance of moving up socioeconomically than a handsome boy, whereas in an already rich family a man is more likely to maintain the resources and attract an attractive female, converting those resources into genetic proliferation
  • Studies on rats have shown that mothers starved of resources are more likely to provide milk to daughters, and wean off sons
  • In the middle-east/Asia as well as medieval Europe, infanticide of females was most common upon upper class families
  • In a study done in America, it was found that sons of high-class families were more likely to be breast fed, and less likely in low class families, i.e., breast-feeding frequency of boys changed with socio-economic status. Women who had a female child in low-class families were more likely to wait to have another child than if they had first had a male. The opposite trend was found for high class families
  • Magnitude of grief of a parent from a lost child seems to correlate near perfectly with fertility metrics of hunter-gatherer societies. That is, parents tend to grieve more for a child that is closer to their peak fertility potential. Grievance for an adolescent will be much stronger than that of an infant or older relative
  • First born siblings tend to be less exceptional. Studies of academics and political greats are found to rarely be first born amongst their siblings. Younger siblings tend to have to compete with older siblings for parental affection or attention, and the older sibling has had more time to develop a relationship with the parent, and likely wins favour through sacrifice of taking care of younger siblings. Thus, the younger sibling seeks another niche, say excellence in school, to gain parental favor

    Chapter 9: Friends

  • In game theory, the TIT FOR TAT strategy wins out. Cooperate on the first go, and match the other player’s move from there on
  • If everyone at the start doesn’t cooperate, the TIT FOR TAT strategy doesn’t work. It’s likely cooperation started out due to kin-selection and gradually spread out, allowing TIT FOR TAT to dominate, and thus society to grow
  • Reciprocal altruism thus likely evolved selfishly, since unlike with kin-selection where genes are shared, altruism with outside-kin is likely just an optimal strategy for personal benefit—everybody wins. It also isn’t a surprise that betrayals are common as well, if people can cheat without repercussion, they will. Gossip and punishment deter this behaviour.

    Chapter 10: Darwin’s conscience

  • In the Victorian environment, in which there were small quaint towns, it paid to be good, act with integrity, and be altruistic, as the towns were small, and it was the optimal strategy for small groups
  • However, in todays large cities, where nobody really knows anybody, it can pay to be dishonest and to be a cheat, hence the societal shift in norms from the Victorian times from having a strong “character” to having a nice “personality”
  • Those who lack a secure environment when growing up, either without parents to instill values of integrity and kindness, or in a disparate environment where these values aren’t necessary, often grow up to be criminals. They are generally not evil people, just products of their environment

    Part 3: Social strife

    Chapter 12: Social Status

  • In the Ache, though skillful hunters share their food with the tribe, they in turn enjoy more extramarital affairs, have more illegitimate children, and their children get special treatment
  • As more and more societies are re-evaluated in a Darwinian light, it becomes doubtful that any truly egalitarian society has ever existed
  • In a study, those given artificially low test scores to lower self esteem, were more likely to subsequently cheat in a game of cards. Another study found that people with lower serotonin levels are more likely to commit impulsive crimes
  • The common stereotype of a wife complaining that a husband can’t bring himself to admit he’s wrong may be because males who too readily sought reconciliation after a fight, or needlessly submitted to others, saw their status drop and thus their inclusive fitness
    • Women fall prey to this as well, but if folk wisdom can be trusted, the average woman is less reluctant than the average man—which makes sense as the fitness of females depend less on status maintenance than does males
  • The ultimate aim for politicians is status, and thus they will say things that appeal to the group of voters most likely to get them into power or keep them there

    Chapter 13: Deception and self-deception

  • “The best liar is the one who makes the smallest amount of lying go the longest way.” Lies that are slight, and hard to discredit, are more difficult to get tangled up in, making them easy to hide behind
  • It may be in the genetic interest of someone at the low rungs of the status hierarchy to display their low status, as to advertise that they aren’t a threat to those above them. This is one possible explanation for individuals with low self-esteem
  • We could have a built-in tendency to refrain from bestowing status enhancement benefits on people whose status threatens our own. Darwin would often acknowledge minor researchers whose empirical observations aided him, but not those who’s ideas had influenced his thought (i.e., competitors near-above him in the status hierarchy)
  • When in a negotiation, say when buying a car, the first person to make a voluntary but irreversible sacrifice of freedom of choice is that who governs the negotiation. If a dealer believes you’re walking away for good, he’ll cave. If the dealer says he can’t accept less than X and appears as if his pride wouldn’t let him go lower, then he wins.
  • Studies show that when shown plausible/implausible arguments to a social issue you care about, people were most likely to remember the plausible arguments that supported their views, and implausible arguments of the opposition. The net effect drives home the correctness of our position, and the silliest of the alternative

    Chapter 14: Darwin’s triumph

  • When dealing with non-kin, natural selection wants us to look like we’re being nice; the perception of altruism, not altruism itself, is what brings reciprocation. One aim of the conscience is to cultivate a reputation of generosity and decency, whatever the underlying motives of those actions are

    Part 4: Morals of the story

    Chapter 15: Darwinian (and Freudian) cynicism

  • Freud’s basic insight of the mind: it is a place of conflict between animal impulses and social reality

    Chapter 16: Evolutionary ethics

  • A utilitarian mandate, in which behaviour that increases people’s happiness is considered good and thus encouraged, and behaviour that leads to peoples suffering is bad and thus discouraged, is thought to lead to a better off society (via non-zero sumness)
    • In essence, considering the welfare of others as importantly as you would your own
  • Utilitarianism strives for maximum societal happiness: the greatest good for the greatest number
  • Some underlying reasons as to why we don’t like someone: liking them won’t elevate our social status, aid our acquisition of material or sexual resources, help our kin, or do any of the other things that during evolution had made our genes proliferate

    Chapter 17: Blaming the victim

  • Determinism view: it seems likely that behaviour is determined in part due to genetic factors and environmental factors—our next move is decided by genetic interest and environmental circumstance
  • Robust moral codes rest not only on norms but on “metanorms”: society disapproves not only of the code’s violators but also on those who tolerate violators by failing to disapprove

    Chapter 18: Darwin gets religion

  • Like how religions preach for brotherly love, politicians self-servingly preach for nationalism, i.e., brotherly love on a national scale

Range

Published:

Range, David Epstein

  • Breadth of training predicts breadth of transfer. The more breadth within learned content, the more the learner creates abstract models, and the less they rely on any particular example. Learners become better at applying their knowledge to situation they had never seen before—which is in essence creativity
  • A study found that typical children tend to be raised in families with an average of six household rules, compared to one rule for extremely creative children. After a wrongdoing parents would let the child know, rather than proscribing it beforehand
  • The “hypercorrection” effect: the more confident a learn is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities
    • This effect was even reproduced in primates (rhesus macaques)
  • Teachers who drive overachievement in their current courses (by providing easier content) tend to undermine student performance in the long run (US Air Force study). Those who had more challenging math courses, and thus had lower student satisfaction, saw their students overachieve in future math courses (i.e., short term their grades would suffer, but long term their grades flourished)
  • Interleaving problems, i.e., mixing them up when practicing, has been found to be more effective than approaching problems in blocks. Shuffle the problems beforehand to improve learning via rules differentiation rather than learning structured patterns
  • According to a Yale study, more scientifically literate adults are surprisingly more likely to become dogmatic about politically polarizing topics in science. One theory is that they are better equipped to find evidence that confirms their beliefs
  • A personality feature that fights back against this propensity is scientific curiosity, not scientific knowledge. Roam freely, listen carefully, and consume indiscriminately. Be open-minded.
  • Scientific work that builds bridges between disparate pieces of knowledge (i.e., atypical citations with respect to the discipline) are less likely to be funded, more likely to be ignored upon publication, but more likely in the long run to gain traction and succeed

Make it Stick - The Science of Successful Learning

Published:

Make it Stick - The Science of Successful Learning, Henry L. Roediger III, Mark A. McDaniel, and Peter C Brown

Chapter 1: Learning is misunderstood

  • “Learning is deeper and more durable when it’s effortful. Learning that’s easy is like writing in the sand, here today and gone tomorrow.”
  • We are poor judges of when we are learning well or not. When we’re undergoing a challenge it doesn’t feel productive, so we’re drawn to strategies that feel better, unaware that they may be less effective
  • Rereading text and massed practice are not productive, i.e., rapid fire repetition of something you’re trying to learn or cramming for exams. They give rise to feelings of fluency but are largely a waste of time
  • Retrieval practice - recalling facts or concepts from memory - is much more effective than review by rereading
  • Spacing out practice or interleaving it with other subjects makes it feel more challenging to recall, yet produces longer lasting learning and more versatile application of what is learned in later settings
  • Trying to solve a problem prior to being told the solution leads to better learning
  • The notion that you learn better according to your learning style, e.g., a visual or auditory learner, is not supported by empirical research. You learn better when you draw on all of your aptitudes and resourcefulness, rather than just the style you find most amenable
  • Extracting and understanding the underlying principles or rules of problem makes one more successful at picking the right solution in unfamiliar situations
  • People who learn to extract key ideas from new material, organize them into a mental model, and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery

    Chapter 2: To learn, retrieve

  • The stronger one’s knowledge about the subject at hand, the more nuanced one’s creativity can be in addressing a new problem
  • Knowledge amounts to little without the exercise of ingenuity and imagination; as creativity absent of a stable foundation of knowledge builds a shaky house
  • A 1978 study showed that cramming leads to higher scores on an immediate test but results in faster forgetting compared to practicing retrieval
  • Testing immediately after exposure enhances knowledge retention, one study found an 11% increase on test scores on a topic learned a week prior between a group that was tested immediately after and one who had not been tested prior
  • Multiple spaced out tests immediately after content is learned serves as an immunization against forgetting the material, the mental strain induced by testing solidifies a foundation of knowledge
  • Students who have been quizzed have a dual advantage: a more accurate sense of what they do and don’t know, and the strengthening of accrued learning from retrieval practice

    Chapter 3: Mix up your practice

  • Massed practice is prevalent; whether it be summer language boot camps, colleges teaching a single subject promising fast learning, or continuing education seminars with material condensed to a single weekend. It feels productive, yet the material is forgotten as fast as it is learned. Spacing out practice feels less productive as it’s more effortful, yet it generates fertile ground for knowledge to grow out of and flourish
  • “The myths of massed practice are hard to exorcise, even when you’re experiencing the evidence yourself.” Massed practice feels better, because as you study you feel as though you’re learning faster and that feels good and more seamless. Yet when compared against the more cognitively challenging varied and interleaved practice, massed practice generally underperforms on later tests.
  • Providing a quiz at the end of a conference can help the audience retain some of what they learned. Normally they just listen and walk out, forgetting the material shortly after
  • Reflection is a form of retrieval practice, essential to bridging the gap in the learning practice (“What did I do? What happened? How did it work out? What would I do differently next time?”)

    Chapter 5: Avoid illusions of knowing

  • A good way to engage in self-insight is to ask yourself: is the world giving me positive feedback? Is the world rewarding me in a way that I would expect a competent person to be rewarded? Is there something I can work on to reduce the delta? “Think of the kids lining up to join the softball team—would you be picked?”

    Chapter 6: Get beyond learning styles

  • Fluid intelligence: the ability to reason, see relationships, think abstractly, and hold information in the mind while working on a problem
  • Crystallized intelligence: accumulated knowledge of the works, the pattern recognition models one has developed from past learning and experience

    Chapter 7: Increase your abilities

  • Myelin coating of axons generally starts at the back of our brain and works it’s way towards our frontal lobes as we grow into adulthood. Myelin coating thickness correlates with ability, and with increased practice, leading to thicker coats that improve the strength and speed of electrical signals
  • Automatic actions or responses to stimula, i.e., habits, tend to be directed from a region deep in the brain called the basal ganglia
  • Learning to remember the relationship between unrelated items, such as names and faces, stimulates neurogenesis in the hippocampus. This neurogenesis starts in anticipation of the learning event, and persists after it has been completed
  • Some individuals aim for performance goals, working to validate their ability. These individuals unconsciously limit their ability, picking challenges that they are confident they can meet so as to validate their ability
  • Some individuals strive toward learning goals, working to acquire new knowledge or skills. With a goal to increase ability, they pick ever-increasing challenges, and interpret setbacks as opportunities to learn and improve
  • “Emphasizing effort gives a child a rare variable they can control, but emphasizing natural intelligence takes it out of a child’s control, providing no good recipe for responding to a failure.”

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet

Published:

Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet, Thich Nhat Hanh

  • We live in a civilization of borrowing. When we want something we can’t yet afford, we count on the bodies and labor in the future to pay back the debt. We have treated the global ecological environment similarly—exploiting the planet for its resources, burdening future generations with the debts we currently incur in order to maintain superfluous and ostentatious lifestyles
  • The four notions of the diamond suttra
    • The illusion of self: I am composed of cells shared with my ancestors, of flourishing and diverse microbiomes lining the inside of my gut, of non-me elements that come together to make me. Thus, the notion of me being separate from the rest of the world is false, and a construct developed by natural selection to prioritize the survival of my genes. Yet, in reality, my system cannot function without the rest of the world… Interconnectedness. I am all.
    • The notion of “human being”: we depend on other beings in order to survive, whether it be plants, fish, or water. Yet we preference our species at the expense of others. Due to interbeing, by harming others we are harming ourselves. Our life requires cohesion with the rest of the world, and since we are interdependent with the planet and its constituents, this notion of “human-being” preference at the expense of others serves to eventually harm us
    • The notion of “living being”: we are composed and dependent on inanimate matter as well—minerals, molecules, atoms. Life is contingent on these things, thus the preference for living over non-living can be unhelpful
    • The notion of “life span”: when we die, we don’t really die, we just transform into something else. Likewise, within us live the genes of ancestors dating back to the creation of life billions of years ago.
  • Three basic needs: peace, understanding, and love. To cultivate in any situation a feeling of peace, understanding, and compassion allows for disillusioned and positive action
  • When suffering, get in touch with it. Do not cover it up with media, games, or alcohol. Ask why you are suffering, and where it has come from. Recognize it and hold it inside—look deeply into it and say “hello my fear, anger, and despair. I will take good care of you.”
  • The mechanics of compassion: when suffering, look deeply into its nature and develop an understanding of it, and follow with a compassion towards the suffering

Science

Published:

A collection of notes from scientific books.

Self-help

Published:

A collection of notes from books within the self-help genre.

Western Philosophy

Published:

A collection of notes from books read on Western philosophy.

The Righteous Mind

Published:

The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt

Part 1: Intuition comes first, strategic reasoning comes second

Chapter 1: Where does morality come from?

  • One of Haidt’s early cross-cultural studies on moral judgement found that between rural Brazil, a city in Brazil, and a city in the USA, those in the more disadvantaged areas tended to moralize more
  • Within each city, lower social status individuals tended to moralize more than those in high status. This effect of status was stronger than the differences in location
  • Kids tended to moralize more than adults
  • Those in rural Brazil still tended to deem something morally unacceptable even if they didn’t find anyone was harmed by the proposed scenario, whereas in the USA they would say it violates a social convention—showing that moral intuitions are not solely innate but absorbed via environmental influence
  • Gut feelings about disgust and disrespect can sometimes drive reasoning, normally fabricated post-hoc. People may have a moral intuition about a certain circumstance, and struggle to come up with a distinct reason as to why they believe it’s bad/good

    Chapter 2: The intuitive dog and its rational tail

  • “Desire and reason pull in different directions. I see the right way and approve it, but follow the wrong”-Ovid, Roman poet
  • There is a difference between personal preference and moral judgements. With personal preferences, it’s perfectly ok to decline a situation because you don’t want to, based on your subjective preference
  • Moral judgements, however, are not subjective statements; they are claims that somebody did something wrong. I can’t gather support to punish you just because I don’t like what you’re doing. I must point to something outside my personal preferences, that pointing is our moral reasoning
  • We reason morally not to see how we came to a judgement; but to find the best reasons why others ought to join us in our judgment
  • Moral reasons are the tail wagged by the intuitive dog. You can’t make a dog happy by forcibly wagging its tail; you can’t change people’s minds by utterly refuting their arguments
  • Empathy is an antidote to righteousness and divisiveness, yet it’s challenging to empathize across a moral divide
  • The mere exposure effect: An experiment showed that repeated exposure to arbitrary objects made people like them more; the brain tags familiar things as good things. This is a basic principle in advertising
  • When exposed to a bad smell, subjects of a study were more likely to give harsher moral judgments. When reflecting on a past moral transgression, we are more likely to want to clean ourselves (Lady Macbeth effect). Even when something as simple as a hand-sanitizer is nearby, we become more morally conservative
  • Animals first evolved to attract and averse to smells and tastes, i.e., biochemical senses. This could be one reason why a bad/good smell effects our moral judgments—if I’m sensing something pleasant, this is probably something that’s good for me
  • An experiment gave its subjects a moral quandary and provided half of them with a weak justification and half with a strong justification. When asked their stance on the situation directly after reading the justification, most stuck to their intuitions and condemned the situation. When given 2 minutes to reflect afterwards, most who were shown the strong justification were much more likely to change their minds
  • After ingesting information that provokes an affective response, letting it mellow for a few minutes, such that our initial brain stem response dies down, allows us to judge things with more reason and openness

    Chapter 4: Vote for me (here’s why)

  • People are more likely to engage in exploratory thought (truth seeking) than confirmatory thought (one-sided attempt to rationalize a particular point) when:
    • Prior to forming an opinion, they are told they will be accountable to an audience
    • The views of the audience are unknown
    • The audience are well-informed and seek accuracy
  • One of thought’s central functions is to allow one to justifiably and persuasively describe why one acted in a particular way, and to search for reasons to convince oneself that they have made the “right” choice of action
  • Schools don’t teach people to reason thoroughly; they select the applicants with higher IQs, and people with higher IQs are able to generate more reasons (normally supporting their side and discounting the opposition)
  • When we want to believe something, we ask ourselves “Can I believe it?” and search for supporting evidence; when we don’t want to believe something, we ask ourselves “Must I believe it?” and search for contrary evidence

    Part 2: There’s more to morality than harm and fairness

    Chapter 5: Beyond WEIRD morality

  • When asked to write statements beginning with the words “I am…”, westerners are more likely to reference internal psychological states (I am happy, I am outgoing, etc.) and East Asians are more likely to reference roles and relationships (I am a father, I am a husband, etc.)
  • The WEIRDer you are, the more you perceive things as separate objects rather than relationships
  • Other than ethics around harm and fairness, the ethic of autonomy is prevalent in western societies. Not as prominent in WEIRD societies are the ethics of community and divinity, though in more conservative and religious factions of western society these ethics are more prevalent
  • “We are multiple from the start.” The foundation for each of these moral ethics lies within us, latent, from the start. It is possible to view them all, to improve understanding of why others take moral positions, and to reduce ignorance towards why they feel that type of way

    Chapter 6: Taste buds of the righteous mind

  • Five good candidates for being the “taste receptors” of the righteous mind are care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity

    Chapter 7: The moral foundations of politics

  • The brain of a newborn is one that is best seen as prewired—flexible and subject to change—rather than hardwired, i.e., fixed and immutable
  • “Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises…built-in does not mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience.”
  • The moral matrix of liberals falls more heavily on the Care foundation than does that of the conservatives, though conservatives do still have some (e.g., save our troops… respect those who sacrifice for the group). The care foundation for the conservatives is aimed more locally, liberals tend to be a bit more universalist (e.g., human eating practices)
  • Regarding the foundation of fairness, on the left, fairness often implies equality, whereas on the right it implies proportionality (i.e., get paid in proportion to one’s contributions)
  • The loyalty foundation comes stronger for conservatives, who lean into loyalty by pledging loyalty their nation (nationalism) and to sports teams. Liberals have a harder time with this one as they tend to be universalists
  • We are the descendants of individuals who were best able to play the game of authority/subversion—to rise in status while cultivating protection from superiors and the allegiance of subordinates
  • The omnivore’s dilemma is that omnivores must seek out and explore new potential foods while remaining wary of them until they are proven safe. They thus go through life with two competing motives: neophilia and neophobia
  • Liberals tend to be more neophilic (open to new experiences); conservatives tend to be more neophobic (preferring what’s tried and true)
  • There is some evidence that liberal and welcoming attitudes to immigrants are more common in times and places where risks of disease are lower (the recent pandemic made this apparent)

    Chapter 8: The conservative advantage

  • The liberty/oppression foundation makes people notice and resent any sign of attempted domination, triggering an urge to band together to resist or overthrow bullies
    • This manifests as egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism on the left, and “don’t-tread-on-me” and anti-government attitudes on the right
  • The fairness foundation focuses mostly on proportionality. Most people have a few intuitive concern for the law of karma, we want to see cheaters punished and good citizens rewarded in proportion to their deeds

    Part 3: Morality binds and blinds

    Chapter 9: Why are we so groupish?

  • Shared intentionality, i.e., when groups of humans share a common representation of a task they are pursuing, could have been the keystone step in the development in human morality. Once people began sharing a common understanding of how things were supposed to be done, and someone violated it, the group would feel a twinge of negativity towards the violator
  • Morality is like the matrix, it’s a shared, consensual hallucination within a group
  • A set of selection pressures operated within groups, e.g., via punishment of nonconformists; and between groups, e.g., via the most cohesive groups surviving and taking resources from less cohesive, smaller groups
  • The human love of using symbolic markers to demonstrate a group membership likely adapted because it provided a way for our ancestors to develop a sense of “we” beyond kinship. The more permanent the symbol (e.g., piercings and tattoos) the more permanent the membership. We trust and cooperate better with people who look and sound like us, we expect them to share our values and norms
  • We have a psychology which “expects” the social world to be divided into symbolically marked groups
  • Humans “self-domesticated” themselves when they began selecting for partners and friends based on their ability to live within the tribe’s moral matrix
  • Changes in our genes accelerated greatly during the Holocene era, once humans started becoming more social, agriculture development began, and humans expanded across the globe into novel environments. Genes and culture coevolve, and once culture starts picking up the pace, genetic evolution picks up the pace as well
  • Early population bottlenecks can also contribute to rapid genetic evolution. If we suddenly lose 95% of all food, the humans that survive are going to be the ones that work best together to monopolize the remaining resources. The small number of people that are left and the genes they carry have an immense impact on the generations that follow. Some suspect this happened 70000-140000 years ago during large global temperature fluctuations and volcanic eruptions that disrupted the environment
  • Groupishness tends to be focused on improving the well-being of the in-group, instead of harming the out-group (although this does happen, e.g., warfare)
  • Human nature is mostly shaped by individual selection. However, there is certainly a case to be made that group selection has played a role in shaping human nature, particularly in shaping our righteous minds

    Chapter 10: The hive switch

  • There exists a “switch” in us that, when engaged, dissolves selfish interests and prioritizes the collective. The peak of this is collective effervescence, a state achieved when a large group acts in synchrony, generating a sort of electricity that reverberates throughout the group
  • We are homo-duplex, we live most of our lives in our individual, ordinary worlds, but achieve some of our greatest joys in brief moments of connection to the “sacred” world, where the self dissolves and we become part of the whole
  • Oxytocin bonds people to their groups. It increases intra-group love, but not love towards all humans as a whole
  • Mirror neurons enable empathy, but studies show that they activate more for those that share their moral matrix (i.e., for those on their good side)

    Ch11. Religion is a team sport

  • Often our beliefs are post hoc constructions designed to justify what we’ve just done, or to support the groups we belong to
  • New atheists dismiss religion as costly, ineffective, and irrational—a product of cognitive misfirings (e.g., agent-detection module). However, it turns out religion is a solution to one of the hardest challenges humanity faces: cooperation without kinship
  • Communes (i.e., groups of people who reject the moral matrix of general society) in the United States tend to persist longer when they adopt a religion. More within group demands for sacrifice also correlated with group longevity. The longevity of secular communes was much shorter, though this doesn’t necessarily mean the people in these communes were more or less happy. It just means religious communes may be more effective groups
  • In the human population as a whole, genes that promoted religious behaviour were likely to become more common in each generation as the less cohesive societies perished and the more united ones thrived
  • If human minds and human religions coevolved, shaping one another, we can not expect people to abandon religion so easily. Of course, one can still reject organized religion, a more recent cultural phenomena. But someone who rejects all religion will have a hard time shaking off their religious psychology
  • Particular religious beliefs and practices don’t correlate much with how altruistic a religious person is. How enmeshed with their co-religious community is the strongest correlate to how generous and charitable they are in general. Friendship and group activities carried out in a shared moral matrix enhance selflessness.
  • “It is religious belongingness that supports neighbourliness, not particular religious beliefs.”

    Chapter 12: Can’t we all disagree more constructively?

  • Genes collectively give some people brains that are more (or less) reactive to threats, and that produce less (or more) pleasure when exposed to novelty, change, and new experiences. Genetics play a role in one’s tendency to be conservative or liberal
  • A study which asked thousands of American to fill out a moral foundation questionnaire, where a third answered as themselves, a third pretended to be a typical conservative, and a third pretended to be a typical liberal, found that moderates and conservatives were able to most accurately predict what the other sides would answer in the questionnaire. Liberals were the least accurate, with those who were “very liberal” having abysmal ability to predict the morals of conservatives
  • This is likely due in part to the emphasis on two moral pillars (care/harm and fairness) that liberals stand on, and the six pillars that conservatives stand on (even though, ironically, conservatives tend to be a bit less empathetic)
  • Can you convince yourself that the following statements hold merit?
    • People are inherently imperfect and prone to act poorly when all constraints of accountability are removed
    • Our reasoning is flawed and prone to overconfidence, making it dangerous to construct theories based on pure reason (i.e., rationality), unconstrained by intuition and historical experience
    • Institutions gradually emerge, shaped by society, which we then respect and sometimes even sacralise; if we strip institutions of authority and treat them as arbitrary and artificial, we render them less effective, exposing ourselves to social disorder and potentially a lack of meaning (anomie)
  • “Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for traditions, and dissolution/subjection to foreign conquest through the growth of individualism and personal independence that makes cooperation impossible.”
  • Liberal programs with good intentions can sometimes have unintended consequences, e.g., the urge to help Hispanic immigrants in 1989 led to multicultural education programs that emphasizes the differences among Americans, rather than their shared values and identity
  • “Emphasizing differences between one another makes many people more racist, not less.”
  • “We think the other side is blind to the truth, science, reason, and common sense, yet everyone goes blind when talking about their sacred objects (i.e., beliefs).”

Breath

Published:

Breath, James Nestor

Chapter 1: The worst breather in the animal kingdom

  • Around 40% of today’s population (western?) suffers from chronic nasal obstruction, around 50% of us are habitual mouth breathers (females and children suffer from this the most (why?))

    Chapter 2: Mouthbreathing

  • How the body generates energy via food and/or air: anaerobic and aerobic respiration. Anaerobic respiration metabolizes glucose to generate energy, and is much less (16x less) efficient than aerobic respiration, a process in which the cells in our body have fine-tuned over the past 2.5 billion years
  • Mouthbreathing begets more mouthbreathing; nosebreathing begets more nosebreathing. Breathing through the mouth reduces air pressure against the back of the throat, causing the airways to sink and relax at the back of the throat, leading to restricted airways. Nose breathing increases air pressure, forcing the muscles at the back of the throat to open up, leading to opened airways

    Chapter 3: Nose

  • The interior of the nose is lined with erectile tissue. When the right nostril is breathed through it tends to be associated with a more sympathetic response: increased heart rate and cortisol and feeds more blood (?) to the left frontal cortex which is associated with impulse response and logical decision making. The left nostril is associated with a more parasympathetic response, calming the body down and feeding blood to brain regions more associated with creativity and mental abstractions
  • Nasal breathing induces a release of nitric oxide by the sinuses, a molecule that plays an essential role in increasing circulation and oxygen delivery to cells. We can absorb about 18 percent more oxygen through nose breathing than by mouthbreathing

    Chapter 4: Exhale

    Chapter 5: Slow

  • Breathing slowly improves oxygen usage, allowing carbon dioxide to settle a bit longer which eases transport of oxygen within hemoglobin to needy tissues
  • Many meditative/prayer practices, e.g., Buddhist/Hindu chants and the Christian rosary, involve chants or rhythmic breathing of a rate of ~5.5 breaths per minute. These practices may have evolved as they synchronized with cardiovascular rhythms, and gave a feeling of well-being and alertness while practicing

    Chapter 6: Less

  • Slower breathing holds in slightly more carbon dioxide, which lowers the pH in blood to make it more acidic. The sweet spot pH in blood is about 7.4, and the body attempts to maintain that pH
  • One way the body does this aside from breathing is through buffering, in which the kidneys release bicarbonate from blood into urine, lowering the pH in response to high pH levels (brought about by low carbon dioxide from too-rapid breathing)
    • When bicarbonate leaves the body, it takes magnesium, phosphorus, and potassium with it. This is why asthmatics and others are prescribed these supplements to stave off future attacks
    • Bones get weakened as well, as mineral stores within the bones are dissolved to compensate for the lost minerals

      Chapter 7: Chew

  • Chewing helps maintain a strong jaw and keeps the jaw and teeth structurally sound. The historical records find that around the time softer foods were developed, a corresponding significant decrease in teeth quality (straightness) came along with it.
  • I like to think of this like trying to plant a fence post in eroded and granular soil: your fence post is going to wiggle around. Whereas, with a strong, dense soil, the fence post stays straight and upright.

    Chapter 8: More, on occasion

  • The parasympathetic system is part of the autonomic nervous system that stimulates relaxation and restoration. It eases digestion, relaxes bowels for waste elimination, and stimulates genitals before sex (“feed and breed” system). Many nerves in the lungs that connect to the parasympathetic system are located deep down in the lungs, so deeper, relaxed breaths tend to engage a parasympathetic response
  • The sympathetic system stimulates the fight or flight response. Nerves for this system tend to be located in the upper lungs. Short, rapid breaths engage the sympathetic system, routing blood from less-vital organs (like stomach and bladder) to more important organs (like muscles and brain)
  • Tummo breathing is a technique used by Buddhist monks in the Himalayas to stay warm with limited insulation. This heavy breathing practice coupled with cold exposure releases adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol on demand. Immune function is enhanced by adrenaline, inflammatory immune response in downgraded by cortisol, and norepinephrine redirects blood from the skin, stomach, and reproductive organs to muscles, the brain, and other vital organs
  • Tummo breathing and cold exposure expands the bounds on what the body is used to, and what it can handle, such that it can adapt and become flexible with respect to unseen stressful physiological responses
  • Tummo breathing procedure:
    1. Lay flat on your back with a pillow beneath your head
    2. Take a very deep breath into the pit of the stomach, through the nose if possible. Inhaling should first inflate the stomach, then the chest. Exhale out just as quickly as the inhale. Repeat 30 times
    3. Exhale to leave about a quarter of the air in the lungs and hold that air for as long as possible
    4. Take a huge inhale and hold it for another 15 seconds. Move the fresh air around the chest and shoulders.
    5. Repeat steps 2-4 for three or four rounds

      Chapter 9: Hold it

  • We have a cluster of neurons at the base of the brain stem called central chemoreceptors, that measure CO2 levels in the bloodstream (?) to regulate how fast and deeply we should be breathing. Low CO2 -> breathe slower, high CO2 -> breathe faster
  • These chemoreceptors have the ability to trigger a panic/fear response outside the amygdalae, which is generally responsible for translating external stimuli into aversive behaviour. The roots of the chemoreceptors are more ancient than that of the amygdalae, used by the first aerobic life forms around 2.5B years ago

    Chapter 10: Fast, slow, and not at all

    Epilogue: A last gasp

  • “…our body is much more nearly perfect than the endless list of ailments suggest. Its shortcomings are due less to its inborn imperfections than to our abusing it.” - Nobel laureate Albert Szent-Györgyi
  • Nine out of ten of the top human killers, i.e., diabetes, heart disease, stroke, are cause by the food we eat, water we drink, the houses and offices we work in. Humanity/civilizations created these diseases

The Social Conquest of Earth

Published:

The Social Conquest of Earth, E.O Wilson

Part 1: Why does advanced social life exist?

Chapter 1: The human condition

  • The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature. By itself, mythmaking could never discover the origin and meaning of humanity (as it attempts to do); however, the discovery of the origin and meaning of humanity may explain the origin and meaning of myths, the core of organized religion

    Part 2: Where do we come from?

    Chapter 2: The two paths to conquest

  • Human groups are formed of highly flexible alliance, in which strategies for navigating these groups were written as a complicated mix of altruism, cooperation, competition, domination, reciprocity, defection, and deceit
  • This array of strategies required higher degrees of intelligence and intense socialization. The brain had to measure emotions of friend and enemy, plan strategies for social interaction, build mental scenarios of short and long-term relationships, and retrieve memories far into the past and long into the future to imagine the consequences of every relationship

    Chapter 3: The approach

    Chapter 4: The arrival

  • One critical point in our evolutionary past was when our ancestors developed an omnivore diet. Hunting game requires a high amount of teamwork and cohesion, and it’s worth it: meat is pound for pound more energetically efficient than vegetable food
  • Another critical point was the ability to control fire, which then led to camps (i.e., nests) which served as the nucleus for social groups. Now in close proximity to one another on a regular basis, intellectual development that enhanced one’s cohesion with the group (e.g., social intelligence, empathy, deceitfulness, etc.) was selected for, propelling our intellectual development further
    • I also remember reading that cooked food also requires less energy to consume (chewing), which may have allowed resources to be directed away from the jaw to the brain region. It seems like these factors (this one and the previous point) arose in tandem, with cooked food enabling more brain capacity and social complexities driving the cerebral growth

      Chapter 5: Threading the evolutionary maze

  • The following preadaptations enabled human eusociality:
  • Living on land: without land dwelling there exists no possibility for the use of fire—a critical prerequisite to social flourishing in mammals * Being large: to house a brain with enough processing power to compute the complexities of social organization requires a large enough animal to house that brain. While ants are hypersocial and design intricate architecture with custom air conditioning, they are purely instinctual. And again, insects are too small to control fire * Grasping hands tipped with spatulate finger tips * Having those grasping hands free from walking, i.e., being bipedal * A shift from vegetarianism to an omnivore diet. Meat yields more energy per gram than vegetation. The social cooperation required to hunt meat also led to select for groups who could cooperate effectively * The controlled use of fire followed, facilitating the consumption of meats; mastication and digestion of cooked meats requires less energy * Persistent fire provided a refuge for early Homo species. As such, nests were formed—a precursor to the attainment of eusociality of all other known animals * With fireside campsites came division of labor, where subgroups formed and bands organized into dominance hierarchies

    Chapter 6: Creative forces

  • The outcome of between-group competition for humans was determined largely by the size and tightness of the group, and the quality of their communication and division of labor
  • The genetic fitness of a human being is the consequence of both individual and group selection. These two forces tend to pull in opposite directions—I could deceive and cheat in pursuit of self-interest at the expense of the group, or I could be heroic and altruistic for the benefit of the group, but at the expense of my resources
    • If the benefit from group membership falls below that which would be had from a solitary life, evolution would favour cheating or departure from the group. If personal benefit from group membership rises high enough, the members will be prone to altruism and conformity
  • Group composition is unstable because of advantageous group size increases from immigration, ideological proselytization, and conquest, pitted against the advantages by usurpation within the group and fission to create new groups
  • Much of culture (i.e., the content of the creative arts) has risen from the inevitable clash between individual and group selection

    Chapter 7: Tribalism is a fundamental human trait

  • People must have a tribe. It gives them their own and social meaning in a chaotic world, making the environment seem less disorienting and dangerous. Each human has a system of interlocking tribes, savouring the company of like-minded friends, and yearning to be in one of the best tribes
  • Groups, regardless of how they are formed, have always been observed to rank out-group below in-group—even in experiments when they were told the in-groups and out-groups were chosen arbitrarily
  • The tendency to form groups and favour the in-group members has the earmarks of instinct. Children can have an inborn propensity to learn some things swiftly and decisively, known as prepared learning. Evidence suggests that in-group preference is prepared early in development, with infants being most sensitive to the sounds of their native language, regardless of whether the meaning of the speech is fully comprehended. Later, these infants look preferentially at person who spoke their native language within their hearing
  • The elementary drive to form and take deep pleasure from in-group membership translates at a higher level into tribalism. We are prone to ethnocentrism, preferring the company of others of the same race, nation, clan, and religion (or anything that can be symbolically represented—as long as I can tell who belongs to my group and who doesn’t)
  • Different parts of the brain have evolved by group selection to create groupishness. Studies have observed that the amygdala (fear & anger) fires when subjects are presented an image of someone of a different race

    Chapter 8: War as humanity’s hereditary curse

  • Once a group has been split off and sufficiently dehumanized, justifications can be made for horrible acts towards that group, no matter how gruesome
  • As a biological reproducing species, our population approaches limits set by available food and water. We are still fundamentally the same as our hunter-gatherer ancestors, just with more food and larger territories. Yet, we blindly obey the instincts that we’ve inherited from our Palaeolithic predecessors, which in our case lead to an overindulgence of energy and material resources

    Chapter 9: Breakout

  • A loose rule of island biogeography is that animals smaller than 20kg tend to evolve into relative giants (e.g., the immense tortoises of the Galapagos), and animals larger than 20kg tend to evolve towards dwarfism (e.g., the dwarf deer of the Florida Keys)
    • A cousin of Homo Sapiens, branching from Homo Erectus, are the Homo floresiensis of the island Flores, who were less than 1 meter tall and with brains of comparable size to australopithecines. This evolutionary product supports the above stated loose rules
  • “We should learn to promote human biological diversity for its own sake instead of using it to justify prejudice and conflict.”

    Chapter 10: The creative explosion

  • Bands and communities of bands with better combinations of cultural innovations became more productive and better equipped for competition and war. Rivals either copied them or else were conquered. Thus, group selection drove the evolution of culture

    Chapter 11: The sprint to civilization

  • The chiefs of chiefdoms typically micromanaged the affairs of their domain, delegating as little authority as possible to reduce the chance of insurrection. Common tactics include the suppression of underlings and fermenting a fear of rival chiefdoms

    Part 3: How social insects conquered the invertebrate world

    Chapter 12: The invention of eusociality

    Chapter 13: Inventions that advanced the social insects

  • A significant change that allowed for the flourishing of ants, and other social insects in general, was the shift in arboreal flora from mostly conifers to leafy and flowered trees. Flowered trees are more diverse and thus leave a more diverse landscape in the soil below (as the portions of the trees eventually fall to the forest floor). They also coevolved with insects, encouraging pollination, and rewarding with sugar
  • This change in the tree landscape also led to a symbiosis between ants and sap sucking insects (i.e., aphids). These aphids would suck sap from trees and excrete their waste below. Ants eventually learned to consume this sugary waste, and in return the aphids wouldn’t get stuck in a pile of their sticky waste
  • Now, some species of ants have intricate nests with pastures laid out for their fleet of sapsuckers, much like how humans do for domesticated animals such as cows, sheep, and so on.
  • Some species of ants in more earthen regions (i.e., not so foresty) have granaries to store seeds of nearby plants
  • Social complexity seems to involve at some point a species developing an ability to sustain larger energy reserves. Ants develop intricate, complex nests with a caste of workers with specialized skills, as do humans in the forms of civilizations with farmers, engineers, and medics
  • “The more elaborate and expensive a nest is in energy and time, the greater the fierceness of the ants that protect it.”

    Part 4: The forces of social evolution

    Chapter 14: The scientific dilemma of rarity

    Chapter 15: Insect altruism and eusociality explained

    Chapter 16: Insects take the giant leap

  • One explanation as to the rarity of eusociality is that it requires specific pre-adaptations, notably the construction of a nest in which offspring are reared. Then, there comes a point where cooperation with another member of the species, e.g., one bee produces larvae while the other defends the nest. This would require an allele change (based on external environmental cues) in the bees that suppress certain behaviours, i.e., foraging for food or producing offspring
  • An allele flip of this sort happened with ants as the working caste lost their wings. The idea is that this gene switch would cause offspring that would otherwise disperse to instead stay and contribute to the nest. This would occur when cooperation of the group favours survival more than if the insect lived a solitary life
  • Eusociality seems to become irreversible once an anatomically distinct worker caste is developed
  • In a eusocial insect group, there must be a balance in cooperation. If too many queens, there are not enough workers to maintain the colony; if too many workers, food around the nest will fall short; if not enough soldiers, predators will overwhelm the nest; and if not enough foragers, the colony will starve

    Chapter 17: How natural selection creates social instincts

  • Overarching principles crucial for understanding the genetic basis of instinct and social behaviour:
    • The distinction between the unit of heredity and the target of selection. The unit is a gene/arrangement of genes that form part of the hereditary code. The target of selection is the trait/combination of traits encoded by the units of heredity and favoured/disfavoured by the environment
    • Natural selection is usually multilevel: it acts on genes that prescribe targets at multiple levels of biological organization, such as cell and organism, or organism and colony. Selection occurring at one level (e.g., the cell) can work in the opposite direction from that of the adjacent level (e.g., the organism). A runaway cancer cell causes the organism of which it is a member to sicken and die. Conversely, the community of cells stays healthy when the growth of cancer cells is controlled
    • In colonies composed of authentically cooperating individuals (i.e., humans), selection among genetically diverse individual members promotes selfish behaviour; while selection between groups of humans typically promotes altruism among members of the colony. Colonies of cheaters lose to colonies of cooperators. The degree of cohesiveness of a colony depends on the number of cooperators and cheaters, which depends on the relative intensities of individual selection versus group selection
    • Traits (targets) that group selection acts upon emerge from interactions among members of the group (e.g., communication, division of labor, cooperation, etc.). If these interactions favour the colony over another colony who uses lesser interactions, the genes prescribing the improved group performance spreads through the population of colonies
    • Individual vs. Group selection results in a mix of altruism and selfishness (virtue and sin) among society members. If a colony member devoted their life to service over marriage, the individual is of benefit to the society, even though they do not have personal offspring. If a colony member is a layabout our coward who saves their energy passes the resulting social cost onto others
  • Phenotypic plasticity describes how traits prescribed by genes (phenotypes) may sometimes be rigid (in the case of the number of fingers on the hand or colour of eyes) but may also be flexible based on environmental cues. There is a species of plant, the water crowfoot, who’s leaves will adopt a different style depending on the surrounding, brushed below water and broad above
  • Proximate cause: how a process or structure works
  • Ultimate cause: why the process or structure occurs in the first place

    Chapter 18: The forces of social evolution

  • In this chapter E.O Wilson attempts to challenge the dogma of inclusive fitness theory, i.e., the notion that degrees of altruism are proportional to the degree of genetic relatedness when trying to explain the emergence of eusociality
  • While there are a few examples in which kin selection holds to explain social phenomena, group selection also offers convincing arguments as well
  • One example is that of an ant colony which invests more energy into virgin females than males. This was initially though to be because this particular ant species was diploidhaploid, i.e., sisters share 3/4 of their genes with one another compared to 1/2 with their mother. Female workers investing more in the virgin females compared to males seemingly confirmed inclusive fitness theory; they invested more in the females since they’re more related. However, an alternative explanation is that males are proportionally smaller and less energy intensive to produce than females, who have fatty deposits to support reproduction. If offspring were invested in based on energy equivalency, many more males would be supported than females, which would result in wasted resources (as many males would be left without a partner). As such, more investment in females is optimal for the colony in terms of resource allocation, making it a more efficient relative to colonies that do not follow this strategy (i.e., selection at the group level)

    Chapter 19: The emergence of a new theory of eusociality

    Part 5: What are we?

    Chapter 20: What is human nature?

  • Human nature is the inherited regularities of mental development common to our species
  • Examples of this include:
    • Incest avoidance: most social species are exogamous, i.e., their young go off to another tribe, humans are no different. Likewise, humans follow a simple rule of thumb known as the Westermarck effect: Have no sexual interest in those whom you knew intimately during the earliest years of your life. Note, this effect occurs regardless of the degree of relatedness between two individuals
    • Colour perception: when modulating the intensity of light, we can correctly perceive the continuous nature of the intensity change. However, if we do the same with wavelength, i.e., changing colours, we bin the changes into their major colour groups (red, to orange, to yellow, to green and so on). We discretize colours, even though the wavelength spectrum is continuous, likely because it was evolutionary advantageous to do so
      • Cross culturally, the language used to describe colour follows a hierarchy (known as the Berlin-Kay progression): black and white -> red -> green/yellow -> blue -> brown -> the rest. This sequence is not random, indicating some human predisposition in describing more/less important colours

        Chapter 21: How culture evolved

  • Culture is the combination of traits that distinguishes one group from another
  • A cultural trait is a behaviour either first invented in a group or learned from another group, and then transmitted among group members
  • The driving force leading to the threshold of complex cultures appears to be group section. A group whose members could read intentions and cooperate among one another, and predict the actions of competing groups, had an enormous advantage over competing groups. Individual selection surely still played a role in intra-group competition, yet group selection acted on inter-group competition
  • Morality, conformity, religious fervour, and fighting ability were keystone to generating a united, cooperative, and effective group

    Chapter 22: The origins of language

  • Three particular attributes enabled our species to approach the highest level of social intelligence: shared attention; high level of awareness required to act together in achieving a common goal; and the “theory of mind”, i.e., the recognition that their mental states are shared by others
  • Language is a set of coordination devices that serve to direct the attention of others
  • When the conversational gaps (the pauses between one person’s speaking and the other’s answering) of ten languages were measured, all were shown to avoid overlap, and the length of turnover gaps were found to be almost the same
  • In warmer climates, languages around the world have evolved to use more vowels and fewer consonants, creating more sonorous combinations of sounds; sonorous sounds carry further, in accord with the tendency of people in warm climates to spend more time outdoors and keep greater distances apart
  • The genetic basis of human language acquisition did not coevolve with language but predates the emergence of language. Language has evolved to fit the human brain, rather than the reverse

    Chapter 23: The evolution of cultural variation

  • In the castes of any colonies, there exist major workers (giant soldiers that perform tasks outside of the nest) and minor workers (timid workers that perform tasks in the best such as nursing majors). Majors have a higher death rate, and are thus produced at a higher per capital rate than minors, maintaining an optimum balance in numbers between the two castes
  • Cultural variation is determined mostly by two properties of social behaviour: the degree of bias in the epigenetic rule (e.g., low in dress fashion or high in incest avoidance) and the sensitivity to the usage pattern (i.e., the likelihood that group members with imitate others who’ve adapted a particular trait)

    Chapter 24: The origins of morality and honour

  • The conflict between the poorer and better angels of our nature stem from the conflicts arising between individual and group selection
  • Individual selection is responsible for much of what we call sin; group selection is responsible for much of what we call virtue
  • Group selection shapes instincts that tend to make individuals altruistic toward one another (but now towards members of other groups); individual selection shapes instincts in each member that are fundamentally selfish with reference to other members
  • Iron rule of genetic social evolution: selfish individuals best altruistic individuals, and groups of altruists beat groups of selfish individuals
  • The countries with highest quality of life (in terms of education, health, crime, collective self-interests) also have the smallest divide in wealth between the wealthiest and poorest citizens
  • A naturalistic understanding of morality doesn’t lead to absolute precepts and sure judgement but warns against basing them blindly on religious and ideological dogmas. When such precepts are misguided (as they often are), it usually stems from ignorance—i.e., important factors are unintentionally omitted during formulation
  • Examples of these ideological dogmas include:
    • Opposition to artificial conception (sex without the intention of conception) with the (well-intended) reasoning being that sex is made to make babies. While this is true in most species, primates included, humans are slightly different in that women have concealed genitalia as to mask their fertility. This is to encourage sexual intercourse as a bonding mechanism without the intent to necessarily conceive a child. This strengthens the partners’ bonds, which is important since raising a human child requires long term support (due their relative helpless in early years) and thus additional investment from the father
    • Homophobia: under the same guise, condemning homosexuality since sex doesn’t produce offspring is misguided. Homosexuality is heritable and occurs too frequently to be the result of mutations alone. Thus, natural selection must be acting to select for homosexuality in populations. Homosexuals occupy niches and roles that support groups more than had they been absent—hence homosexuality is natural and healthy within societies

      Chapter 25: The origins of religion

  • The illogic of religions is not a weakness, but their essential strength. Acceptance of their bizarre creation myths is what binds followers together
  • The core of traditional organized religions are their creation myths. Creation myths come about in part from folk memories of momentous events, like mass emigration, wars, and natural disasters; stories of devils and angels likely spawn from hallucinations invoked by sleep paralysis, mental illnesses (schizophrenia), or hallucinogenic drugs (mushrooms, fungi, hemp, etc., which were commonly consumed in the Middle East when Abrahamic religions were being crafted)
  • Around the late palaeolithic era humans started to reflect on their mortality, as suggested by ritual burial sites aged around ~95000 years ago
  • Thus humans would have asked where dead people go, and having still seen the dead in their dreams or hallucinations, they concluded the dead must be in some spirit realm, the same inhabited by dreams or hallucinations
  • Religious faith offers the psychological security that uniquely comes from belonging to a group

    Chapter 26: The origins of the creative arts

  • “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth” - Picasso

    Part 6: Where are we going?

    Chapter 28: A new enlightenment

  • On free will: we are free as independent beings, but our decisions are not free of all the organic processes that created our personal brains and minds
  • The opposition of the two levels of natural selection, individual and group level, has resulted in a chimeric genotype in each person, rendering each of us part saint and part sinner
  • Every person feels the pull of conscience, of heroism against cowardice, altruism against greed, truth against deception, and commitment against withdrawal. These dilemmas stem from the conflicting objectives of multilevel selection
  • To question the sacred myths of a religion is to question the identity and worth of its followers, which is why skeptics (including those from other tribes with equally absurd myths) are so righteously disliked

Consilience

Published:

Consilience, E.O Wilson

  • Consilience: a “jumping together” of knowledge by linking facts and fact-based theory across disciplines to create a common groundwork of explanation

    Chapter 3: The Enlightenment

  • Francis Bacon (1561), a founder of the Enlightenment, believed that we must understand nature, both around us and within ourselves, in order to set humanity on the course of self-improvement
  • Bacon emphasized to beware of the idols of the mind:
    • Idol of the tribe is assuming that more order exists in chaotic nature (i.e., being allured to simple answers that seemingly describe complex issues)
    • The imprisoning cave is getting caught in the idiosyncrasies of individual belief and passion
    • The marketplace is where the power of mere words are used to induce belief in nonexistent things
    • The theatre is an unquestioning acceptance of philosophical beliefs and misleading demonstrations
    • Bacon urged to observe the world around you as it truly is and reflect on the best means of transmitting reality as you have experienced it—approaching and transmitting truth is Nature’s calling
  • Chinese scholarship focused on holistic properties and on the harmonious, hierarchical relationships of entities, from stars down to mountains to flowers and to sand. The entities of Nature, in this view, are inseparable and perpetually changing, not discrete and constant as perceived by Enlightenment thinkers (who adopted a more reductionist approach)
  • Our species and its way of thinking are a product of evolution, not the purpose of evolution
  • The “Anthropic principle”: the laws of nature, in our universe at the least, had to be set a certain way so as to allow the creation of beings able to ask about the laws of nature
  • “What really interests me is whether God had any choice in the creation of the world” - Einstein
  • To the extent that philosophical positions both confuse and close doors to further inquiry, they are likely to be wrong.
    • Questions that can’t be answered are generally better than answers that can’t be questioned
  • Wilson suggests that there are two kinds of original thinkers: those who upon viewing disorder try to create order, and those who upon encountering order try to protest it by creating disorder. The tension between the two is what drives learning forward. (Ying and Yang)

    Chapter 4: The Natural Sciences

  • Reductionism is the search strategy employed to find points of entry into otherwise impenetrably complex systems
  • “The love of complexity without reductionism makes art; the love of complexity with reductionism makes science.”
  • Optimum intelligence for normal sciences: bright enough to see what needs to be done, but not so bright as to suffer boredom doing it
  • Natural selection built the brain to survive in the world and only incidentally to understand it at a depth greater than or equal to what is needed to survive
    • The goal of a scientist should be to diagnose and correct the misalignment between human subjective experience and free-standing reality

      Chapter 5: Ariadne’s Thread

  • The activation-synthesis hypothesis suggests that dreaming may be a side effect of the reorganization and editing of the brain’s memory banks
    • During sleep, with most sensory input lacking, the conscious brain is still activated internally by impulses originating from the brain stem. Lacking instantaneous sensory information, yet attempting to perform its usual function (?), the brain does its best to create images that move through coherent narratives—creating fantasy

      Chapter 6: The Mind

  • The thalamus, comprising of two egg-shaped masses of nerve cells near the centre of the brain, functions as a relay center through which all sensory information (other than smell) is transmitted to the cerebral cortex (i.e., the conscious mind). Even dreams are triggered by impulses passing through the thalamus
  • Neurotransmitter: a chemical that either excites an electric discharge in a receiving nerve cell or prevents one from occurring (acts within the synapse, the points of connection and microscopic space between nerve cells, at the ends of their axons)
  • Aggregates of neuron circuits gather in flat assemblages (layers) and rounded assemblages (nuclei), mostly placed at or near the surface of the brain. This is why the gray matter of the brain is gray, with the white colour coming from the myelin sheaths that insulate axons. These aggregates include sensory relay stations, memory modules, and emotional control centres.
  • Three primitive divisions of the brain are found throughout vertebrates, from fishes to mammals: hindbrain, midbrain, and forebrain
    • Hindbrain regulates breathing, heartbeat, and coordination of body movements
    • Midbrain controls sleep and arousal, also parts regulating auditory reflexes and perception
    • A major part of the forebrain is composed of the limbic system, comprised of the amygdala (emotion), hippocampus (memory, especially short-term), hypothalamus (memory, temperature control, sex drive, hunger, and thirst) and thalamus (awareness of all senses other than smell, be it temperature or pain)
    • Forebrain also includes the cerebral cortex, covering the rest of the brain. The primary seat of consciousness, storing and collating information from the senses. It directs voluntary motor activity, speech, and motivation
  • The self is the main character in the winning dramas taken from the litany scenarios generated by the subconscious mind. The hidden preparation of these scenarios gives the illusion of free will. We make decisions for reasons we often sense only vaguely, and seldom understand fully
  • Can AI generate a human mind equivalent? Seems unlikely, as the mind’s emotions are driven by the senses (touch, sight, smell, taste, sound) and a computational neural network is unlikely to have access to these senses, especially at the resolution of a biological system that has fine-tuned its sensory organs over hundreds of millions of years. The AI may be able to mimic what a human mind is capable of, but without human senses and thus human emotion, it doesn’t seem like it would be conscious in the human sense; though, it could gain consciousness in the computational sense

    Chapter 7: From genes to culture

  • Culture is created by the communal mind, and each mind is the product of the genetically structured human brain; genes and culture are thus inseverably linked
  • As a part of gene-culture coevolution, culture is collectively reconstructed each generation in the minds of its individuals. Writing and art allows culture to grow indefinitely large and even skip generation, as opposed to solely oral tradition. However, the fundamental biasing influences of epigenetic rules, being genetic and ineradicable, stay constant
  • Some individuals inherit epigenetic rules that enable survival and reproduction between in their environment and culture than individuals who lack those rules. As such, the human species has evolved genetically by natural selection in behaviour, just as it has anatomically and neurologically
  • Some cultural norms also survive and reproduce better than competing norms, causing culture to evolve on a track parallel to (and much faster than) genetic evolution. Culture allows rapid adjustments to changes in the environment through cultural adaptations without correspondingly precise genetic prescriptions. This is one reason why humans differ fundamentally from all other animal species
  • On epigenetic rules, i.e., innate genetic predispositions: o By four months old, infants prefer harmonious tones, and sometimes react to out-of-tune notes with a disgusted facial expression (the same as elicited by a drop of lemon juice on the tongue) o The startle response from a loud noise closes the eyes, opens the mouth, drops the head, sags the arms and shoulders, and buckles the knees, preparing the body as though to absorb a coming blow o Newborns prefer sugar solutions over plain water in the following order: sucrose, fructose, lactose, glucose o Within ten minutes after birth, infants fixate more on normally drawn facial designs than on abnormal designs o Two days after birth, infants prefer to gaze at their mother rather than unknown, other women o Smiling, used primarily to signal friendliness and approval and indicate a general sense of pleasure, appears cross culturally; environment has little influence in the maturation of smiling
  • Reification, i.e., the aggregation of ideas and complex phenomena into simpler concepts, is a quick and easy mental algorithm that creates order in a world otherwise overwhelming in flux and detail
  • The dyadic instinct, a manifestation of reification, is the proneness to divide classifications into two parts: in-group vs out-group, child vs adult, kin vs non-kin, married vs single, sacred vs profane, good vs evil. The boundaries of each division are fortified with taboo and ritual (initiation ceremonies, weddings, blessings, rites of passage)

    Chapter 8: The fitness of human nature

  • The significant acceleration of cultural evolution in historical times may seem to imply that humanity has transcended its genetic instructions or found a way to suppress them. That is an illusion. The ancient genes and the epigenetic rules of behaviour they ordain remain comfortably in place
  • Through homo habilis, homo erectus, homo ergaster, and homo sapiens, cultural evolution was slow enough to remain tightly coupled to genetic evolution, until around 40000 to 10000 years ago, where Neolithic agricultural advances upped the tempo of cultural evolution
  • There is no evidence that our paleolithic genes simply disappeared during the “creative revolution” ensued by agricultural development. They remained in place and continued to prescribe the foundational rules of human nature

    Chapter 9: The social sciences

  • The social sciences—anthropology, sociology, economics, and political science—strive to provide the power to predict what will happen if society selects one course of action over another
  • The social sciences lack consilience because they aren’t built upon, and don’t share, a solid foundation like the natural sciences do (e.g., medical sciences can build off molecular and cell biology)
  • As such, the social sciences are built into independent cadres with limited common ground, stressing the precision in words within their specialty yet seldom speaking the same technical language in another speciality. They mistake the overall atmosphere of chaos for creative ferment
  • The paradox of the social sciences is that it seems easier because we can talk with other humans but not with photons and atoms, yet this familiarity bestows a comfort that in turn breeds carelessness and error. People believe they know how they themselves think, and how others think, and how institutions evolve; they are wrong.
  • James S. Coleman, a distinguished sociologist from the University of Chicago, stated that the study of societies require “that the explanatory focus be on the system as a unit, not in the individuals or other components that make it up.” (i.e., holism)
    • Imagine if the same were done in biology, “the essential requirement is that the explanatory focus be on the organism as a unit, not in the cell or molecules that make it up.” Biology would have remained stagnant around 1850 with that perspective. Biology is instead a science that traces causation across many levels of organization, from ecosystem to atom
  • Epigenetic rules are innate rules of thumb that direct the individual towards quick and accurate responses most likely to ensure survival and reproduction. Sometimes, especially in complex societies, they no long contribute to health and well-being; the behaviour they direct can militate against the best interests of the individual and its society
  • The practical role of evolutionary theory is to point to the most likely location of epigenetic rules within a culture

    Chapter 10: the arts and their interpretation

  • Works of art communicate feeling directly from mind to mind, with no intent to explain why the impact occurs. In this sense, the arts are the antithesis of science
  • A potential formula for the driving pulse of the arts: imitate (generally something in nature), make it geometrical, intensify
  • The dominating influence that spawned the arts was the need to impose order on the confusion caused by intelligence
  • In a study on physical attractiveness of female faces, the features though most attractive were relatively high cheek bones, a thin jaw, large eyes relative to the size of the face, and a slightly shorter than longer distance between mouth and chin and between nose and chin
  • Though, these qualities are rare in the general population. Why, then, hasn’t natural selection directed facial features to this optimum? It’s possible that attraction to these features is an attraction to a super-normal stimulus—-much like how male butterflies can be tricked into trying to mate with a mechanical butterfly who’s wings are larger and flap faster, while ignoring the real female butterflies that surround it. Perhaps we follow a similar epigenetic rule as do other animals, i.e., “take the largest, or brightest, or most conspicuously moving individual you can find.”
    • The author suggests that women with large eyes and delicate features may have less robust health (?), especially during childbearing; but they present physical cues of youth, virginity, and the prospect of a long reproductive period. This is why the beauty industry thrives: they manufacture super-normal stimuli by imitating the natural physiological signs of youth and fecundity

      Chapter 11: Ethics and religion

  • The dangerous Christian devotion of ”I was not born to be of this world” can encourage the notion that with a second life waiting, suffering can be endured—especially in other people. The natural environment can be used up. Enemies of faith can be savaged and suicidal martyrdom praised
  • Ethical and religious beliefs are created from the bottom up, from people to their culture. They do not come from the top down, from God or other no material source to the people by way of culture
  • Tribes cooperate with one another through carefully defined treaties and other conventions, quick to imagine themselves as victims of conspiracies by competing groups, and prone to dehumanizing and murdering their rivals during periods of severe conflict. They cement group loyalty by means of sacred symbols and ceremonies. Their mythologies are filled with epic victories over menacing enemies
  • There is a hereditary selective advantage to membership in a powerful group united by devout belief and purpose, as such our brains were shaped by evolution to be groupish and primed for religious adoption
  • The human mind evolved to believe in the gods; it did not evolve to believe in biology. Religiosity conveyed genetic advantages throughout prehistory, and biology is a modern product and thus not reflected in our genetic algorithms. The two are not factually compatible, therefore those who hunt for both intellectual and religious truth will struggle to acquire both in full measure
  • Wilson believes that the competition between science and religion will lead towards the secularization of the human epic and religion itself. Science will test relentlessly every assumption about the human condition, and in time uncover the foundation of moral and religious sentiments

    Chapter 12: To what end?

  • We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely
  • The Ratchet of Progress: the more knowledge people acquire, the more they can increase their numbers and alter the environment, whereupon the more they need new knowledge just to stay alive. In a human-dominated world, the natural environment steadily shrinks, offering less and less per capita energy and resources
  • A principal principle of organic evolution is that of habitat selection, that all species prefer and gravitate to the environment in which their genes were assembled. This is likely why so many people gravitate towards nature and the outdoors
  • The colonisation of space will be impossible without massive supply lines. The Biosphere experiment in the early 1990s, costing $200M, attempted to create a synthetic environment isolated from the real world (except for electricity and communication). Only 8 individuals participated in the experiment. The concentration of oxygen depleted five months into the experiment, and oxygen from the outside had to be pumped in to continue the experiment. Carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide increases to dangerous levels. 19/25 vertebrates and all animal pollinators vanished, and cockroaches and ants multiplied explosively. The conclusion of the experiment was that “No one yet knows how to engineer systems that can sustain human life like the natural ecosystems that produce it for free.”
  • The wall toward humanity is evidently rushing toward a shortage of not only minerals and energy, but of food and water. Humankind is like a household living giddily off vanishing capital. The idea that “Life is good and getting better, we’re still expanding and spending faster…don’t worry, we’re a smart bunch, something will turn up; it always has.”
    • It’s helpful to imagine the lily pad arithmetic riddle in this situation. A lily pad doubles itself each day after being placed in the pond. On the thirtieth day, the lily pads cover the pond entirely, unable to grow more. On which day was the pond half full and half empty? The twenty-ninth day.
  • Humanity will attempt to invoke every techno local fix for an over-populated planet that genius can devise. They will be driven by venture capital and government subsidy in the free market economy, and reduce the risk of short term economic calamity. Though, these man-made procedures will enlarge the carrying capacity of the planet, and as human beings are typical organisms, their reproductive response will be to expand to fill the added capacity, and the spiral will continue
  • The more biodiverse an ecosystem, the higher it’s productivity and the greater it’s resilience to environmental stress. Since we depend on functioning ecosystems to cleanse our water, enrich our soil, and generate the air we breathe, biodiversity is something we shouldn’t discard carelessly

Starry Messenger

Published:

Starry Messenger, Neil deGrasse Tyson

  • Cloud 9 originates from when cloud taxonomy was documented by a Scottish meteorologist in 1896. The greatest cloud of them all, the cumulonimbus, landed at the highest spot—-number 9. The most divine cloud of them all, the term cloud nine appropriately refers to a state of divine bliss
  • Science denial happens on both sides of the spectrum: on the right, climate change and Darwinian evolution (for Christian fundamentalists); on the left, crystal healing, magnetic therapy, homeopathy, astrology, anti-GMO

The Analects of Confucius

Published:

The Analects of Confucius

  • Confucius was likely a private person who trained the sons of gentlemen in the virtues appropriate to a member of the ruling class. Though, it is clear that he longed for a more public position to disseminate his teachings
  • Chün-tzu, or gentleman, are recognized by freeness from violence or brusqueness, open and sincere expression, and speech free from vulgarity (careful and considerate speech)
  • Those who behave as a chün-tzu should find themselves welcomed everywhere. The alliances of ‘small people’ are directed against others, hostile and destructive in intent; but those of the gentlemen exist only for mutual satisfaction
  • Chün-tzu have no politics, but side with the Right wherever they find it
  • Softness, the unwillingness to inflict pain or take life, carried to its logical conclusion involves extinction, as does hardness, the indifference to the infliction of death and suffering
  • The downfall of liberalism (a rational meeting in the middle) has been due to the failure to associate it with any strong emotion. Extremes, not compromises, evoke the strongest emotional impulses
  • “If the distant do not submit, cultivate the power of wên (culture, the arts of peace) to bring them to you.” XVI
  • When one sees people who are better than oneself, one should instead turn their attention towards equalling them
  • If one learns but does not think, one is lost; if one thinks but does not learn, one is in danger
  • Keep order among them by chastisement and they will flee from you; keep order among them by ritual and they will come to you of their own accord.
  • Clever talk and a pretentious manner are seldom found in the Good
  • Be cautious in giving promises and punctual in keeping them
  • A gentleman who doesn’t continue eating after he is full, does not demand comfort in his home, is diligent in business and cautious in speech, and associates with the Good thereby correcting his own faults
  • Do not grieve that other people do not recognize your merits, the real tragedy would be to not recognize theirs
  • He who by reanimating the Old can gain knowledge of the New is fit to be a teacher
  • A gentleman can see a question from all sides without bias, the small man is biased and can see a question from only one side
  • To recognize what you know, and what you don’t know, is knowledge
  • Do not mind failing to get recognition, be too busy doing the things that entitle one to recognition
  • Rotten wood cannot be carved
  • The Middle Way: to exceed is as bad as to fall short, moderation is key
  • Lavishness leads easily to presumption, as does frugality to meanness. But meanness is a far less serious fault than presumption
    • Does frugality lead to meanness?
  • Be affable yet firm, commanding but not too harsh, polite but easy
  • If the Way prevails in your land, count it a disgrace to be needy and obscure; when the Way does not, then count it a disgrace to be rich and honoured
  • The gentleman brings attention to the good qualities in others, not the bad
  • When asked how to avoid burglary, build up qualities that cannot be stolen, rather than ostentatious material goods that can be.
  • In vain have I looked for one whose desire to build up his moral power was as strong as sexual desire
    • This will generally be the case. Individual selection has a first order effect on our behaviour, group selection (which forms morals) has a second order effect (we abide to social rules because we must, otherwise our genes would perish)
  • Demand much for oneself and little from others to banish discontent
  • The demands that a gentleman makes are upon himself; those that a small man makes are upon others
  • A gentleman is proud but not quarrelsome, and aligns himself with individuals but not parties
  • 3 profitable pleasures: pleasure from ritual and music, pleasure from discussing the good points in the conduct of others, and pleasure from having many wise friends
  • 3 harmful pleasures: pleasure from profligate enjoyments, pleasure from idle gadding about, and pleasure from comfort and ease
  • 3 mistakes that can be made in the context of speech: forwardness (speaking before being called to do so), secretiveness (not speaking when called to do so), and blindness (speaking before noting others’ facial expression)
  • Love of uprightness without love of learning degenerates into harshness
  • Love of courage without love of learning degenerates into turbulence
  • Even minor walks of knowledge (specialized knowledge) have an importance of their own, but if pursued too far they tend to prove a hindrance; for which reason a gentleman does not cultivate them
    • This same idea prevailed until the 19th century in England, where specialized knowledge was deemed incompatible with true gentility
  • One who studies widely and with purpose, who questions earnestly, and thinks for himself about what he has heard
  • When the small man goes wrong, it is on the side of over-elaboration
  • A gentleman seen from afar looks severe, when approached is found to be mild, and when heard speaking is found to be incisive

Why We Get Sick

Published:

Why We Get Sick, The new science of Darwinian medicine (1996), Nesse & Williams

Chapter 1: The mystery of disease

  • Proximate explanations answer “what?” and “how?” questions about structure and mechanism; evolutionary explanations answer “why?” questions about origins and functions
  • Most medical research seeks the proximate explanations about how a body part works or how a disease disrupts function. The other half of biology, that tries to explain what things are for and how they got there, has been neglected in medicine
  • One may worry that evolutionary explanations are mere speculation, however studies are showing that evolutionary hypotheses can predict what to expect in proximate mechanisms (e.g., morning sickness evolved to protect the developing fetus from toxins during its most vulnerable state)
  • 6 categories of evolutionary explanations of disease:
    1. Defenses: while not actually an explanation of disease, this is listed because it is so often confused with other manifestations of disease. An example provided is that of a pneumonia patient who has blue-ish skin and a cough. The blue skin comes from a lack of oxygen in the hemoglobin which leads to darker blood. This is a problem that should be addressed, lack of oxygen is no bueno. The cough, however, is a defense, evolved to expel foreign material from the respiratory tract. Coughing is not a problem, and suppressing this defense puts the body at more risk
    2. Infection: we evolved defenses to counter viral and bacterial threats, viruses and bacteria have evolve ways to overcome our defenses and even use them to their own benefit. This evolutionary arms race explains why eradication of all infections is futile
    3. Novel environments (i.e., evolutionary mismatch)
    4. Genes: some of our genes are perpetuated even though they cause disease, as some of their effects were “quirks” that were harmless in our evolutionary environment
    5. Design compromises: walking upright gives us the ability to carry food, tools, and babies while walking, but predisposes us to back problems. To better understand diseases, we need to understand the hidden benefits of apparent mistakes in design
    6. Evolutionary legacies: evolution is an incremental process and cannot make huge jumps. As such, some designs at this point can be sub-optimal, e.g., our food passes over our windpipe. Once a system is in place, it is costly to re-engineer the evolutionary history

Thinking in Systems

Published:

Thinking in Systems, Donella H. Meadows

  • If we consider that a system causes its own behaviour, we need to consider that politicians don’t cause recessions or booms; oil-exporting nations are not solely responsible for oil prices—consumers are as well; and pathogens do not solely attack you, but you set up conditions for them to flourish within you
  • A diverse system with multiple pathways and redundancies is more stable and less vulnerable to external shock than a uniform system with little diversity
  • The least obvious part of the system, it’s function or purpose, is often the most crucial determinant of the system’s behaviour
    • To understand life, we need to identify the ultimate cause—life’s purpose: to survive and reproduce!
  • Someone trying to fix a system is intuitively attracted to a policy lever that has a strong effect on the system, and well-intentioned fixers often pull the lever in the wrong direction! Think, over-reactions to stock fluctuations. We are often surprised by the counterintuitive behaviour of systems when we start trying to change them
  • Economies are full of balancing feedback loops and delays, companies react in lieu of delayed responses, and those reactions produce oscillations of system outputs. This is why economies are cyclical—not because of this president or this company, but because the interconnected system is full of signal delays.
  • No physical system can grow forever in a finite environment
  • The real choice in the management of a non-renewable resource is whether to get rich very fast or to get less rich but stay that way longer
    • When competing with other systems, the most likely choice made is getting rich very fast, because the competitors who make this choice will confer immediate advantages over those who do not.
  • Resilience provides a large plateau upon which a system can play, performing its normal functions in safety and surrounding the system with gentle, elastic walls, that bounce it back if it wanders too close to a dangerous edge
  • A system that loses resilience sees its plateau shrink, and whose protective walls become lower and more rigid, restricting the freedom of the system
  • When a subsystem’s goals dominate at the expense of the total system’s goals, the resulting behaviour is called suboptimization
  • Too much control can also harm a system. If a cell is not free to perform self-maintenance it will die; if stringent rules prevent students or faculty from exploring fields of knowledge freely, education will falter; over-control by governments has led to some of the greatest catastrophes of history
  • A highly functioning system requires enough central control to achieve coordination toward the large system goal, and enough autonomy to keep all subsystems flourishing, functioning, and self-organizing
  • Hierarchies form so that their originating subsystems can perform their jobs better
  • Hierarchies evolve bottom up. The top layers evolve to serve the purposes of the lower layers
  • Long term behaviour provides clues to the underlying system structure, and structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why
  • We are too fascinated by the events systems generate, and insufficiently skilled at prospecting their history to find the structures from which behaviour and events flow
  • If we’re to understand anything, we must simplify. We must invent boundaries for clarity and sanity; but boundaries can produce problems when we forget that we’ve artificially created them. When you draw boundaries too narrowly, the system surprises you
  • National boundaries mean nothing when it comes to ozone depletion, greenhouse gases, or ocean dumping
  • Think of how many arguments have to do with boundaries—national boundaries, trade boundaries, ethnic boundaries, public vs. private
  • Boundaries are of our own making, and they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose
  • If a company offers a perfect product or service at an affordable price, it will be swamped with orders until it grows to the point where some limit decreases the perfection of the product or raises its price
  • If a city meets the needs of all inhabitants better than other cities, people will flock there until some limit brings down the city’s ability to satisfy peoples’ needs
  • Bounded rationality is the idea that we act rationally with the limited data we have available to us, but that our acts can be irrational when considering the decision at a broader scope
  • The US and Soviet Union for years exaggerated their reports of each other’s armaments to justify more armaments of their own. Each side was escalating itself to the detriment of their local economies and to the entire globe with the evolution of unimaginably destructive weapons
  • Addiction can appear in large systems, such as:
    • The dependence of industry on government subsidy
    • The reliance of farmers on fertilizers
    • The addiction of western economies to cheap oil
    • The addiction of weapons manufacturers to government contracts
  • Modern medicine in general has shifted the responsibility of health away from the practices and lifestyle of each individual and onto intervening doctors and medicines
  • Addiction is finding a quick and dirty solution to the symptom of the problem (not the root cause), which prevents or distracts one from the longer and harder task of solving the real problem. Addictive policies are insidious, because they are so easy to sell, and so simple to fall for.
  • Like a drunk ransacking the house in hopes of unearthing just one more bottle, we will pollute our beaches and invade the last wilderness areas, searching for just one more big deposit of oil
  • Seeking the wrong goal is a system trap. For example, attempting to maximize GDP is harmful because it is a poor indicator of overall social well-being. More car accidents, and thus more spending on medical and repair bills, increase GDP. More parents hiring help to bring their children up increases GDP. An expensive second home for a rich family is better for GDP than an inexpensive basic home for a poor family. An efficient light bulb that both reduce electricity cost and lasts a long time makes the GDP go down.
  • GDP measures effort rather than achievement, regardless of whether that effort was put to good use or wasted, and regardless of whether the achievement is helpful or harmful; gross production and consumption rather than net/efficiency
  • System delays cause oscillations. When I receive delayed information about the state of the system stock, I overshoot or undershoot my goal. A system can’t respond to short-term changes when it has long term delays. This is why massive central-planning systems, such as the Soviet Union or General Motors, necessarily function poorly
  • Insistence on a single culture shuts down learning and cuts back resilience, leading to failure over the long term in highly variable environments
  • This means encouraging variability and experimentation and diversity, which is scary because it means “losing control”. This is why it’s so hard for people to adopt this highly effective leverage point
  • Collect as many explanations as possible and consider them all to be plausible until you find evidence that rules them out. That way you will be emotionally available to see evidence as it truly is, not clouded by entanglement with your own identity
  • Honouring information means above all avoiding language pollution—making the cleanest possible use out of language
  • What Wendell Berry calls “tyrannese”
    • My impression is that we have seen, for perhaps a hundred and fifty years, a gradual increase in language that is either meaningless or destructive of meaning. And I believe that this increasing unreliability of language parallels the increasing disintegration, over the same period, of persons and communities…
  • He goes on to say:
    • In this degenerative accounting, language is almost without the power of designation, because it is used conscientiously to refer to nothing in particular. Attention rests upon percentages, categories, abstract functions. . . . It is not language that the user will very likely be required to stand by or to act on, for it does not define any personal ground for standing or acting. Its only practical utility is to support with “expert opinion” a vast, impersonal technological action already begun. … It is a tyrannical language: tyrannese.
  • The first step in respecting language is keeping it as concrete, meaningful, and truthful as possible; part of the job of keeping information streams clear. The second step is to enlarge language to make it consistent with our enlarged understanding of systems
  • Our culture is obsessed with numbers, giving us the idea that what we can measure is more important than what we can’t measure. If we motivate, rate, and reward ourselves on our ability to produce quantity, then quantity will be the result. Quantity is not necessarily as important as quality, however (e.g., when we maximize GDP and sacrifice quality of life).
  • Be interdisciplinary. Penetrate the jargons of other disciplines, integrate what they tell you, recognize what they can honestly see through their respective lenses, and discard the distortions that come from the narrowness and incompleteness of their lenses—they won’t make it easy for you

Fiction

Published:

A collection of notes from fictional books. Although, isn’t everything fictional to some extent? Can fact and fiction ever be disentangled?

Excellent Advice for Living

Published:

Excellent Advice for Living, Kevin Kelly

  • A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can’t believe how ignorant you were a year earlier
    • Next year: Energy and materials, where we’re heading as a species
  • Gratitude unlocks all other virtues (transcendence)
    • Keep this in mind in virtues posts

      To be continued

A World Beyond Physics

Published:

A World Beyond Physics, Stephen Kauffman

Chapter 1: The world is not a machine

  • The history of life is non-ergodic. Meaning, there are an astronomically large amount of potential amino acid sequences, such that the universe simply has no time to create a sample every single possible sequence. Life occupies a sub space of potential, and is thus ripe for instability, spontaneity, and creativity

    Chapter 2: The function of function

  • The burgeoning complex biosphere is surely based on physics, but it flowers to a realm beyond
  • A rock is matter that has no matter, the flowing river has no standalone function. However, a heart has a function and an auto catalytic perpetual reaction has a function. How can these functions be described by physics?

    Chapter 3: Propagating organization

  • All living systems are open thermodynamic systems, and thus locally evade the second law of thermodynamics that states that disorder increases over time (entropy). Instead, living beings propagate ordered organization.
  • “Work is the constrained release of energy into a few degrees of freedom.” - Peter Atkins
    • Expanding gas between a piston and cylinder. Gas is constrained, released along the cylinder, thrusting the piston. If there was no constraint on the gas, it would just expand in all directions and no work would be done
  • The piston-cylinder constrains the gas expansions, limiting its expansion to limited degrees of freedom. This constraint channels the release of energy into work, not just entropy increase. Entropy still increases, just more slowly
  • Constraints on the release of energy generate work, and work done can construct more constraints. This is how order self propagates. This is life.

    Chapter 4: Demystifying life

  • Chapter outlines same idea, with the addition of auto catalytic sets of molecules/peptides catalyzing their own growth in a cyclical, interdependent, holistic manner. ###Chapter 5: How to make a metabolism

    To be continued

Crime and Punishment

Published:

Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • “You know what irks me…Not that they’re lying; lying can always be forgiven; lying is a fine thing, because it leads to the truth. No, what irks me is when they lie and then worship their own lies.”
  • “There are all sorts of traffickers hanging onto this common cause who in their own interest have so distorted everything that they have decidedly befouled the whole cause.”
  • “He’s an intelligent man, but it takes more than intelligence to act intelligently.”
    • What exactly does it require? Honesty? Compassion? Rightness?
  • Mention of socialists, who believe that everyone is a “victim of the environment”, and that if only society is properly set up then all crimes and protest will cease to exist.
    • General disregard for history and a belief that some social system will at once organize the whole of mankind, making it righteous and sinless
    • Reductionist ideology that posits an easy solution to a complex problem, so that there’s no reason to think.
    • Dostoevsky is a disillusioned socialist, this is likely his way of taking a dig at his younger self.
  • Like a moth to a flame.
    • Modern addictions like processed foods, social media
    • Hatred and anger (honey-tipped arrow with a poison root)
  • Raskolnikov, upon recounting the thesis of his paper on crime, states that people can be divided into two classes. An ordinary material class, in which people play their roles, submit to authority, and preserve tradition. And the extraordinary, who transgress law to progress towards greater pastures, and are thus “criminals” in a way, disturbing the existing system. The first preserves the world and increases it via reproduction, the second leads the world towards a goal.
  • Suffering and pain are always obligatory for a broad conscience and a deep heart
  • “The cleverer the man, the less he suspects that he can be thrown off with the simplest thing.”
  • “Reason is the slave of passion”
    • System 1 (passion) serves system 2 (reason) [Daniel Kahneman] or the elephant (passion) and the rider (reason) [Jon Haidt]
  • In reference to progressivists, nihilists, and exposers, Pyotr Petrovich (the insecure pompous asshole) had “like many others…exaggerated and distorted the meaning and significance of these names to the point of absurdity”
    • This is precisely what happens these days, when people reference with disdain and fear the alt-right or the woke-left
  • “She was naturally of an easily amused, cheerful, and peaceable character, but continual misfortunes and failures had made her wish and demand so fiercely that everyone live in peace and joy, and not dare to live otherwise, that the slightest dissonance in life, the [smallest] failure, would at once set her almost into a frenzy, and in the space of an instant, after the brightest hopes and fantasies, she would begin cursing her fate, ranting and raving, throwing things around, and beating her head against the wall.”
    • Showcase of the rotting nature of resentment, how it eats away at people and provokes vicious defensive tactics to protect the rotten foundation that remains. Also showcases the consequence of an untrained mind. A spark causes the mind to come ablaze like it’s a pool of gasoline.
  • “There’s nothing in the world more difficult than candor (frankness, honesty), and nothing easier than flattery. If there is only the hundredth part a false note in candor, there is immediately a dissonance…but with flattery, even if everything is false down to the last little note, it is still agreeable and is listened to [with] pleasure; crude though the pleasure may be, it is still a pleasure.”
  • “The people are drinking, the educated youth are burning themselves up in idleness, in unrealizable dreams and fancies, crippling themselves with theories.”
    • When we don’t use our hands and interact with the common, we lose sight of the physical and get lost in the metaphysical—the realm of ideas and theories.
  • “They were resurrected by love; the heart of each held infinite sources of life for the heart of the other.”

Civilization

Published:

Civilization, Niall Ferguson

Introduction: Rasselas’s Question

  • An interesting thing to keep in mind when studying history is that many years ago people didn’t typically live as long and were more exposed to death and morbid suffering. This smaller lifespan likely produced more urgency and populated positions with people who had more risk-taking tendencies, whereas in modernity we may be a bit more docile.

    Chapter 1: Competition

  • “It may just have been easier for marauding mongols to access China; Europe was less penetrable by abhors on horseback—and therefore has less need of unity.”
  • The forbidden city in Beijing is immense, with a theme of Gates and Halls of Supreme/Central/Preserving Harmony. Harmony in this sense was bound with the Chinese idea of undivided imperial authority

    Chapter 2: Science

  • Scientific progress (i.e., technological evolution) was critical for the West’s advantage over the once dominant Ottoman Empire. Part of the reason the West pulled away in the scientific respect was because their governments were more supportive (or tolerant) of the pursuit of science, and valued it (especially in its promise to enhance wellbeing and to improve militaristic outcomes)
  • The Ottomans had a lingering superiority complex from their previous reign of dominance, and struggled to admit that they were falling behind, and that their governmental regime hindered progress. They thus resisted adopting technologies (such as the printing press, and modern scientific findings)
  • Israel is like a sandbox surrounded by foes, and thus needs better science to ensure its strategic survival. Israel has more scientist and engineers per capita than any other country and produces more scientific papers per capita.
    • Could this be a testament to why Judaism seems to produce more Nobel prize winners? Judaism was an adaptive technology developed to help Israelites endure the constant ragdolling that they were constantly subject to by competing imperial powerhouses (Romans, Persians, Assyrians, Egyptians). Perhaps the behaviour preached by the tradition of Judaism produces more robust and resilient subjects, which enables more subjects to achieve greatness

      Chapter 3: Property

  • British America had upwards mobility in its infancy. There was a surplus of land, and a shortage of labour. So, to incentivize labour, the Brits allowed labourers the right to property after a few years of service. This was quite a steal for the labourers (serfs), who, if they had stayed in Britain, had little to no chance of acquiring property
  • This upward mobility stimulated economic growth, and once anyone owned property they earned the right to vote.
  • In South America, the Spaniards opted for a different approach. There wasn’t a labour shortage in the Americas, so the Spaniards simply exploited the native populations for their labour, and the riches were granted to a tiny elite. The crown owned the land, and only a small fraction was entitled to some of it. This meant there was little upwards mobility, even for Spaniards.
  • “In South America the Indians worked the land. In North America, they lost it.”
  • Between 1500 and 1769, 2/3 of migrants were slaves, peaking at 3/4 between 1700 and 1760
  • The Portuguese had sophisticated slave markets, such that by 1825, 56% of Brazil’s population were of African origin, compared with 22% in Spanish America and 17% in North America
  • Average life expectancy for a Brazilian slave was 23 as late as the 1850s; a slave had to last only 5 years to double a slave owner’s investment
  • South America was more tolerant of racial interbreeding. Most of the Spanish and Portuguese men who crossed the Atlantic came alone, thus yearning for partners when they arrived. British men generally came with their wives upon migration; hence interbreeding was less common and became taboo.

    Chapter 4: Medicine

  • On War (1832), one of the best books on war, described war as a paradoxical trinity composed of primordial violence, hatred, and enmity; plays of chance and probability; and subordination as an instrument of policy
  • Defence is always a stronger form of fighting than attack, as the force of an attack gradually diminishes more rapidly than that of a defence
  • Commander must remember four things: assess probabilities, act with utmost concentration, act with utmost speed, and requires the subordination of the means of warfare to the ends of foreign policy (i.e., warfare acts must correspond with the interest of the general group, and control must be maintained to ensure this is satisfied and things don’t degrade into anarchy)
  • Europe brought medicine to Africa, drastically improving health outcomes. The underlying motive was likely so that economic expansion could progress. Railroads increased infection rates and spread, so countermeasures (vaccines) needed to be developed
  • Meanwhile, Africans were subject to substantial prejudice, based on eugenic pseudoscience

    Chapter 5: Consumption

  • The great paradox of consumerism: the economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity
  • The Industrial Revolution flourished first in Britain. One convincing theory is that Britain had a limited supply of labourers, which made them expensive, and a surplus of coal, which motivated innovations to replace expensive manpower with cheap coal powered machines
  • Words from Greek poet Rigas Feraios: “It’s better to have an hour as a free man than forty years of slavery and prison.”
    • Metaphysical interpretation emphasizes the importance of meditation and mindfulness, freeing yourself from the proclivity to perpetually wander (slaving to cravings)
  • The Second World War was between four distinct western social organizations: national socialism, Soviet communism, European imperialism (which Japan had adopted), and American capitalism
  • All major combatants evolved highly centralized state apparatuses to support war efforts, personal freedom was sacrificed for military benefit, regardless of the social orientation of the nation
  • The war against Germany was won by a combination of British intelligence (who cracked German codes), Soviet manpower (who slaughtered German soldiers), and American capital (which flattened German cities)
  • Centralized planning works well for organizing the production of a military weapon, but not for organizing the demands of consumers (which are steeped in complexity and in constant flux). Centralized planning is rigid and constrained, but consumer demands are in constant flux and evolution. Post-war, the communist soviet consumer market just couldn’t keep up with capitalist America.
  • The Soviet party knew what clothing everyone needed and placed orders with state-owned factories accordingly. For this reason, they had to vilify and demonize outsider products, such as jeans, because freedom of expression (through clothing) meant a free market, which would threaten the foundations of the centralized market
  • Industrial evolution and the consumer society were propelled in large part due to clothing, first producing clothing efficiently, and then making clothing sexier and more expressive

    Chapter 6: Work

  • Max Weber argued that Protestantism shifted individuals’ relationships to work, changing working to live to living to work. Protestants valued industry and thrift that encapsulated hard-working godliness
  • Acquisition of wealth was liberated from the inhibitions of traditionalist ethics (where motivation for acquiring wealth was taboo)
  • Luther’s emphasis on individual reading of the bible encouraged literacy and printing, which both encouraged economic development and scientific study
  • Religious belief tends to be associated with economic growth, as ideas of heaven and hell encourage good behaviour. Hard work, mutual trust, thrift, honesty, and openness to strangers are improved—all economically beneficial traits
  • The separation of church and state in America allowed for a free religious market, which encouraged innovations to make the church and worship experience more vibrant and fulfilling. In Europe, religions were/are (?) still state monopolies, which are less efficient than free market counterparts
  • American evangelicals put surprisingly few demands on believers, instead believers serve out demands to God, asking Him to solve their personal problems. The only demands are for money, which are funneled into the pockets of charismatic leaders
  • Religious communities double as both credit networks and supply chains of creditworthy, trustworthy fellow believers. This is one reason Christianity is taking off in Wenzhou, as the social transition from communism to capitalism breeds conditions rife with exploitation and corruption. People need people they can trust
  • Three requirements for sustainable economic growth, as per a report given to the CCP: property rights as a foundation (resources), the law as a safeguard (resource security), and morality as a support (community)
  • This idea that we are doomed is deeply connect with our sense of mortality…we are bound to disintegrate…vainglorious monuments end up as ruins

    Conclusion: The Rivals

  • Civilizations are complex, thus exhibiting many of the characteristics of complex systems in the natural world—including the tendency to move quite suddenly from stability to instability
    • similar to intermittent turbulence in fluid flows
  • Book summary: six applications enabled the West to dominate the rest:
    • Competition: political fragmentation allowed competition amongst corporate entities
    • Science: the scientific revolution flourished in the west, breeding advances in math, astronomy, chemistry, and biology
    • Rule of law and representative government followed private property rights and the representation of property owners in elected legislatures
    • Modern medicine: healthcare breakthroughs, including control of tropical diseases, were made by westerners
    • Consumerism: Industrial Revolution took place where productivity enhancing tech was supplied, and demands for better and cheaper goods, beginning with cotton garments
    • Work ethic: westerners combined more extensive and intensive labour with higher savings rates, which permitted sustained capital accumulation
  • The biggest threat to civilization is not other civilizations, but cowardice and the historical ignorance that feeds it

How To Be a Stoic

Published:

How To Be a Stoic, Massimo Pigliucci

Chapter 1: The unstraightforward path

  • To best approach living requires understanding the nature of the world (metaphysics), how it works (natural science), and how (imperfectly) we come to understand it (epistemology, i.e., a theory of knowledge)

    Chapter 2: A road map for the journey

  • Stoic framework: living a gold life requires understanding the nature of the world and the nature of human reasoning (physics and logic)
  • Good character arises from a nurturing of understanding of the natural world, nurturing our garden so that knowledge can flourish; but also, understanding our thought, acting as a fence to protect our garden so that it can grow unimpeded of bad reasoning

    Part 1, The discipline of desire: what it is proper to want or not to want

    Chapter 3: Some things are in our power, others are not

  • Some parallels between lines of different traditions of ancient thought are from direct/indirect reciprocal influence, some from independent convergence of wise minds reflecting deeply on the human condition
  • These common ideas are those that have withstood the test of time, so we would be wise to draw from them in our own lives
  • We have a strange tendency to worry about, or concentrate energy on, things we cannot control
  • Focus instead your attention and efforts where you have the most power to influence it, and otherwise let the universe run as it does. Save yourself the energy and worry.

    Chapter 4: Living according to nature

  • Nature in this sense refers to human nature. In the stoic sense this means being reasonable and sociable. Being unreasonable and antisocial runs counter to our nature
  • To be sociable is to recognize that the closer you bring relationships with others, the closer you bring them to the degrees of importance you rate yourself and related kin. Refer to others as brother/sister, elders as aunt/uncle. When someone asks where you’re from, say the universe—don’t fall prey to separation via fictional boundaries.

    Chapter 5: Playing ball with Socrates

  • Preferred indifferents: things like health, wealth, education, and good looks are preferred indifferents. We’d prefer to have them rather than not have them, and we can pursue them, but really matters is our values and whether we act in accordance with them. The preferred indifferents should never come at the expense of virtue: your values (e.g., accepting a job you feel ethically uncomfortable with because it pays more). ###Chapter 6: God or atoms

    Part 2: The discipline of action: how to behave in the world

    Chapter 7: It’s all about character (and virtue)

  • Socrates believed that all virtues are different aspects of the same underlying feature: wisdom
  • Six “core” virtues found across all major religions (the four Stoic virtues are bolded):
    • Courage: exercise of will to accomplish goals in the face of opposition (external or internal), e.g., bravery, perseverance, and honesty
    • Justice: fairness, leadership, citizenship
    • Humanity: “tending and befriending”, e.g., love and kindness
    • Temperance: strengths that protect against excess, e.g., forgiveness, humility, self-control
    • Wisdom: acquisition and use of knowledge, e.g., creativity, curiosity, perspective, judgment
    • Transcendence: forging connections to the larger universe and thereby provide meaning, e.g., gratitude, hope, and spirituality
  • The true value of a person lies in their core, not in the clothes they don or the role they happen to occupy in society

    Chapter 8: A very crucial word

  • When a man agrees with what is false, know that he had no wish to agree with the false: “for no soul is robbed of the truth with its own consent,” as said by Plato, but the false seemed true to him
  • People don’t do “evil” on purpose, they do it out of ignorance
  • Story told about a Nazi, and his complete disregard for Russian prisoners of war. “There’s…nothing demonic [about the Nazi] …simply a reluctance ever to imagine what the other person is experiencing.”
  • Intelligent stupidity (amathia) is not an inability to understand but a refusal to understand, and any healing or reversal of it will not occur through rational argumentation, greater accumulation of data or knowledge, or through experiencing new and different feelings. Intelligent stupidity is a spiritual sickness in need of a spiritual cure
  • Show pity for the intelligently stupid, as we pity the blind and lame, as one who is unreasonable is blinded and lamed in their sovereign faculties. Remember this and be angry with no one, indignant with no one, revile none, blame none, hate none, offend none.

    Chapter 9: The role of role models

  • “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” - James Stockdale
  • Aristotle thought that we have what is called moral virtue and intellectual virtue. Moral virtue consists of that obtained by natural endowment and habit (especially in early development) and intellectual virtue can be acquired intellectually

    Chapter 10: Disability and mental illness

  • “Stand by a stone and slander it: what effect will it produce? If a man then listens like a stone, what advantage has the slanderer?”

    Part 3: The discipline of assent: how to react to situations?

    Chapter 11: On death and suicide

  • In reference to suicide, one of Epictetus’ friends provided his reason for suicide as ‘A man must abide by his decisions.’ “What are you doing, man?” Responded Epictetus, “Not all decisions, but right decisions. Stay where you are and depart not without reason.”

    Chapter 12: How to deal with anger, anxiety, and loneliness

  • Not every problem has a solution. Don’t focus on finding a solution, but on how to handle the situation, including the possibility of failing in the endeavour
  • The difference between loneliness and being alone, is that the latter is a factual description, while the former is a judgment imposed on the description of being alone, which makes us feel worse about it

    Chapter 13: Love and friendship

  • There is a difference between what is natural and what is right, and we ought to use sound judgment to override what is natural in favour of what is right
  • Simply recognizing the truth of something is not enough: you need to practice it enough until you develop a habit

    Chapter 14: Practical spiritual exercises

The Ministry for the Future

Published:

The Ministry for the Future, Kim Robinson

  • In reference to the delegates and their clauses within the Paris Climate Agreement: “Words are gossamer (delicate) in a world of granite. There weren’t even any mechanisms for enforcement of these so carefully worded injunctions; they were notional only, the international order of governance being a matter of nations volunteering to do things. And when they didn’t do them…there were no sanctions at all.”
  • Those involved in these agreements who carefully craft their sentences are doing their best to use words to avoid the inevitability of physical conflict. They are the gossamer net that holds the granite.
  • People work for incentives. In the case of the navy, when the maximum wage is bounded at 8 times (200,000) that of the starting wage (25,000), those at the top are still normal, still at a level where they can see eye to eye with their subordinates, and somewhere their subordinates can see themselves attaining
  • The typical wage ratio in the business world is over 1:100. 1:1500 isn’t uncommon. What are those making 1500 times more incentivized to do? Hide. Hide the fact they don’t do 1500x more work than each of their labourers.

The Origin of Species

Published:

The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin

  • Darwin considered this book as “one long argument” for his view of life
  • The fiercest struggle for existence is among members of the same species, as they occupy the same areas, require the same foods, and are exposed to the same dangers

    Chapter 1: Selection by man

  • Darwin has this to say about breeders who doubt that distinct breeds could have come from a common ancestor: “from long-continued study they are strongly impressed with the differences between the several races; and though they well know that each race varies slightly, for they win their prizes by selecting such slight differences, yet they ignore all general arguments, and refuse to sum up in their minds the slight differences accumulated during many successive generations”
  • In domesticated races we see in them adaptation, not to the animal’s or plant’s own good, but to man’s use or fancy
  • Man can hardly select any deviation of structure except what is externally visible; and rarely cares for what is internal
  • A fancier perceives extremely small differences, and it is in human nature to value any novelty, however slight, in one’s own possession

    Chapter 2: Variation under nature

  • B.D Walsh, an entomologist, suggested that forms that could freely intercross were varieties, and those who lost this power were species — earliest distinction of species vs. variety?
  • The term species used to be considered as a useless abstraction, uniting and assuming a separate act of creation
  • Distinguishing between species and variety is a struggle, since organisms adapt via a continuous process, thus species/varieties occupy a continuum. Distinguishing between a separate species/variety thus requires some abstract threshold

    Chapter 3: Struggle for existence

  • Natural selection comes by analogy of breeders “selecting” for optimal plants/animals, and nature doing the equivalent thing unconsciously
  • Species develop adaptations as they struggle for life against other species. The fiercest competition tends to occur between close varieties or subspecies, as they occupy the same areas, eat the same food, etc.

    Chapter 4: Natural Selection; or Survival of the Fittest

  • “…I mean by Nature, only the aggregate action and product of many natural laws, and by laws the sequence of events as ascertained by us.”
  • P112, good quote about how selection by man pales in comparison to natural selection
  • Intercrossing seems to be conducive to genetic success. Hermaphrodite plants and animals, despite having both sex cells, still require intercrossing to breed, and rarely reproduce successfully with themselves despite close spatial proximity of their sex organs
  • Hermaphrodites tend to profit off insects or fluid currents (wind or water) to transport their sex cells to other organisms
  • Animals with separate sexes need to do the sexual delivery themselves, so are fitted with behaviours that bring them together in space and time (since the currents or insects can’t do it for them), a sexual magnet of sorts
  • Organisms occupying larger areas are exposed to more competition, and thus have greater ability to adapt into new varieties and species. They will be better adapted than species from smaller isolated areas, by virtue of having more competition to train from. These organisms thus play a more important part in changing the history of the organic world
  • Smaller confined areas produce organisms that are less varied and experience less severe competition. When organisms from a larger region come in (e.g., from Asia to Australia), they tend to dominate due to their better generalizability
  • Rare species are less quickly modified or improved within any given period, consequently being beating in the race for life by modified and improved descendants of commoner species
  • The more diversified in habits and structure the descendants of organisms become, the more places they can occupy
  • Natural selection leads to the improvement of each creature in relation to its organic and inorganic conditions of life, and what may be regards as an advance in organization
  • The Tree of Life fills the crust of the earth with its dead and broken branches, and covers the surface with its ever-branching and beautiful ramifications

    Chapter 5: Laws of variation

  • Disuse leads to natural selection removing unnecessary organs. Subterranean creatures tend to be blind, beetles near a coastline develop either no wings or stronger wings to avoid/overcome coastline breezes. o Disuse reduces investment in that feature. This goes with behaviour. A bad habit fades away if one manages to place themselves in an environment where it can’t be of use (like the eyes of a mole)
  • Sexual selection is less rigid in its action than ordinary selection, as it does not entail death, but only gives fewer offspring to the less favoured individuals
  • “I would almost as soon believe that the old and ignorant cosmogonists, that fossil shells had never lived, but had been created in stone so as to mock the shells living on the seashore.”

    Chapter 6: Difficulties of the theory

  • One objection to the theory is how it can account for the “perfection” of specialized organs, for example, the eye. Darwin goes on to explain that gradual changes could very well lead to eyes over long time periods, early light sensing via a convex sense organ is seen in starfish
  • Then goes to point that the closer you look, the less perfect things become. Our respiratory tract and digestive tract intersect each other, which is terrible design! This is an artifact from our ancestors that evolution didn’t overwrite, as it didn’t pose enough of a threat to survival

    Chapter 7: Miscellaneous objections to the theory of natural selection

    Chapter 8: Instinct

  • Habit is behaviour obtained through repetitive experience; instinct is more innate (the repetitive experience in this case is amassed and ingrained over innumerable generations)

    To be continued…

Stolen Focus

Published:

Stolen Focus, Johan Harri

Cause One: The increase in speed, switching, and filtering

  • It’s when you set aside your distractions that you begin to see what you’re distracting yourself from
  • Studies on speed reading have consistently found that retention degrades the faster we read, even with professional speed readers
  • Evidence shows that there is no alternative to focusing carefully on one thing at a time if you desire quality outcomes. Multitasking unequivocally degrades performance on each task involved

    Cause Two: The crippling of our flow states

  • To find flow, choose a simple goal (monotask, do NOT multitask); ensure your goal is meaningful to you; and push yourself to the edge of your abilities
  • Fragmentation makes us smaller, shallower, angrier. Flow makes us whole, deeper, and calmer. Do you want to atrophy your attention, dancing for meaningless rewards? Or to be able to find and concentrate on the meaningful?

    Cause Three: The rise of physical and mental exhaustion

  • Lack of sleep encourages a sympathetic physiological response. Ancestrally, when we were sleep deprived, it usually meant we were in a high stakes environment, like raising a newborn or fighting through a natural disaster. Thus, lack of sleep raises our blood pressure, has us craving more energy rich foods (e.g., fast food), and making us more paranoid/anxious
  • Dreaming may allow for emotional adaptation without real world costs. Exposure to stressful moments in dreams may help prepare one for stressful moments in real life
  • Longest REM cycles, those cycles filled with more dreams, occur seven to eight hours into sleep. A good portion of sleep-deprived society is dreamless—what effects could a dream-depraved society have
  • Sleep is an active process, so when we take sleep aid prescriptions, we dampen the active processes as well and lose their benefits. They produce an empty sleep

    Cause 4: The collapse of sustained reading

  • Reading fiction forces you to simulate a social situation, and imagine others experiences in a complex way. Perhaps fiction is like a gym for training empathy
  • Experiments have shown that readers of fiction tend to empathize better than those who don’t read fiction—non-readers and non-fiction readers included
  • Though it could be that empathetic people are more drawn to fiction. However, one study in early childhood showed that kids who are read story books are better at reading others’ emotions, suggesting story-reading experiences expand empathy

    Chapter 5: The disruption of mind wandering

  • Mind wandering allows us to make sense of the world, as sensory inputs are associated with past experiences. Connections are made between concepts, allowing unresolved issues to resolve themselves via creative melding. Our scope retracts, allowing us to tie together past and present to get a better sense of the future.
  • Attention is commonly thought of as a spotlight, but mind wandering is an important and more diffuse form of attention. Instead of a spotlight, this attention is like a warm all-encompassing glow
  • Focus is required to feed us knowledge, mind-wandering is required to digest it
  • In low-stress and safe situations, mind wandering is a gift; in high stress and dangerous situations, it becomes tormenting rumination

    Cause 6: The rise of technology that can track and manipulate you

  • Engagement is the fuel for tech companies. Competition between these companies fragments our attention as it is pulled between engagement hungry apps
  • Ironically, there are popular workshops at google and Facebook about mindfulness, and the companies themselves are some of the biggest perpetrators of mindlessness in the world
  • Enragement generates engagement

    Cause 7: The rise of cruel optimism

  • Cruel optimism: to take a complex problem with deep cultural causes, and offer an upbeat, simplistic, individualistic solution to that problem. Examples include obesity, depression, and addiction.
  • Those who design phones and apps add features to help limit phone use (do not disturb, time limits, etc.). Yet, they still produce apps and tech intentionally designed to be addictive, whose forces tower above the individual and their ability to restrain themselves. This is not a fair fight: tech companies have a lightsaber; users have a butter knife.

    Cause 8: The surge of stress and how it’s triggering vigilance

  • Narrowing focus is a great strategy in a safe environment, which allows for learning and development. But, in a dangerous environment, narrow focus is a dumb strategy. The better option would be to spread your vigilant view to scan for cues for danger. To dissolve your attention.
  • This could be why some children have a hard time focusing; they’re stressed (for reasons expounded upon in later chapters), and their attention is thus diffuse

    Causes 9 & 10: Deteriorating diets and rising pollution

  • The fuel we give to our brains, food, has lowered in quality as profit motives have transformed food. Preserved, high refined sugars and fats, nutrition-less foods are pervasive, and are degrading attention. It’s like putting corn syrup in an engine, it’s bound to putter out
  • A return to whole foods is the answer to our attention—and overall health—qualms, as supported by a litany of research. We need to feed our engines petrol, not syrup.
  • A study in Canada found those living within 50 meters of a busy road were 15% more likely to develop dementia than those who didn’t. Is this due to air pollution? Noise pollution affecting rest?

    Cause 11: The rise of ADHD and our response to it

  • The medication approach to alleviating ADHD symptoms only addresses the proximate causes of the illness. It should be treated as a Band-Aid fix, allowing for normal functioning as the ultimate cause is investigated and addressed
  • The ultimate cause for ADHD is, according to a Minnesota study that tracked 200 participants across their lives, the circumstances in which the child is brought up in. A stressful environment makes it more difficult to tend to a child’s needs, and children develop coping mechanisms accordingly. “The strongest predictor of positive change [to ADHD symptoms] was an increase in social support available to the parents during the intervening years.”
  • “…people who snort a line of stimulants then become very boring and go off on long monologues—they become very focused on their own train of thought and filter out the bored-to-tears look on your face.”
  • Twin studies had inflated the genetic influence on ADHD. While twin studies are great, it’s challenging to disentangle the environmental influence with the genetic. Even if identical twins have the same genetics, their dispositions also influence how the environment responds to them.

    Cause 12: The confinement of our children, both physically and psychologically

  • The major impacts that free play has on child development: creativity and imagination, social bonding and socializing, and aliveness (joy and pleasure) from engaging with biologically congruent activities
  • In free play, children must negotiate with one another, and police rules to games themselves. Increased reliance on adult supervision is troubling, because it reinforces dependence on authority to sort things out rather than working things out among themselves.
    • The young adult consequence of this may be increased reliance of university students on administrators to address their qualms (microagressions, safe spaces, trigger warnings)
    • The adult consequence of this may be increased reliance on governmental authority, police intervention to punish those who make them uncomfortable (this is probably what ended up justifying the historical prevalence of racial prejudices such as antisemitism). The decrease of play can cause fragmentation long term
    • Expecting authority figures to solve your problems may work when you’re a child, but when you’re an adult your submission to authority occurs in lieu of complex issues, and the authority (whether it be campus administrators or the government) consists of fallible humans. We need to learn to talk to one another, to solve and negotiate issues together
  • We’re more focused when our actions are intrinsically motivated, rather than extrinsically. Kids with their schedules set out by parents are robbed of doing what they find important, they instead do what their parents find important. They’re not given any time to find meaning.
  • “Life begins at the edge of your comfort zone.” - Neale Walsch
  • The No Child Left Behind Act, introduced in 2002, massively increased standardized testing across the United States. In the four years that followed, severe attention problems in children rose by 22%.
    • While standardized testing offers disadvantaged, yet intelligent, kids some class mobility, it also introduces constraints that counteract freedom and creativity. The constraints from college admission informed standardized testing reverberate to early childhood education.

      Conclusion

  • Three forms of attention: spotlight (what’s in our immediate focus), starlight (what we’re working towards), and daylight (what allows us to find our longer-term goals in the first place—requires reflection, mindwandering, and deep thought)
  • The author’s three big bold goals to fight against attention decline: ban surveillance capitalism (companies financially incentivized to exploit attention), introduce a four-day work week (needlessly exhausting people dwindles ability to focus), and encourage free play for children
  • The root of many issues is that the quality of a country tends to be based upon economic growth: GDP. Politicians stay in power if the economy grows, CEOs are celebrated if the companies see increased profits.
  • Much of current economic growth depends on attention exploitation. If we were to somehow regain control over our attention, and sleep a few more hours each night, the economic system would be hit with a substantial shockwave. There will be subtle yet significant forces that resist our deep desire to regain control of our lives, because economic growth depends on controlling our behaviour

Awakening the Buddha Within

Published:

Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das

Part one: discovering ancient wisdom in a modern world

Chapter 1: We are all buddhas

  • “I knew that I wanted to learn more, not earn more.”
  • The concept of fighting for peace, a contradiction in terms

    Chapter 2: A Tibetan prophecy

  • Dharma: that which supports or upholds
  • The Buddha told people not to follow anything blindly, for Buddhism is not based on belief so much as rational experiment
  • “I do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the men of old; I seek what they sought.” Basho
  • To spiritually transform, you don’t need to see different things, but see things differently
  • How can there be peace in the world if we are not at peace with ourselves?

    Chapter 3: Deconstructing the house that ego built

  • Poison one: ignorance of truth
  • Poison two: attachment
    • We trade success for real lives; we crave beauty so much that we only see the imperfections in what we have; we become attached to others, so we attempt to control them
    • Two subsets of attachments are pride and jealousy.
    • Pride causes us to define ourselves by our attachments, maintaining a rigid persona, deadening the flow of authenticity and spirit
  • Poison three: aversion (or dislike)
  • Because we are ignorant, we think we can be made happy by fulfilling attachments. Inevitably we end up disappointed, and become aversive to that disappointment, escalating to anger, hate, and enmity
  • The author mentions resistance to change as another poison, i.e., attachment to negative habits, or aversion to the discomfort of the stress that accompanies growth

    Part 2: Walking the eightfold path to enlightenment

    Chapter 4: The four noble truths

  • We don’t need to dispel what we desire; we must dispel our attachment and identification with what we crave to reduce our suffering
  • Wisdom is how we transform the hedonic treadmill into a lovely garden walk
  • The enlightened still have preferences, but they are not attached to them. This is similar to the notion of “preferred indifferents” of stoic philosophy
  • Buddha realized that one seeking truth had to move away from the extremes of self-indulgent passion (extreme indulgence) and self-inflicted mortification (extreme sacrifice), and instead pursue the Middle Way, i.e., moderation
    • Buddha grew up as royalty (indulgence), left royalty and spent 6 years eating a grain of rice a day (impossible) but more realistically undernourished himself while meditating all day
  • A perfectly realized spiritual life is not a carnival ride of exhilarating ups and frightening lows
  • Happiness cannot be found in a life devoted to sensual pleasure (more money, sex, vacations, status, pride, materials) [excessive selfish motives], nor in a life devoted to self-denial, self-deprecation, blame, and guilt [excessive sacrificial motives].
  • The eightfold path includes:
    • Wisdom training
      • Step 1: Right view
      • Step 2: Right intentions
    • Ethics training
      • Step 3: Right speech
      • Step 4: Right action
      • Step 5: Right livelihood
    • Meditation training
      • Step 6: Right effort
      • Step 7: Right mindfulness
      • Step 8: Right concentration
  • These steps form more of an interconnected circle. The three main values of Buddhism are wisdom, ethics, and meditative awareness
    • Very similar to stoicism’s three disciplines of acceptance (physics), philanthropy (ethics), and mindfulness (logic)

      Part 3: Wisdom training: seeing things are they are

      Step 1: Right view, the wisdom of clear vision

  • Samsara: perpetual wandering
  • The enlightened mind is free flowing. Like Teflon, nothing sticks or clings. The unawakened mind is like sticky flypaper, holding onto thoughts and worries. Fixed positions and entrenched opinions
  • Trying to grasp emotions and things is like trying to grasp water between your hands. It is bound for disappointment
  • “Each of us is unique, but we are not especially special; we are all interconnected notes in the same cosmic symphony.”
  • Meditating on death can make life more meaningful, shifting things into perspective of what is and what isn’t worth pursuing
  • When asked whether God existed or not, or whether the universe had a beginning or end, the Buddha remained silent. He felt that speculating about such questions did not facilitate progress towards freedom and peace
  • It is better to know nothing (and recognize that you know nothing), than know what isn’t so
  • The self is a process, not some independent and concrete entity
  • Often the greatest doubts occur just before a big breakthrough. Doubt is the great teacher.
  • Four transforming thoughts that redirect the mind, a daily meditation
    • Precious human existence: be grateful for this lifetime, life is rare to obtain and easily lost. Use this precious time to develop yourself with diligence
    • Death, mortality, and impermanence: all things are impermanent, the time of our death is uncertain, and we depart alone from this world. The duration of our lives is like a flash of lightning
    • The ineluctable law of karma: wholesome and unwholesome words, thoughts, and deeds procreate in kind, following us like a shadow follows the body
    • The defects and shortcomings of samsara:
      • birth, growing up, and illness are difficult.
      • Aging and death are painful.
      • Losing what we care for hurts.
      • We are blown about by circumstance and conditions beyond our understanding, making us feel lost, anxious, and powerless.
      • Being unaware and half-asleep in our own lives is wasteful and meaningless
      • We are continually tormented by fear of the unknown and ignorance and doubt about where we will go and why

        Step 2: Right intentions (right thought)

  • Thoughts manifest as the word; which manifest as the deed; which develops into habit; which hardens into character.
  • As the shadow follows the body; as we think, so we become
  • The jewel in the lotus = wisdom and compassion are in us all. What we seek, we are
  • “Wisdom tells me I am nothing; love tells me I am everything. Between the two, my life flows.”
  • Wisdom without love is not wisdom. Love without wisdom is not love.

    Part 4: ethics training, living a sacred life

  • Sanskrit word for virtue/morality is sila (shee-la)
  • Outwards: being straightforward, honest, healing, nonviolent, unselfish, caring
  • Inwards: being honest to yourself, free from self-deception, selfish bias, ill-will, prejudice. Straightening out things when they are bent.

    Step 3: right speech, speaking the truth

  • There will always be sparks that have the potential to generate an angry reaction. A trained mind is like a pool of water that causes sparks to fizzle out, whereas the untrained mind is like a pool of gasoline that cause a reactive explosion
  • The less full of ourselves we are, the more room there is for others
  • Downsizing and simplifying frees you from attachment to material goods. The same can be said about your mental real estate. The less thoughts you’re attached to, the more free and clear your headspace

    Step 4: Right action, the art of living

  • “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
  • The author says to give now, use your wealth, talent, and energy for the greater good, and it will follow you in the afterlife.
    • I agree with the point, giving is virtuous. I’m not a fan of using it as a reason to profit in the afterlife. This makes the deed about you, which seems besides the point.
    • This also speaks to why the afterlife/rebirth themes worry me, they seem to suffer from an attachment to my life, with enlightenment providing one a (likely false) hope to cling to it for another lifetime
    • I think rebirth is fine as a metaphor, but it seems regressive if taken seriously. Good deeds do carry on after you pass, because they urge others towards goodness, creating a positive chain of cause and effect
  • “We are being foolish when we congratulate ourselves on our compassionate behaviour when in reality we are simply giving in or giving up too easily. In all likelihood we are being lazy, fearful, frightened, or even codependent. This idiotic pseudo-compassion is counterproductive, and can enable others to hurt themselves further. Sometimes to say no is far more affirming and supportive than to just say yes without reflection…Sometimes we give in because we are trying to manipulate a situation—perhaps we are afraid of rejection or we want to get something in return. We all need to be really clear about what it means to give with a pure and unselfish heart.”
  • At the end of each day, tally up positive and negative actions to help you stay on the right path

    Step 5: Right livelihood, work is love made visible

  • As per Buddha to a layman, there are four things conducive to happiness in this world:
    • To be skillful and knowledgeable in whatever profession one has
    • To conscientiously protect one’s income and family’s means of support
    • To have virtuous, trustworthy, and faithful friends
    • To be content (glass half full) and to live within one’s means
  • The eight worldly winds blow us about like leaves in the wind when we become too attached to them. They are:
    • Pleasure and pain
    • Gain and loss
    • Praise and blame
    • Fame and shame
  • “Don’t be best friends with Pride and Vanity”
    • Pride arises from a person, or a group of persons, tendency to attribute their successes to themselves alone. “I did that” or “We did that” despite the challenges I/we faced. This is delusional and neglects the interdependent nature of the natural world. The innumerable causes and effects of the world allowed for your success, not you. Be grateful for success, but don’t attribute a false sense of ownership—pride—to it. It never belonged to you.
  • Money is helpful or harmful depending on whether we use it or abuse it, whether we possess it, or it possesses us
  • The happiness quotient: if we want more than what we have, we become dissatisfied. Becoming happy is about balancing the amounts of what we want and what we have. The middle way in Buddhism is all about striking balance between self-indulgence and self-denial
    • Guided by wisdom, find a personally satisfying balance between need and greed
  • Success is not found through the gratification of desire, but in the end of desire—which is contentment. True wealth is when one enjoys what they have.
  • Finding the right job is about finding work that genuinely develops us as we develop it.

    Part 5: Meditation Training; awareness, attention, and focus

  • Thought and intellect are great servants, but poor masters
  • When our mind becomes more centered, clear, caring, and open, we have much more room for both others and ourselves. This requires mental discipline, a training of the mind

    Step 6: Right effort, a passion for enlightenment

  • When we cling to narrow-minded opinions, we smother them and our mind becomes fragile. Instead, dance with opinions and give your mind the room it needs to flourish.
  • There is no way to happiness and peace, happiness and peace is the way
  • Rejoice in the good fortune of all. Do not wish ill-will on others, regardless of who they are. Avoid jealousy and covetousness
  • Four great efforts involve: avoiding unwholesomeness, tending to and reducing the unwholesomeness within you, tending to and promoting wholesomeness into your practice, and maintaining that wholesomeness once it’s there

    Step 7: Right mindfulness, keeping your eyes open

  • You may feel you have no time to meditate, however meditation actually adds back time to your day through additional mental clarity and spaciousness

    Step 8: Right concentration, the joy of meditation

  • Remindfulness, the recentering of attention to the object of meditation
  • Investigate your restlessness when you meditate. If you get bored, ask “why do I get bored? Why aren’t I satisfied?”
  • Daily meditation is like a mental floss that protects against truth decay
  • Metaphysical fitness is as important as physical fitness

    Epilogue: Toward a western Buddhism and contemporary dharma

  • Make the effort to contribute to others rather than convert others
  • Western Buddhism will tend to emphasize personal growth and individual interests more than institutional preservation and growth (democratic vs collectivist)

Drunk

Published:

Drunk, Edward Slingerland

Chapter 1: Why do we get drunk?

  • Yeast produces alcohol to protect against bacteria, as the yeast and bacteria compete over a fruit’s nutrients
  • Alcohol allowed for some preservation of resources that would otherwise be lost in a world without fridges. In Tanzania, banana and pineapple-based crops are preserved into a tasty brew that would otherwise rot
  • Though most crops can be preserved in other non-alcoholic ways, like fermenting wheat and oats into porridges that are more nutritionally rich
  • Alcohol also acts as a disinfectant, and would have acted to rid dirty water of pathogens, and can also provide medicinal properties
    • Though you can just boil water to rid it of pathogens, and fire has been around for a while. In China, tea drinking is common and cultural norms have made drinking unboiled water taboo, claiming it harms the qi
  • Many recent studies are concluding that the individual health costs of drinking are overwhelmingly negative. But this is only analyzed at the level of the individual—not the level of the group. Too reductionist.
  • Path dependence: when a prior path constrains future outcomes (e.g., our spines were designed for four-legged ambulation, not upright bipedalism, hence we get back problems. Evolution can’t see ahead around adaptive corners)
  • Asian flush may have adapted to protect against fungus that appears in rice stores in damp environments. Normally when alcohol is processed by the body, ethanol is broken down into acetaldehyde, and then acetic acid, which is the broken into oxygen and carbon. Acetaldehyde protects against fungal infections. This breakdown of acetaldehyde is thus suppressed in some Asians, so when they drink a surplus of acetaldehyde is produced which inebriates them faster.
  • Islamic prohibition of alcohol apparently arose due to companions of Mohamed becoming too drunk at a dinner to say their prayers
  • Prohibitions of alcohol have been attempted throughout the world to no avail—societies keep drinking nevertheless
  • The Mormon prohibition from alcohol (and coffee and Coca-Cola) may in part be a strategy to emphasize differences between other existing religious groups, as well as displaying a costly loyalty-inspiring display.

    Chapter 2: Leaving the door open for Dionysus

  • In human mythology there exists a universality of high-stakes riddles. This is a symbolic representation of humanity’s (and life’s) main challenges: we need to be creative to survive
  • Manioc is a toxic tuber that requires an elaborate process to detoxify. Portugal naively exported manioc from South America to Africa for its impressive and efficient yields. They neglected the cultural process required to detoxify it, however, and to this day contemporary Africans continue to suffer health problems by low-level cyanide poisoning. “Cultural evolution is often much smarter than we are.”
  • Underdeveloped PFC in youth is a design feature, relaxing constraints and instead allowing the brain to encounter larger swaths of information to facilitate learning and knowledge accumulation
  • Social emotions allow us to override selfish decisions, but only because we can’t consciously control them. “Love and honor that I can switch on or off when convenient is not true love or honor.”
  • Social emotions bind us to longer term emotional commitments, restraining us from betraying others when selfish temptations call. Analogous to the siren myth, where Odysseus’s ties himself to the ship before swimming past the irresistible sirens.
  • In the Daodejing, the Daoists compare the perfect sage to an infant: perfectly open and receptive to the world.
  • Children are great at the three Cs that make us human: creativity, culture openness, communal bonding. As we age, we get a little less creative, a little less trusting, a little more ossified. Alcohol relaxes these inclinations, making us more child-like
  • The default mode network is suppressed when taking LSD and psilocybin. The DMN seems to provide a basic sense of self, and when suppressed yields more cognitive fluidity, a fuzzier boundary between self and others, and reduced sensory discrimination and filtering
  • “Dionysus (God of wine, fertility, emotionality, chaos), like a hapless toddler, may have trouble getting his shoes on, but he sometimes manages to stumble on novel solutions that Apollo (the sun God of reason, order, and self-control) would never see.”
    • The chaos/creativity introduced by alcohol can jump us out of local optimums that narrow-minded rationality can’t see beyond. Dionysus allowed selfish apes to stumble and dance their way into civilization

      Chapter 3: Intoxication, ecstasy, and the origins of civilization

  • From Billy Wilder’s the Lost Weekend: “What does [alcohol] do to my mind? It tosses the sandbags overboard so the balloon can soar.”
  • We are typically good at sensing implicit emotional cues to gauge the trustworthiness of others. Nudging people to think more about judging trust in others stifles the moral reliability of our spontaneous intuitions.
  • We have also evolved to deceive, and suppressing emotional leakage requires prefrontal horsepower. Alcohol suppresses this ability, allowing groups of intoxicated individuals to better suss out cheaters. This was especially important when potentially hostile groups gathered (to reconcile, matrimonially unify, or select a new chief which would otherwise be contentious), so these unions were typically accompanied by copious amount of booze
  • The word bridal comes from “bride ale”, which bride and groom would exchange to seal the marriage, and crucially the new bond between families
  • In addition to testing trustworthiness, many ancient cultures would ritualize getting drunk together to test the self-restraint and virtue of participants under challenging circumstances
  • Robin Osborne: “Intoxication…both revealed the true individual, and bonded the group…those who would fight, and die, together established their trust in each other by daring to let wine reveal who they were and what they valued.”
  • On talking of early American society: “Beyond the obvious usefulness of staid maize and potatoes, then, Emerson discerned a more subtle function for beauty (via Apple blossoms) and intoxication (via cider and applejack), equally important as bread and potatoes for us social apes.”
    • Maize and potatoes are extrinsically valuable, helping us survive. Apples (in this context) are intrinsically valuable, helping societies reproduce and grow
  • Ecstasy (Greek ek-stasis) means “standing outside oneself.”
  • “By enhancing creativity, dampening stress, facilitating social contact, enhancing trust and bonding, forging group identity, and reinforcing social roles and hierarchy, intoxicants have played a crucial role in allowing hunting and gathering humans to enter agricultural villages, towns, and cities.”

    Chapter 4: Intoxication in the modern world

  • The obvious physiological and psychological costs of alcohol must be weighted against their benefits to creativity, contentment, and social solidarity
  • The 70s and 80s industrial boom in Japan must have been in part facilitated by the “water trade.” This was the culture of Japanese salarymen binge drinking after work, which relaxed status differences and allowed juniors to bring more ideas to the table. Overall creativity must have been enhanced as well.
  • Prohibition turned off social drinking by killing the saloon, and forced drinkers into isolation and small private gatherings, neutralizing the collaborative advantage of alcohol
  • Michael Pollin: “Entropy in the brain is like variation in evolution: It supplies the diversity in raw materials on which selection can operate to solve problems and bring novelty into the word.”
  • The prohibition stifled innovation, as supported by patent data from that time. Given the isolating nature of covid (reliance on impersonal teleconferencing, closure of cafes and bars), we might expect to see a similar drop in innovation
  • Dunbar and colleagues note that what sets alcohol apart from cannabis and psychedelics are its use in social contexts rather than for quasi-religious experiences and solitary hedonic pleasure. “It opens the social pores.”
  • Despite the physiological impacts on health from alcohol, one of the principal impacts on longevity is social connectedness, and alcohol helps us connect. Moderate alcohol use, if it encourages more meaningful social encounters, could have beneficial long-term effects on health
  • “Subjects given alcohol rather than a placebo rate photos with sexual content as more appealing and choose to gaze at them longer. Interestingly, the effect is more pronounced in women, which may reflect greater inhibitions created by cultural norms that alcohol downregulates.”
  • Our self critical color commentator—the self—so often gets in the way of just being in the world and enjoying it. Escape from selfhood is typically done spiritually (prayer, meditation, yoga) or through use of chemical intoxicants (getting drunk or high)
  • Religious life has over the past few centuries has seen collective active bonding being replace by passive isolated individualism. Encouragement to combine takes context more and more in the passive sense—to passively observe some entertaining spectacle, whereas intoxication had them interacting in a dynamic and collective sense.
  • Most of our leisure time is spend drooling in front of TV screens, video games, or our phones.
  • When it comes to drinking, claiming that there is no “safe level” does not seem like a good enough reason to abstention; there’s no safe level of driving, yet governments do not recommend we avoid driving. This is because there are obvious benefits to driving, that it’s deemed worth the risk. The benefits of alcohol are not so obvious, they lie not only in the individual but the messy culture, so we have to find a better way of communicating these benefits
  • Thinking that one method over another gives us special access to the divine is suspect. Everything we experience is chemically conditioned, whether it be meditation, prayer, a fast, or a chemical intoxicant. In all cases, we are simply modifying the body’s chemistry to modify how we experience the world.

    Chapter 5: The dark side of Dionysus

  • “The NIH estimates that alcohol is the third highest preventable cause of death after smoking and lack of exercise.”
  • Southern drinking culture (e.g., in Italy, where children are exposed to alcohol at a young age, drinks are only had at meals/social gatherings and are drank to complement the occasion, drinks are non-distilled) protects genetically alcoholic-susceptible individuals, whereas northern drinking culture (e.g., in United States, where children are strictly forbidden alcohol, drinking as a primary activity is common, distilled spirits are more common) have ineffective safeguards against distillation and isolation—the two innovations that produce alcoholics
  • Distillation is a novel invention (arriving as early as the 1300s-1500s in China) that our evolutionary precedent did not prepare us for. Distilled liquors, being 10x as volatile as wines or beers, provide the quickest and surest routes to alcoholic dependence. Individualized, on-demand delivery of strong booze is unnatural.
  • Cultural drinking norms and rituals allow groups of people to regulate consumption before the points of excess are reached.
  • Prior to the advent of distilled liquor and unregulated private drinking, the dangers of alcoholism may have been outweighed by the social benefits. But as the world becomes more fractionated (i.e., the isolating nature of suburbs) and awash with distilled spirits, alcohol may be more dangerous than it is helpful.
  • Dissatisfied couples tend to see an increase in relationship quality when under the influence (~0.08BAC). However, those already satisfied with their relationships see no change with alcohol, suggesting that the dissatisfied may be more drawn to alcohol as a crutch for those in unsatisfying relationships
  • Religious songs, mantras, and chants increase CO2 levels in the lungs and bloodstream, changing the body’s chemistry and likely reducing oxygenation to the prefrontal cortex, bestowing practitioners with similar self-dissolving experiences as one might with alcohol (drunk on the spirit, not wine)
  • In Ancient Greece, wine cups were deliberately shallow, spilling easily, to regulate consumption. In general, smaller glasses also help regulate consumption

The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Published:

The True Believer, Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Eric Hoffer

  • “All mass movements breed fanaticism, fervent hope, hatred, and intolerance;…all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance.”
  • However different the holy causes people die for, they perhaps die basically for the same thing
  • The author will attempt to show that any mass movement deliberately fosters in its adherents a frustrated state of mind, and advances its interest by seconding the propensities of the frustrated
  • “Regardless of belief in God, the true believer (of a mass movement), by converting and antagonizing, is shaping the world in his own image.”

    Part 1: the appeal of mass movements

    Chapter 1: The desire for change

  • We tend to attribute success and failure to the state of things around us. “The unfortunate blame their failures on the world, the fortunate see the outside world as a precariously balanced mechanism that should not be trifled with. Thus, there are those with an ardent desire to change the world, and those with a similar conviction to maintain it.”
  • The privileged and destitute both fear change. Discontent does not necessarily create desire for change. Vast change requires one to feel like they hold some insurmountable power, a certainty that supersedes the uncertainty that they fear. See: religious gods, the omnipotency of man’s reason in the French Revolution, Lenin’s blind faith in the Marxist doctrine.
  • Power isn’t enough. If power is not joined with extravagant hope, it is mostly used to preserve the status quo. Kindling a fervent faith in the future is a necessity for mass movements.
  • “For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented but not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader, or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power.” They must also be radically hopeful, and wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their undertaking.

    Chapter 2: The desire for substitutes

  • Mass movements appeal not to those intent on advancing a cherished self, but those who crave to be rid of an unwanted self. Mass movements attract followings not to satisfy in its followers self-advancement, but to satisfy the passion of self-renunciation
  • The disadvantaged see self interest as something tainted and evil, and mass movements satisfy their craving for a rebirth that promises new elements of pride, confidence, hope, purpose, and worth by identification to a holy cause.
  • The frustrated value mass movements as they provide elements that make life bearable that they could not evoke on their own.
  • “Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.”
    • Can you place faith in something larger than yourself without losing faith in yourself? I think so…though, I suppose submitting yourself to something larger than yourself means embracing it with humility and claiming you aren’t everything. (The author isn’t implying anything negative with this statement; it seems to ring true).
  • “A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.”

    Chapter 3: The interchangeability of mass movements

  • Most movements are some combination of religious, nationalist, and revolutionary nature.
  • In pre-war Italy and Germany, businessmen logically encouraged fascist movements to stop communism, but in doing so they promoted their own liquidation.

    Part 2: The potential converts

    Chapter 4: The role of the undesirables in human affairs

  • There is a tendency to judge a race, nation, or any distinct group by its least worthy membership. The inferior elements exert the most influence on a group’s course as they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as ruined beyond remedy, ready to wreck both. They crave dissolving their meaningless selves in a spectacular communal undertaking and are among the earliest recruits of mass movements.

    Chapter 5: The new poor

  • “The newly poor throb most with the ferment of frustration, as their recent disenfranchisement leaves notes of what could have been lodged in their seething skulls,”
  • Intensified struggles for existence have more of a static rather than dynamic influence. The abjectly poor are chiefly preoccupied with sustenance. Those who can afford to let their mind wander are those who are poor but not driven to the brink
  • Before the French Revolution, prosperity had augmented more rapidly in the twenty years preceding the event. This leads to the observation that grievances are most poignant when “just about” redressed. As De Tocqueville noted: “the French found their position the more intolerable the better it became.”
  • “It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt.”
    • Notes of Buddhist insight here. Craving is the root of suffering, not suffering itself.
  • “Intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired.”
    • Wonderful.
  • “We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing.”
  • Movements shift from immediate hope to distant hope. Immediate hope is the hope around the corner that is used to promote action and urgency. Once a mass movement has “arrived”, we shift to distant hope, prizing obedience and patience as the movement attempts to preserve the present.
  • Freedom aggravates, freedom of choice places whole blame of failure on the individual; freedom alleviates, making available action, movement, and protest
  • We join a mass movement to be free of personal responsibility. Nazis considered themselves cheated when made to shoulder the responsibility for following orders. “Had they not joined the Nazi movement to be free from responsibility?”
  • Mass movements demanding for personal liberty inevitably see their followers denouncing personal liberties on behalf of group cohesion.
  • “The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity…no one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority.”
  • “Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality.”
    • Cohesive and synced versus competitive and messy
  • Mass movements do all they can to disrupt the family and discredit national, racial, and religious ties. This is because individuals without a group and greater sense of meaning are much easier to harvest and manipulate
  • Almost all contemporary movements attempt to undermine the family, by “undermining parental authority; facilitating divorce; taking over responsibility for feeding, educating, and entertaining the children; and by encouraging illegitimacy.”
  • There exists a trade-off, the family unit is sacrificed for the collective success of a nation. Children gain economic independence earlier and leave the home, women gain more freedom which facilitates divorce, the rural are drawn to becoming isolated urbanites, loosening family ties.
  • “All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of a communal existence.”
  • “The policy of an exploiting colonial power should be to encourage communal cohesion among the natives…the process which transmutes misery into frustration and revolt is checked at the source.”
  • Individual bonuses are a great way to break apart a group. Group wide incentives are much more likely to maintain group satisfaction and harmony.
  • Rising mass movements attract and hold following not by doctrine and promises, but by the refuge it offers from the anxious and meaningless individual existence. By absorbing followers into a close-knit whole, followers are freed for their ineffectual selves.
  • Christianity was exceptional at this. In the Graeco-Roman world, the church offered an unmatched ability to absorb followers into a tight knit community.
  • Hitler knew the chief passion of the frustrated is “to belong”, that this passion is satisfied by extreme cementing and binding
  • Uprooted from ancestral soil and local allegiance, urbanization created a fleet of individuals prone to demagogic propaganda, socialist or nationalist or both. The villagers outside of Rome were less likely to have a communal pattern that kept them from Christianity, whereas many of the city dwellers were once separated from their hereditary milieu by the Roman Empire.
  • “When people revolt on a totalitarian society, they rise not against the wickedness of the regime but its weakness.”
  • The man just out of the army, feeling lost in the free-for-all of civilian life and surrounded by incertitude, is an ideal potential convert for a mass movement. He longs for the certitude and camaraderie and freedom from individual responsibility for which he was brought up in.

    Chapter 6: Misfits

  • The passage of war to peace is more critical than the inverse, as when veterans return to normality, they find the slow and painful adjustment difficult relative to their previously orderly lives.
  • The author suggests the most vehement of misfits are those with unfulfilled cravings for creative work—their creative flow being dried up–as they are in the grips of the most desperate of passions (see Hitler)

    Chapter 7: The inordinately selfish

  • Author suggests that the selfish attach themselves to groups, making the subject of their selfishness their group (i.e., becoming groupish). They claim they have faith of love and humility, but can neither be loving or humble (see religious pride)

    Chapter 8: the ambitious feeling unlimited opportunities

  • When opportunities abound, there is an inevitable depreciation of the present. What could be outweighs what is. This disorder attracts the unquenchable thirst of get rich quick enthusiasts to orderly mass movements that promise them everything

    Chapter 9: Minorities

  • The least and most successful in assimilated minorities are most attracted to mass movements. Failures see themselves as outsiders unable to blend. The successful find themselves unable to gain access to exclusive circles of the majority, and with evidence of their individual superiority they resent the inferiority implied by the assimilation.

    Chapter 10: The bored

  • The bored are the most ready and numerous to convert. Those living autonomous lives, living not badly off but lacking abilities to engage in creative work and useful action, lack meaning in their lives, so the meaning inherent in a mass movement is incredibly attractive to them.
  • This explains the invariable presence of middle-aged women (Karens who are unsatisfied with their marriage or unable to find a partner) at the birth of all mass movements. (See Madame Khoklakhov in Brothers Karamazov)

    Chapter 11: Sinners

  • “A mass movement attempts to infect people with a malady and offer the movement as a cure.”
  • The disorder present in the conscience of a sinner attracts him to the order of a collective movement, and an opportunity to wash away his sin—a chance of salvation

    Part 3: United action and self-sacrifice

    Chapter 12: Preface

  • Mass movements are characterized by an emphasis on collective unity and self-sacrifice.
  • Every unifying agent is a promoter of self-sacrifice and vice versa.

    Chapter 13: Factors promoting self-sacrifice

    Identification with a collective whole

  • Those ready to self-sacrifice identify with a whole rather than themselves. When asked “who are you they” answer Canadian, Christian, member of so and so tribe. When they die, their self lives on through the tribe.
  • Life itself is all that matters to those without a sense of belonging, the only tangible feeling in an abyss devoid of meaning (see Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment)
  • Discouraging emigration is just as important in maintaining a collective whole. The iron curtain is perhaps more to prevent Russians from escaping rather than stopping others from entering. It is a psychological boundary, bolstered by propaganda, to prevent losing valuable members to competing groups.

    Make believe

  • Leaders of mass movements mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in followers the illusion that they are participating in a dramatic performance. Think of the costumes and symbols and parades and music present in army marches so common in mass movements.
  • The desire to escape into spectacle may come easier to the frustrated than the self-sufficient, as the fiction allows them to escape their unsatisfactory selves

    Deprecation of the present

  • A mass movement starts out by reviling the past, insisting that the past taints the pure present. But as the movement gets going, detest shifts onto the present (despite the original aim of salvaging the present) in hopes for a better future.
  • Impracticability is a mark of mass movements, because to distance oneself from the present means to distance oneself from the real, the feasible, the tangible. Mass movements thus gravitate towards miracles and mysticism, as these technologies spit in the face of the present
  • All mass movements criticize the present by depicting it as a necessary scourge to reach a glorious future (see religious movements and heaven, social revolutions and utopia, nationalist movements and triumph)
  • “Those without hope are divided and driven to desperate self-seeking.” The slaves in Hebrew were resentful, but it wasn’t until Moses brought them hope of a promise land that they broke their chains of emancipation.
  • “Those who are at war with the present have an eye for the seeds of change and the potentialities of small beginnings.”
    • The frustrated are more likely to prophesize, to search for greener pastures amidst the barren present
  • Conservatives want to preserve the present and cherish the past; liberals see the present as an offspring of the past developing towards an improved future. Both see the present favourably.
  • Radicals loathe the present, ready to proceed recklessly with the present towards a better tomorrow. Radicals believe in the ability for humans to perfect their nature, being solely a product of their environment, and by changing the environment they can mold humans perfectly. Reactionaries also revile the present but see the past as important and worthy of glorious restoration.
  • Those who fail in everyday affairs tend to reach for the impossible, because it is less humiliating to fail in attempting something impossible than the possible. Their ineptitude is dwarfed by the grandiosity of the movement.

    “Things which are not”

  • We are more ready to die for that which don’t yet have, than that which have already. “Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.”
  • Even when defending ourselves, our motivation is tied not necessarily to the maintenance of life, but to the maintenance of hope. The hopeless either run away or accept defeat.
  • Mass movements thus furnish hope in followers and attempt to drain hope from opponents. See Nazi Germany, where Hitler drained the Jews of all hope. However, in Palestine, those same Jews, fuelled by hope, fought recklessly

    Doctrine

  • Mass movements strive to interpose a fact-proof screen between faithful followers and the realities of the world. “It is startling to realize how much unbelief is necessary to make belief possible.”
  • The certainty made explicit in doctrines renders followers impervious to the uncertainties present in the world around them.
  • To be effective, a doctrine has to be believed in—not understood. Absolute certainty only occurs in things we don’t understand.
  • Followers are thus asked not to try and understand a doctrine with their heads, but with their hearts. “It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason.” Or, “Do not seek Adolph Hitler with your brains; all of you will find him with the strength of your hearts.”
  • “When some part of a doctrine is relatively simple, there is a tendency among the faithful to complicate and obscure it. Simple words are made pregnant with meaning and made to look like symbols in a secret message. There is thus an illiterate air about the most literate true believer.”

    Fanaticism

  • The fanatic is perpetually incomplete and insecure, leading him to passionately grasp for a doctrine of certainty. The resulting sense of security is not from the excellence of the cause, but the intoxicating stability provided by having something to hold on to.
  • The fanatic can thus not be persuaded by an appeal to reason or morals. The quality of his cause is not what he clings to, but his passionate attachment. We thus find that fanatics are easily converted (not convinced), as they cling to any doctrine that offers refuge in a sea of uncertainty
  • “The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a God or not.”

    Mass movements and Armies

  • Armies differ from mass movements on the sense that they attempt to preserve or expand an established order. Armies attempt to protect the present; mass movements arise to destroy it.

    Chapter 14: Unifying agents

    Hatred

  • “Mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without belief in a devil.”
  • Strengths of mass movements are typically proportional to the tangibility and atrocities attributed to the enemy. When asked if he went too far with the Jew hatred, Hitler responded “No, no, no!… It is impossible to exaggerate the formidable quality of the Jew as an enemy.”
  • Hatred often stems from insufficiency, a desperate effort to “suppress an awareness of our inadequacy, worthlessness, guilt, and other shortcomings of the self.” Self-hatred is transmuted into hatred of others.
  • When wronged, we don’t always direct our hatred at those who wronged us. We are not necessarily mad at them, but at the evidence of our inadequacy, helplessness, and cowardice.
  • To silence a guilty conscience, we convince ourselves that those we sin against are deserving of it, unworthy of love. To admit otherwise would open the door to self-contempt, which is precisely what we attempt to escape with our venomous hatred
  • Hating those who have it worse comes harder because hate shifts into pity. It is much easier to hate those who are advantaged. A nation beginning to hate foreigners wholeheartedly is evidence that they have lost confidence in themselves.
  • For this reason, the oppressed invariably shape themselves in the image of their hated oppressors, because they admire them, and that admiration fuels their hatred.
  • Surrendering and humbling the self to a larger cause can breed pride and arrogance, the believer seeing himself as chosen and those outside of his faith as evil and perishable
  • We relinquish responsibility when absorbed by a collective whole. This offers freedom to hate, bully, lie, and torture without shame or remorse.
  • “The hatred and cruelty which have their source in selfishness are ineffectual things compared with the venom and ruthlessness born of selflessness.” o Groupishness>selfishness

    Imitation

  • Lack of self-worth generates a proclivity to imitate. The more we mistrust our judgment, the more we are ready to follow the example of others.

    Persuasion and coercion

  • Propaganda penetrates only minds already open, and rather than inserting new opinions it justifies and reinforces existing ones
  • Coercion when insurmountable has an unequaled persuasiveness and breeds fanatics to similar degrees as those persuaded. “It needs fanatical faith to rationalize our cowardice.”
  • Christian historian K.S.Latourette notes “However incompatible the spirit of Jesus and armed force may be…the latter has often made it possible for the former to survive.”
  • To exercise coercion requires the stability provided by ardent faith. As Hitler put it “Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain.”
  • Proselytizing comes not from an expression of having all of the answers but lacking in them. For we only strive for expansion when we feel we’re lacking something.
  • Passion for proselytizing is centred around some deficiency, be it an irrational dogma or some distance between what is preached and what is practiced (i.e., guilt)

    Leadership

  • Leadership in the context of mass movements requires fertile ground of unsatisfaction and frustration, for without this a movement cannot commence
  • The thrust of mass movements, though, requires an exceptional leader at the helm. What makes a leader exceptional in this case is audacity, fanatical faith in a single truth, an awareness of the importance of close-knit cohesion, and, “above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants.”
  • All mass movements rank blind obedience as the highest virtues. “Obedience is not only the first law of God, but also the first tenet of a revolutionary party and of fervent nationalism.”
  • The frustrated are attracted to freedom from responsibility more than freedom from restraint, as when they are burdened with responsibility it has led to failure, evidence of their ineptitude.

    Action

  • Successful action can bring premature end to mass movements, as it can feed in the true believer a sense of self-confidence and reconciliation with the present. He can find salvation not in the one and only truth, but in action by proving his worth and individual superiority.
  • The taste of continuous action kills the collective spirit. And when the ability to act is stifled, say after a defeat in war, fertile ground is laid for mass movements (see Germany after WW1, a population well-equipped to act but forced to be inactive—Hitler gave them an opportunity to act, and they praised him for it)

    Suspicion

  • “We usually strive to reveal in others the blemishes we hide in ourselves. Thus when the frustrated congregate in a mass movement, the air is heavy-laden with suspicion.”
  • Abraham sacrificed his only son to prove devotion to Jehovah, and the fanatical Nazis and Communists are ready to sacrifice relatives. Family serves to undermine the collective cohesion of a mass movement, so sacrifice of family is often encouraged. Devotion to family drains devotion to the holy cause.

    The effects of unification

  • Once unified, the true believers source of frustration that led them to the group diminishes. But they become dependent on the group for their sense of self worth, dependent on this group that delivered them from meaninglessness autonomous existence to an anonymous whole.
  • “The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure.”

    Part 4: Beginning and End

    Chapter 15: Men of Words

  • Excellence in spoken or written word gets mass movements rolling; fanaticism hatches the actual movement; and a practical man of action thrusts the movement forth.
  • “There is apparently an irremediable insecurity at the core of every intellectual, be he noncreative or creative.”
  • The grievance which animates in the protesting man of words is often really directed at some personal and private insufficiency, not a public one.
  • All mass movements are conceived by impractical fault-finding intellectuals, not men of action. German intellectuals generated German nationalism; Jewish intellectuals generated Zionism
  • Deep-seated cravings of approval make the man of words hypersensitive to any humiliation imposed on their tribe.
  • “The genuine man of words…can get along without faith in absolutes. He values the search for truth as much as truth itself…His vanity, it is true, often prompts him to defend his speculations with savagery and even venom; but his appeal is usually to reason and not to faith.
  • “The intellectual’s precursors to mass movements rise against the established order, announcing its incompetence and calling for freedom of expression and self realization.” This is tragic for the intellectuals, because followers too want to see the old order crumble, not to realize their potential but to hide into the whole and relinquish responsibility. The intellectual tragically finds himself swallowed by said whole. The intellectual values the individual, but the masses despise it, and he must then conform or perish.

    Chapter 16: The Fanatics

  • “The dissolution of cursed individuality in the majesty and grandeur of a mighty whole.”
  • The noncreative men of words are apparently most potent at becoming fanatics. Unable to write a great book, paint a great picture, or become a great scientist, they see themselves as irredeemably spoiled in the current social order. Most Nazi bigwigs were failed artists.
  • The creative man of words can find satisfaction from the creative flow within, so isn’t as drawn to the collective source of meaning from a mass movement.

    Chapter 17: The practical men of action

  • For they (FDR, Churchill, Ghandi) “are not tempted to use the slime of frustrated souls as mortar in the building of a new world. The self-confidence of these rare leaders is derived from…their faith in humanity, for they know no one can be honorable unless he honours mankind.”
  • The chief preoccupation of men of action is to maintain unity and willingness to self-sacrifice. This is normally accomplished through strict law and order.
  • While the man of action reveres the early days of the movement, he acts not on faith but on law. He realizes the value of faith and therefore maintain the incessant flow of propaganda and symbolism, but he persuades not by faith but by force.
  • Once in charge the men of action, now nearing the end of the dynamic phase and establishing order, need to keep the frustrated from reconciling with the present. They thus dangle the promises of distant hope, a vision, in front of the crawling frustrated to keep them motivated

    Chapter 18: Good and bad mass movements

  • When a mass movement dies, it can be followed by a burst of creative energy from the individuals who were once embalmed in the stifling atmosphere of blind faith and disgust of the present.
  • Much to the dismay of Hitler or Napoleon, the creative output during their “heroic” age was pathetic. The high tension of their periods leaves little room for the contemplation required to produce art.
  • “The fanatic’s disdain for the present blinds him to the complexity and uniqueness of life.” Example given of Rabbi Jacob condemning the appreciation of beauty in sources (trees, fields, etc.) other than the Torah.
  • This blindness is a strength, allowing the fanatic to see no obstacles, but causes “intellectual sterility and emotional monotony.”
  • The measure of a nation’s strength is as the reservoir of its longing. The more lofty and infinite the goal, the longer it can keep the desires of the masses continually fulfilled. This could be a desire of ever improving standards of living (like in democracies) or holy authority and world domination (like in autocracies)
  • “It would not be better for mankind if they were given their desires.” - Heraclitus

The Alchemist

Published:

The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho

  • Santiago receives two stones, indicating yes and no, that would provide him an answer to any truly objective question. He asks, “Am I going to find my treasure?” And the stones fall in a whole through his pocket so he cannot grab one.
    • This question is not objective (is any?). But, perhaps more importantly, we’re more motivated to fight for something when we don’t know the outcome, win or lose.
  • “‘Well, why don’t you go to Mecca now?’ asked the boy. ‘Because it’s the thought of Mecca that keeps me alive…I’m afraid that if my dream is realized, I’ll have no reason to go on living.’”
  • “You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you’ll never have to fear an unanticipated blow.”
    • You will never be able to escape suffering. So it’s better to suffer. That way, you’ll never have to fear an unanticipated blow.
  • “Fear of suffering is worse than suffering itself.”
  • “Most people see the world as a threatening place, and, because they do, the world turns out, indeed, to be a threatening place.”
  • On the Sun and the Earth: “So we contemplate each other, and we want each other, and I give it life and warmth, and it gives me my reason for living.”
    • But if the Sun drifted any closer to the earth, it would burn that which it loved. When we love ourselves or others too much and drown ourselves/our loved ones in indulgence, we/they get burnt.
  • “That’s what alchemists do, they show that, when we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better, too.”
  • “When we love, we always strive to become better than we are.”

Behave

Published:

Behave, Robert Sapolsky

Introduction

  • We divide things into categories to understand them, but categories can distort our perception of reality. Shown two colours on a spectrum, depending on how the culture defines their colours the observer may see the colours as more similar or different
  • To describe behaviour, the thrust of this book is to invoke the various timescales that precede that behaviour, to connect the scientific disciplines (neurobiology, biochemistry, endocrinology, evolutionary biology, etc.) into a consilient whole to explain why we do things
  • “We use the same muscles as does a male chimp when attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.”
    • This is also sexual competition, in a weird way, but in the context of group competition. An ideology is partly an attractant devised to lure individuals who long for a coherent explanation of life’s complexity. The more that are lured, the greater group’s reproductive fitness (but not necessarily survival fitness)

      Chapter 2: One second before

  • The hypothalamus is the limbic pathway to autonomic regulation, where emotions inform autonomic responses (blood flow, heart-rate, temperature regulation)—the limbic to lizard bridge
  • The frontal cortex is the brain region most interconnecting the limbic system and cortex
  • The amygdala, responsible for fear, uncertainty management, and aggression, adapts with exposure to fears. This adaptation does not occur passively, the neural inputs to the basolateral amygdala require active exposure to objects of fear
    • Insert “trigger warnings and avoidance strategies are harmful” here
  • The extreme sensitivity of the amygdala’s neural connections to sensory neurons allows us to sense fleeting and faint information that the cortex (conscious awareness) misses
  • The insular cortex and amygdala form a connection that concerns disgust. This disgust pathway is triggered by rotten food and moral transgression. We literally express disgust with people we find socially reprehensible. Dangerous.
  • Autonomic arousal doesn’t influence what you feel, but the intensity of what is felt. Whether you have a sympathetic or parasympathetic response will colour your perceptions differently.
  • “The front cortex makes you do the harder thing when it’s the right thing to do.”
  • Willpower and self-control are finite resources, and frontal cortex neurons are metabolically expensive cells
  • Increased cognitive load leads to less prosocial decision making (less charitable, more likely to lie)
  • The dorsolateral PFC is the chief cognitive region for forgoing short-term pleasure for long term achievement.
  • The ventromedial PFC is where the PFC interfaces with the limbic system. vmPFC damage silences gut feelings; this lack of emotional thrust makes decision-making more challenging. Decisions aren’t felt and become more utilitarian.
  • Suppressing thought or emotion is near impossible. But thinking/feeling differently is achievable. Antecedent rather than response strategies can protect us from distress, and when done right activate the dlPFC and suppress the amygdala and sympathetic nervous system.
  • We are most prosocial to in-group when our emotions and intuitions hold sway; we are most prosocial concerning out-group when cognition holds sway.
  • You can predict whether someone will buy something by looking at brain imaging. If it’s cheaper than expected, their vmPFC surges and their emotions goad them to buy it; if it’s more expensive, their disgust-oriented insular cortex throbs as they snarkily refuse
  • “What was an unexpected please yesterday is what we feel entitled to today, and what won’t be enough tomorrow.”
  • Anticipatory dopamine release peaks when uncertainty is maximal as to whether a reward will occur
  • Low serotonin predicts cognitive impulsivity and impulsive aggression, meaning it inhibits PFC projections in some way and amplifies amygdala projections

    Chapter 3: Seconds to minutes before

  • Discussed subliminal stimuli. Interoception (e.g., autonomic arousal can make us less trusting), psychological priming (e.g., being told pleasant words makes us more trusting), inherent biases (gender, race)

    Chapter 4: Hours to days before

  • Supraphysiological levels of androgens (i.e., from PEDs) cause steroid abusers to be more paranoid and anxious, and aggression may follow
  • Testosterone quiets the PFC and increases coupling with the amygdala. Thus, more influence by split-second, low-resolution inputs and less let’s-stop-and-think-about-this.
  • Testosterone causes us to be fearless, overconfident, and delusionally optimistic
  • Testosterone makes us more willing to do what it takes to attain and maintain status.
  • Oxytocin and vasopressin aren’t necessarily the prosocial love hormones. They’re social hormones. For instance, these hormone increases make women improve at detecting kinship relationships, and men improve at detecting dominance relationships
  • Oxytocin makes us more prosocial to Us and worse to everyone else. As well as the love hormone, it is the ethnocentric, xenophobic hormone.
  • Acute stress response enhances immunity, chronic stress suppresses immunity, increasing vulnerability to infection
  • Chronic stress dampens PFC activation and amplifies amygdala responses, facilitating the learning of fear associations but impairing the learning of fear extinction. This creates a feedback loop, where more fears are learned and less are extinguished.
  • Sustained stress makes us more selfish and less capable of empathizing with others

    Chapter 5: Days to months before

  • Experience alters the number and strength of synapses, the extent of dendritic arbor, and the projection targets of axons.
  • Hippocampal neurogenisis is enhanced by learning, exercise, environmental enrichment, estrogen, and antidepressants

    Chapter 6: Adolescence; or, dude, where’s my frontal cortex?

  • Frontal cortex maturation in adolescence is about a more efficient brain, not a larger one. Synapses are actually pruned in adolescence, equivalent tasks require less effort in well-pruned brains (i.e., in adults)
  • When looking at highly expressive faces, an adult sees amygdaloid activation and a tempering of emotion via the vmPFC, but an adolescent can rely less on the inhibitory vmPFC and gets a bigger, sustained amygdala activation (more distress-provoking)
  • Adolescents have 2 to 4 times the rates of pathological gambling as do adults (underdeveloped PFC hinders judgment of risk)
  • Adolescence is about risk taking and novelty seeking
  • Depression radiates young women like a viral contagion, as their tendency to co-ruminate reinforces their negative affect
  • Rejection hurts adolescents more (due to reduced vmPFC hushing and increased amygdala screaming), producing a stronger need to fit in
  • Those who feel most strongly about other’s pain, with the most pronounced arousal and anxiety, are actually less likely to act prosocially. Instead, the personal distress prompts avoidance, because as empathetic pain increases, one’s own pain becomes of primary concern
  • “Because it is the last to mature, by definition the front cortex is the brain region least constrained by genes and most sculpted by experience…Ironically, it seems that the genetic program of human brain development has evolved to, as much as possible, free the frontal cortex from genes.”

    Chapter 7: Back to the crib, back to the womb

  • Mothers with children in the hospital were once asked to leave their child and let the hospital take care of everything. Infants began dying of “hospitalism”, devoid of social contact and embalmed in a suprasanatized environment, died of illnesses unrelated to their initial illness. The poorest hospitals performed better, as they couldn’t afford incubation chambers and had to use hands on, intimate methods
  • Infants may suppress glucocorticoid release as it stunts brain development. This is why, when abused (even by their mother), they may grip to their mother tighter, entrusting her so that they don’t have a brain-damaging aversive response. This would have made evolutionary sense for vulnerable children.
  • Pathway to addiction from adverse childhood: 1) effected developing dopamine system, 2) excessive exposure to glucocorticoids (stress) that increase drug craving, 3) poorly developed frontal cortex
  • “Cultures (starting with parents) raise children to become adults who behave in the ways valued by that culture.”
  • Play teaches social competence; provides a chance to roleplay and improve motor function; provides exposure to transient and moderate stress; and as a tool decides which excess synapses to prune
  • One reason dogs may wag their tails is for pheromone distribution to indicate a willingness/desire to play

    Chapter 8: Back to when you were just a fertilized egg

  • “Genes don’t make sense outside the context of environment.” Genetic evolution occurred in relationship with environment. You can’t make sense of genes without the environment, they are shaped by their surroundings
  • Your genes aren’t carbon copies of your parents. Shuffling sometimes occurs in genes, where a stretch of DNA is copied and transposed into another stretch (these are called transposons). This process occurs in the neurons in our brains, and transposon events have been shown to produce new memories in fruit flies, freeing them from strict genetic inheritance
  • Inheritance and heritability are different. Inheritance describes an average genetic trait; heritability describes the genetic variability around that average. Inheritance tells us how different we are from a wildebeest; heritability tells us how different we are from our neighbour
  • Heritability measures are always inflated. When we control an environment in an experiment to make things easier to interpret, we restrict gene regulation to a single environment, neglecting how other environments may influence genes. One example is in twin studies, the effects of birth order are by definition neglected. Without influence of birth order, genetic influence receives more attention (inflated heritability)
  • Heritability scores tell us how much variation in a trait is explained by genes in the environment in which it was studied.
  • It’s not meaningful to ask what a gene does, only what a gene does in a particular environment.
  • The challenge with gene candidate approaches (singling out a gene and seeing how it affects behaviour) is that there are still tens of thousands more genes that we lose sight of, and gazillions more environments to consider due to gene/environment interactions
  • The other approach is to examine large swaths of genes at once and see how they explain the variance in some phenotypic trait. In a Nature study on height with nearly 200,000 participants, the top gene explained 0.4% of height variance. Similar for BMI and educational attainment. Surprise, networks of genes influence behaviour, not just one.
  • “Ask not what a gene does. Ask what it does in a particular environment and when expressed in a particular network of other genes.”
  • “Genes aren’t about inevitability. Instead, they’re about context-dependent tendencies.”

    Chapter 9: Centuries to millennia before

  • A gene associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking occurs in 10-20% of Africans and Europeans, 0% in collectivist East Asians, and 30-60% in American/South American indigenous. Having most recently expanded, those who crossed the Bering strait ages ago possessed an inclination to explore. Those in long established societies (East Asians) with collectivist norms would have damped impulsivity and emigration
  • Southern Americans have larger stress and testosterone responses to slights of honour. Southerners are mostly of Scottish, northern Irish, and northern English descent, which are herding cultures. Given the problems which pastoralist cultures deal with (i.e., the potentially catastrophic consequences of losing a herd to thieves), monotheism and duty tends to run deep in pastoralists
  • “As income inequality grows, the percentage of people who bother voting generally declines.”
  • As economic stratification increases, investment in public goods (public transit, public schools, universal healthcare) decreases, and as a result public health decreases. The rich don’t benefit from these public expenditures, instead relying on private equivalents, and thus avoid taxation for and mount political opposition to services that don’t apply to them.
  • Incidence in air rage has been increasing. Incidence increases further when passengers are forced to walk past first-class passengers. Being reminded of lower status provokes frustration that then gets displaced onto flight attendants. First class passengers are also, unsurprisingly, more likely to provoke air rage incidents related to senses of entitlement
  • Clarity of borders can reduce intergroup conflict, say separation by mountain range or river. As concluded by a study at the New England complex systems institute, “Peace does not depend on integrated coexistence, but rather on well-defined topographical and political boundaries separating groups, allowing for partial autonomy within a single country.”

    Chapter 10: The evolution of behaviour

  • Divorce rates are skewed by serial divorces. Keep in mind when seeing “half of marriages end in divorce.” If one person divorces 3 times, 3 other marriages could be fine and produce the 50% number (in this case 1/4 of individuals marriages end in divorce)
  • Pseudokinship: seeing nonkin as kin, being charitable to strangers, adopting them, empathizing with them. Pseudospeciation: seen nonkin as non-species. Seeing opposing human tribes as pests and vermin, akin to another species, that are deserving of extermination.

    Chapter 11: Us versus Them

  • “We feel positive associations with people who share the most meaningless traits with us.”
  • Arbitrary markers allow us to differentiate (symbols, dress, accent). The markers themselves are often meaningless, but they are linked to meaningful differences in values and beliefs
  • Symbols then, when associated with reward, become imbued with meaning themselves, leading people to literally live and die for patterned colors on cloth (national flags)
  • Those with stronger negative attitudes towards outgroup (immigrants, foreigners, etc.) are more prone to interpersonal levels of disgust (resistant to wearing clothes of others or sitting on a warm seat just vacated)
  • High warmth/high competence: pride; low warmth/high competence: envy; high warm/low competence: pity; low warmth/low competence: disgust
  • “The need for justification fuels those on top to pour the stereotypes of, at best, high warmth/low competence or, worse, low warmth/low competence on the heads of those struggling at the bottom, and those on the bottom reciprocate with the simmering time bomb that is the perception of the ruling class as low warmth/high competence.”
  • “Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect.”

    Chapter 12: Hierarchy, obedience, and resistance

  • “Countries with more brutal socioeconomic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally.” (More bullying)
  • Highest ranking primates don’t necessarily have the highest levels of testosterone. If their group is unstable, they will, and they’ll be fighting for their spot. But during stability, the pressure to maintain rank is less demanding, requiring less testosterone to maintain that rank. Adolescents near the bottom of the hierarchy are most testosterone fueled, as they are most motivated to climb
  • “The worst stress-related health typically occurs in middle management, with its killer combo of high work demands but little autonomy—responsibility without control.”
  • Right wing authoritarianism is associated with lower IQ and higher intergroup prejudice. RWA provides simple answers that are ideal for those with low abstract reasoning skills
  • “When people’s insulae activate (disgust activation) at the thought of Thems, you can check one thing off your genocide to-do list.”
  • The descent into savagery is incremental, and despite our love and emphasis of arbitrary boundaries, the boundaries to degeneracy are subtle. Treat them 10% worse, then 15%, then 30%, and so on. When do we stop? The jumps can be so incremental that we don’t notice them.
  • Diffusion of responsibility can justify atrocity. Death penalty executers are numbered and some are given blanks so that they can live with themselves (I may not have even shot him, phew)
  • Warriors from cultures that transform and standardize their appearance before battle are more likely to torture and mutilate their enemies. Anonymity diffuses responsibility, justifying atrocity because it “wasn’t just me” or “it was the character I was playing”
  • To understand whether someone is likely to be conservative, “understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.”

    Chapter 13: Morality and doing the right thing, once you’ve figured out what that is

  • People with obsessive compulsive disorder see wildly active dlPFCs when making everyday decisions and moral decisions
  • “When we confront a moral choice, the dlPFC doesn’t adjudicate in contemplative silence. The waters roil below.”
  • “When facing a moral quandary, activation in the amygdala, vmPFC, and insula typically precede dlPFC activation.”
  • A study conducted in a Swiss bank found that when psychologically primed to think as bankers, banking employees were more likely to cheat in an experiment than before they had been primed. This shows an at-least dualism in identity, normal personal identity and get-ahead banker identity
  • In a game where subjects could pool tokens for collective gain and punish for misbehaviour, it was found that if the subject came from a region with lower social capital, they were more likely to punish overly generous subjects, as much as punishing free-riders. Interesting…in regions with more distrust and less self-efficacy, over-generosity can be seen as a threat
  • Collectivist cultures discourage moral transgressions with shame, and individualist cultures with guilt. Shame comes from external judgment; guilt comes from internal judgment. Shame requires an audience, is about honour. Guilt appears in cultures that treasure privacy and conscience. Shame is applied to the individual as a whole, guilt is applied to the action, making it possible to hate the sin but love the sinner.
  • Deontologism is about moral intuitions, recruiting more emotional vmPFC, amygdala, and insula; whereas consequentialism is about cold cognitive calculation, recruiting more dlPFC. Automatic and intuitive judgements tend to be nonutilitarian, since our brains evolved to help spread genes, not maximize collective happiness (although this can coincide with gene spreading)
  • Moral reasoning thrives when both subjective feelings and objective judgements harmonize. Long-term, pragmatic consequentialism that explores how decisions change the landscape coupled with deontological emotional intuitions about how inhabiting the landscape will make people feel.
  • “Most intergroup conflicts on our planet ultimately are cultural disagreements about whose “right” is righter.”
  • In Me vs. Them scenarios, be intuitive, your “gut” evolved to benefit the group. In Us vs. Them scenarios, be pragmatic, your “gut” also evolved to prefer Us at the detriment of Them.
  • Dogs drop their tail between their legs when scared, partly to mask the scent of their anal scent glands that secrete fear pheromones
  • Classic polygraph lie detectors measures sympathetic arousal. This doesn’t work well for interviewees who are nervous, sociopathic, or take measures to reduce sympathetic responses. Modern polygraphs instead measure anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) activation instead, which activates when conflicting information needs to be sorted out (e.g., fictional lie vs. true reality)

    Chapter 14: Feeling, understanding, and alleviating someone’s pain

  • The ACC is involved in interoception (monitoring internal stimuli) and is an “all purpose alarm that signals when ongoing behaviour has hit a snag.”
  • The ACC lights up when we observe others pain and is mediated by oxytocin release. However, the ACC seems to be brain region associated with more selfish motives, indicating that the ACC activates, and we feel the pain of others so as not to repeat their mistakes
  • The ACC is crucial for learned fear and conditioned avoidance by observing misfortune of others. Feeling someone else’s pain is more useful to the self than merely knowing someone else’s pain
  • Later in maturation the insula and amygdala get involved in empathy. This is when we start becoming disgusted and angry with injustice inflicted on the vulnerable.
  • Even when the source of pain is from a benign source, we search for something to blame, a target for our hatred and disgust. “The more the purity of empathy is clouded with anger, disgust, and indignation of blame, the harder it is to actually help.”
  • The larger the distance between you and others (physically or socially), the more cognitive work required to empathize
  • Mirror neurons have yet to demonstrate unequivocal causality towards empathy
  • The adolescent frenzied feeling of feeling others’ pains tends to lead to frenzied self-absorption. Young people tend to imagine how injustice would feel if it happened to them (self-oriented) rather than imagining how victims are feeling (other-oriented). Self-oriented individuals report more distress and anxiety, and are thus more likely to focus on lessening their own distress
  • We can hear the sound of someone else’s need when we are calm and our hearts aren’t pounding in our chests
  • The point is not whose pain pains us the most but who most needs our help
  • Empathy is optimal when it’s automatic and ingrained by culture. If we have to think about it, we’re vulnerable to thinking into why we shouldn’t bother. Yet too much heart (limbic) can lead to feeling the pain too deeply and tending to ourselves instead. Detachment is necessary to mitigate this.

    Chapter 15: Metaphors we kill by

  • Feelings of disgust produced by the insular cortex activate for moral transgressions. Being primed into moral disgust also makes things seem more disgusting (things seem dirtier, we want to sanitize more, a neutral drink tastes worse)
  • We become more socially conservative when disgusted, and the socially conservative are more disgust prone. Disgust is meant to protect from threat; for instance, conservative opposed to gay marriage see it as a threat to family values and the sanctity of marriage
  • Sensations paint unrelated judgements. Sit in a hard chair and we judge others as hard-assed. Place a resume on a heavier clipboard and our achievements carry more weight. Hold someone’s iced coffee and we perceive them as having a colder personality.
  • Recall the judge example: empty stomach, harsher judgment. When we’re hungry, we show more future discounting (foregoing long-term gain for short term pleasure). The more we crave, the more we discount our future.
  • The most unique neurons, the recently evolved and slow-developing von Economo neurons, are predominantly housed in the ACC and insula. The adaptive advantages of (mostly self-interested) empathy and moral disgust have seemed to attract recent evolutionary brain development.
  • One cannot truly end conflict, make peace, without acknowledging and respecting the sacred values of Them

    Chapter 16: Biology, the criminal justice system, and (oh, why not?) free will

  • Neuroscientist Gazzaniga fully accepts the material nature of the brain but nonetheless sees room for responsibility. “Responsibility exists at a different level of organisation: the social level, not in our determined brains.” Except the social level is just as much a product of evolutionary biology as are our brains, there are just further layers of intimidating complexity.
  • The deepest line in the sand drawn by mitigated free will believers is the notion that aptitude and impulsion are biological and perseverance and resisting impulse are willful.
  • Traditional rationales around punishment are to protect the public, rehabilitate, punish, and to use the threat of punishment to deter others. This last one is tricky; increased strictness of punishment does indeed deter others. But we have to be careful not to invoke stricter punishments because it’s pleasurable, because it satiates some sadistic desire
  • “The hope is that when it comes to dealing with humans whose behaviours are among our worst and most damaging, words like ‘evil’ and ‘soul’ will be as irrelevant as when considering a car with faulty brakes.” When we take a car to the mechanic and he can’t find what’s wrong, he doesn’t conclude that the car is evil.
  • “Many who are viscerally opposed to this view charge that it is dehumanizing to frame damaged humans as broken machines…doing that is a lot more humane than demonizing and sermonizing them as sinners.”
  • “I can’t really imagine how to live your life as if there is no free will. It may never be possible…Perhaps we’ll have to settle for making sure our homuncular myths are benign, and save the heavy lifting of trucking thinking rationally for where it matters—when we judge others harshly.”

    Chapter 17: War and Peace

  • In a study which polled “Indian Hindus, Russian Orthodox, Israeli Jews, Indonesian Muslims, British Protestants, and Mexican Catholics as to whether they’d die for their religion and whether people of other religions caused the world’s troubles,” it was found that in all cases frequent attendance of religious services, but not frequent prayer, predicted those views. Religiosity doesn’t stoke intergroup hostility, being surrounded by coreligionists who affirm in-group identity, commitment, and shared loves and hatreds does.
  • “It’s useless to call for religion to broaden the extent of their Us-ness…Religions range from “only those who look, act, talk, and pray like Us” to “all of life”. It will be…tough to shift religions from the former to the latter.”
  • “Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing.”
  • “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” - Booker T. Washington
  • “We decide someone is guilty based on reasoning but then decide their punishment based on emotion.”

Dante’s Inferno

Published:

Dante’s Inferno, Dante Alighieri (13/14th century BCE) (1901 translation)

  • “In the midway of this our mortal life, I found me in a gloomy wood, astray.”
  • “So bad and so accursed in her kind that never sated is her ravenous will, still after food more craving than before.”
  • “He will not life support by earth nor its base metals, but by love, wisdom, and virtue.”
    • Material goods make for meaninglessness; they do not nurture a life worth living.
  • Dante follows Virgil (one of Rome’s greatest poets), who inhabits the form of a lion, towards the depths of hell. Virgil gives Dante courage.
  • As the day departs, Dante gets cold feet again. But the love of Beatrice reinvigorates him, a guiding light in the gloom of night. Still fearful, he presses forward, cherishing the pity and supporting love that Beatrice offers him.
  • “Supremest wisdom and primeval love.”
  • Between the gates of hell and hell itself laid a sea of weeping souls. These were the apathetic, worthy not of praise nor blame, driven out of Heaven and not accepted into Hell. They were true not to God, but to themselves only. “Their blind life so meanly passes, that all other lots they envy.”
    • Being apathetic, dull, and indifferent, their lives weren’t even lively enough to warrant entry into hell.

      First circle of Hell: Limbo

  • This is where the virtuous mingle yet merit not the bliss of Paradise due to lack of baptism
  • Sees Homer and Socrates and Plato and Seneca and Euclid and Caesar and so forth. Him and his guide speak with them pleasantly.

    Second circle (attachment?)

  • The stormy blasts of hell sweep around souls like Achilles and Cleopatra, and they cling to the winds despite their anguish
  • Why? “No greater grief than to remember days of joy, when misery is at hand.”
  • These are people who had great lives but are unable to let them go, and thus cling to the tormenting winds of misery

    Third circle (gluttony)

  • The gluttonous are showered with rain and hail (doomed to eternal empty consumption) and fed to Cerberus who gobbles them up.

    Fourth circle (avarice, greed)

  • In this circle, the greedy are attached to their hoards of money, doomed to endlessly roll their hoards up the inclined circle
  • “Not all the gold that is beneath the moon, or even hath been, or these toil-worn souls, much purchase rest for one.” o No amount of money will satiate their avarice

    Fifth circle (wrath and anger)

  • “A miry tribe, all naked, and with looks betokening rage. They with their hands alone struck not, but with the head, the breast, the feet, cutting each other piecemeal with their fangs.” o The relentless, self-inflicting nature of anger
  • “The water dwells a multitude, whose sighs into these bubbles make the surface heave […] fixed in the slime, they say, ‘Sad once were we, in the sweet air made gladsome by the sun. Carrying a foul and lazy mist within: Now in these murky settings are we sad.’” o Meditate on this.

    Sixth circle (Dis)

  • Upon arrival to the gates of Dis, Dante is denied entry for he hath not yet died. “Who is this that, without death first felt, goes through the regions of the dead?”
  • Virgil is allowed in, and leaves Dante behind, though assuring him that he will return and by divine authority he will be let through. Dante, meanwhile, relishes the thought of being able to turn back and escape
  • Virgil’s plea to let Dante in is refused
  • Dante and Virgil observe Erynnis, the goddesses of vengeance and fury, clawing at each other.
  • An angel comes down and opens the gate for them. Upon entry is a path laden with the open tombs of arch-heretics (leaders of movements at odds with the status quo) and every sect of their following
  • When talking with one of the tombs: “We view, as one who hath an evil sight, plainly, objects far remote; so much of his large splendour yet imparts the Almighty Ruler: but when they approach, or actually exist, our intellect then wholly fails.”
    • The “evil” has a blinding reverence for the future that produces an ignorance for the present, such that when faced with the present they know not how to cherish it.
    • This is somewhat similar to the second circle of hell, where people are attached to the past. In this circle, they are attached to the future. Too far-sighted, they can’t see the good that sits before them in the present.
    • “Our knowledge in that instant shall expire, when on futurist the portals close.”

      Before the 3 lower circles

  • Dante asks why the glutinous, avaricious, wrathful, and envious (of past and future) are spared from the lower rungs of hell. Virgil mentions how incontinence (lack of self-restraint) the least offends and is least incurring of guilt
    • With gluttony, greed, anger, and envy, we’re seemingly thrown around by these feelings as if puppets. Ignorance is shallow in these cases, and requires less intensive cleansing
  • Those lying in the lower circles are the fraudulent. There is a difference in the degree of intentionality, or equivalently, depth of ignorance and thus malice.
  • “He is indeed alive, and solitary so must needs by me be shown the gloomy vale, thereto induced by strict necessity, not by delight.”

    7th Circle (Violence against God, Nature, and Art)

  • In the first portion of the 7th circle lie the merciless tyrants (those who committed violence into their neighbours), who are mercilessly shot by patrolling centaurs if they try to escape.
  • In the second portion are those who commit violence on themselves; those who commit suicide. They give their bodies away to hell, so their souls are turned into seeds and thrown into the woods where they grow into gnarled trees that harpies feed upon.
  • The static, rooted nature of their being may reflect the seemingly rooted and immutable despair we feel when suicidal.
  • “For what a man takes from himself it is not just he have.”
    • We can never take our “own” life. We are a social species, and thus our life invariably touches and belongs to a larger whole. In the selfish act of taking one’s life, we rob from the network in which we are interconnected. We rob our future and the potential relationships therein, which may not be as bad as the present may seem. We commit this robbery when we are lost without faith, rooted in the despair of our harrowing thoughts.
  • In the third portion are those who committed violence against God, Nature, and Art. Example of Capaenus is given, burned from hot sands below and rained by flakes of fire above. “As still he seems to hold, God in disdain, and sets high omnipotence at nought.”
  • “Thou by either party shalt be craved with hunger keen: but be the fresh herb far from the goat’s tooth.”
  • Cultivate goodness within yourself but be wary not to be used by those who crave it for personal benefit.
  • Dante sees his old teacher among those who have done violence to Nature, notably, sodomites (homosexuality or beastiality). They talk for a while, and his teacher sees him off to go tend to the group he was leading. Dante describes him as “of them he seemed not he who loses but who gains the prize.”
  • Dante briefly encounters those who committed violence against Art. He sees a few usurers (loan sharks), implying that excessive interest rates harm Art… (why?)
  • Geryon, or Fraud, takes them down to the 8th circle. Geryon is a winged beast with a wise inviting face in his upper half, but a serpent lower half. Misleadingly inviting and venomous

    Eighth circle

  • In the first chasm are sexual deceivers (e.g., unfaithful, rapists, prostitutes). They are lashed and whipped endlessly by devils.
  • In the second chasm are flatterers (verbal deceivers), doomed to sink eternally in a stinking swamp. “Me thus low down my flatteries have sunk, wherewith I never enough could glut my tongue.”
  • In the third are those who practiced simony, i.e., using religion for monetary gain (i.e., paying for religious status or selling sacred objects for cash). They are doomed to stay face down in the soil with only their feet exposed to air, being burned by flames
  • In the fourth are clairvoyants/seers/astrologers. Their necks are turned 180 degrees, doomed to only see and walk backwards with horrifyingly painful gait.
  • In the fifth are barterers and those who misuse entrusted sums of money. They are doomed to be boiled in tar by demons.
  • The demons swarm Virgil, but Virgil claims he has divine will to cross through hell. Upon hearing this the head demon “fell his pride, that he let drop the instrument of torture at his feet.”
    • The pride-extinguishing nature of submitting to God and demanding humility.
  • In the sixth chasm are the hypocrites, who wear hoods and gowns “overlaid with gold, dazzling to view, but leaden all within, and of such weight, that Frederick’s compares to these were straw. Oh, everlasting wearisome attire!”
  • Caiaphas, who gave the Pharisees counsel that it was fitting for one man to suffer for the people (i.e., to nail Jesus to the cross), is himself nailed to the ground in a cross position.
    • Is he the archetypal hypocrite? Perhaps because he made Jesus to suffer but was a coward who was unable to suffer/sacrifice himself or his pride for his people. According to John 11:51-52 it states that “being high priest that year he prophesied that Jesus would die for the nation, and not for the nation only, but also to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad.”
  • As they journey to the seventh chasm, Dante becomes exhausted. Virgil assures him that “for not…under shade of canopy reposing, fame is won; without which whosoe’er consumes his days, leaves to such vestige of himself on earth, as smoke in air, or foam upon the wave.” He then encourages him to “therefore rise: vanquish thy weariness by the mind’s effort, in each struggle form’d to vanquish…a longer ladder yet remains to scale.”
    • Be courageous. Cowards are forgotten.
  • In the seventh chasm are robbers, doomed to endless torment by venomous snakes. They meet Vanni Fucci, a robber who stole from a church and set up an innocent man who was then executed.
  • A thieving sinner undergoes a transformation, where a monster steals the body of the sinner, and the sinner transforms into the monster.
  • In the eighth chasm are evil counsellors, those who cowardly hid behind the pride of tyrants, enabling and enhancing the atrocities tyrants committed. They are each doomed to isolated pits deep below that bellow with flames
  • “Then, yielding to the forceful arguments, of silence as more perilous I deem’d, and answer’d: ‘Father, since this washest me clear of that guilt wherein I now must fall, large promise with performance scant, be sure, shall make thee triumph in thy lofty seat.”
    • Cowardly caving
    • An irony of hell seems to be that deeper self-interest leads to higher-status positions on earth, but lower status positions in hell. Balance. The further the depths of self interest, the deeper cleansing required to absolve us of our ignorance.
  • In the ninth chasm are those who seed scandal and schism. They are doomed to being maimed and chopped up, divided like how their counsel encouraged war and division
  • In the tenth chasm are alchemists and forgers, doomed to torment by pestilence, scratching their skin till their nails fall off and laying in repugnant filth.
    • False claims to transform riches from nothing are punished by transforming the richness of live into decay (pestilence)
  • Alchemists were frauds, using chemistry (magic at the time) to turn worthless iron into priceless gold. “I am Cappachio’s ghost, who forged transmuted metals by the power of alchemy; and if I can thee right, though needs must well remember how I aped creative nature by my subtle art.”

    Ninth circle

  • The ninth circle has giants monitoring the perimeter. When speaking of the giants, “Nature, with her last hand left framing of these monsters…repent her not of the elephant and whale, who ponders well confesses her therein wiser and more discreet; for when brute force and evil will are back’d with subtlety, resistance none avails.”
    • The grand and imposing nature of giants makes their threat honest, what’s much more threatening are those who are small but deceptively cunning and harmful. An elephant provides an honest signal to avoid, but a parasite is more crafty and deceptive
  • Nimrod is doomed to blow a deafening horn that shackles him. He was the first lord, and ordered the construction of the Tower of Babel, that which caused inhabitants to stop understanding one another. “Nimrod is this, through whose ill counsel in the world no more one tongue prevails. But pass we on, nor waste our words; for so each language is to him, as his to others, understood by none.”
  • In the first round is a frozen lake inhabited by doomed souls, “Blue pinch’d and shrined in ice the spirits stood, moving their teeth in shrill note like the stork.”
  • The ninth circle is about treachery against those we are close with. The first round has those who betray family and loved ones, second who betray politically or nationally, third who betray their guests (they are punished more harshly because of the belief that having guests means entering a voluntary relationship, and betraying a relationship willingly entered is more despicable than betraying a relationship born into), and the fourth is for betrayal against benefactors appointed by God.
  • In the first and second (betrayal of kin and country) is the tragic story of Ugolino locked in the tower of Pisa with his sons and forced into famine for political treachery. His sons die of hunger, after which he eats their bodies. “Fasting got the mastery of grief.” This man gnaws on the skull of his betrayer Ruggieri while in the frozen pools of Cocytus, compelled to devour even that which hath no substance.
  • In the third was friar Alberigo, who had his brother and nephew killed at a banquet in his home.
  • In the final are those who betrayed their benefactors and Lucifer himself, a giant, winged, three-headed beast who had two of Julius Caesar’s betrayers (Brutus and Cassius) in the mouths on the side, and the body of Judas (betrayer of Christ) in the middle.
  • Virgil and Dante escape and ascend the cave to reveal a starry sky, for night has passed and a new dawn arrives. They find their way out “discover’d not by sight, but by the sounds of brooklet, that descends this way along the hollow of a rock, which, as it winds with no precipitous course, the wave hath eaten. By that hidden way my guide and I did enter, to return to the fair world: and heedless of repose we climb’d, he first, I following his steps, till on our view the beautiful lights of heaven dawn’d through a circular opening in the cave; thence issuing we again beheld the stars.”
    • The path towards Good isn’t immediately obvious. It’s hard to see. We must listen closely. But if we follow that feeling, foregoing what is immediate and obvious, we are awarded with unfathomable beauty. This is faith.

Ramayana

Published:

Ramayana, Valmiki

Part one: the prince of Ayodhya

  • Brahma, the God of Gods, humbly admits “What can I do? I can never lie, and I do not know every answer.”
  • Narayana, or Lord Vishnu, is the Soul of the Universe.
  • So, Indra the lord of earthly gods (fire, wind, earth, etc.) gets destroyed by the demon king Ravana, who can’t be killed by gods. He complains to Brahma, Brahma says go talk to Vishnu, and Vishnu splits into four and is reincarnated into a king’s four sons. The first son is Rama, second Bharata, and two twins
  • When the architect of heaven, Viswskarma, is asked whether he needs helpers to make a temple on Lanka for some Rakshasas, he replied “when the master carpenter no longer goes out into the forests to choose his own tree, when he no longer cuts it down himself and saws his own boards then say farewell to the arts!”
    • Risks of using technology to do all your doing and thinking for you
  • “Greet the days like new friends”
  • The Rakshasas, who were made a temple of Lanka by Viswakarman, eventually overflow the island, and spill out to the mainland and start eating humans. Narayana (Vishnu) comes down and destroys them, so they flee to underneath the ocean floor.
  • The God of treasure gets placed on Lanka now. Envious Rakshasas see this from below, and out of envy a daughter is sent to get pregnant with the Treasure God’s father. The daughter has Ravana, and three others, as children
  • Ravana the demon, has ten heads. He sacrifices one head every thousand years while in deep contemplation. At the ten thousandth year Brahma stops him from cutting off his last head, saying, “your will is dreadful, too strong to be neglected; like a bad disease I must treat it. Your pains make me hurt. Ask!” Ravana is then granted to be unslayable by gods or demons
  • Ravana and the Rakshasas take back the island. Ravana weds the Daughter of Illusion, and has a son Meghanada who burns like fire and changes form and appearance at will.
  • “In ignorance he drinks poison, in confusion he refuses the antidote.”
  • Ravana visits the luxurious Naga underworlds, filled with gems and minerals that shine brighter than heaven. Perhaps a symbolic representation of the distance that materialism has from a higher and more meaningful way of being. Our shiny toys seem heavenly on the surface, but they’re located in depths lacking in meaning
  • The king of Naga is Vasuki, the king of serpents. When confronting Ravana he is human waist up, and snake waist down. Similar to the monster Fraud in Dante’s Inferno who has a bearded human face that appears wise but with a serpentine lower half. Trustworthy on the surface, conniving below.
  • When Ravana comes knocking on the door of the Kingdom of Heaven to conquer it, Indra says, “I don’t care what anybody says, never will I take orders from that overbearing monster Ravana!” Pride was Indra’s downfall.
  • Ravana’s son captures Indra. Brahma comes to set Indra free, names the son Indrajit (conqueror of Indra), and grants him a wish. Indrajit first asks for immortality, but Brahma declines, claiming he is unable to provide that gift. Brahma is saving naive Indrajit from an eternal curse.
  • “Brahmana keep your temper; King, keep your word. Observe the defects of this world and do not add to them.”
  • “Desire and Wrath whom the gods cannot tame come bowing to me and gladly rub my feet.”
  • Describing Ahalya, the most beautiful woman: “Like the sun she could not be looked at too closely or for too long.”
  • Use Dharma as your shield, and Truth as your sword
  • “The opinions of disinterested men are different from the beliefs of a father, and the Truth may sometimes come out like Fire from friction between the two.”
  • “Dasaratha, you follow the Dharma-path walked by your ancestors, and thoughtless of your own happiness you protect us.”
    • Prudence. This is how we should treat our future selves, our future families, our future nations, the future of mankind, and the future of life on earth
  • The council states that the one reason they support Rama becoming king “is that if Rama says something to me I can believe it.”
    • Again, honesty reigning supreme.
  • When Kaikeyi, Bharata’s mother, asks Rama to leave and whether she has done right, Rama responds, “If you say you have, you have; I will believe you.”
    • Rama is very much like Alyosha in Brothers Karamazov here
  • “A wrong thrown at Rama seems to bring out no anger in him; it is like a seed thrown on stone.”
  • “Men must have laws, sometimes hard to follow, but harder to find once lost.”
  • “Many men are all talk and no deeds, all words and no wisdom, and what they don’t know of they think does not exist.”
  • Guha, king of the forest, recounts a story where a Shiva statue was gifted to him. He prayed to the tree god, and therefore kicked the statue everyday without fail, while Brahmanas from the city would come every so often to lay flowers. On the brink of death, Shiva saves him from Yama due to this devotion. Good or bad, his resilient faith still had him coming back to the statue, and outshined the more mildly devoted Brahmanas
    • Actions over words
  • “As a man’s deeds are good or evil so are the events which follow them, and which the man must face in their time. …Excited, mindlessly lured by pretty flowers on the branches, I came to expect a good yield. I looked forward to happiness but all the while I coveted delusion.”

    Part 2: Sita’s rescue

  • “Behold Man, ignorant of his own ways in the world—now merrily drinking and dance, now blindly weeping all in tears.”
  • “Dharma leads to happiness, but happiness cannot lead to Dharma.”
  • The Valakhilyas were benign little deities that floated around the air like motes of dust. Despite their small size, they hold great power. They spawned the King of Birds Garuda, who is the mount of Narayana (Vishnu, the soul of the universe). He carries Lord Narayana on his back and never tires.
    • The sum of the small gives rise to the large.
  • Garuda’s father to him, “My boy, eat a little something before you try to fly to heaven and steal Amrita (nectar of immortality) from Indra. But never eat a man. Remember that.”
    • Strive for greatness, especially for those you love (he’s stealing amitra to free his mother). But do not tear down others down along the way.
  • “A real deer made of precious stones and gold Never yet lived in this world. Such a things cannot be; But Rama followed a golden deer And lost Sita.”
    • We lose those we love when we recklessly pursue illusions and idols (like jealous fantasies or social media ideals)
  • Hanuman the monkey is born from a woman and the god of Wind, Vayu. The mother leaves Hanuman, and he sits hungry and alone. When the sun rises, glowing orange like a mango, he flies up to eat it. Despite warning, he endures the fire of the sun and keeps trying to eat it. Finally, he’s thrown back down to earth by Indra, and breaks his jaw (why the jaw?).
  • Vayu is upset that his son is hurt, and the wind ceases to blow. All life stops, for without air life cannot flow. “Wind, you are breath. Having no heavy body you pass through all beings,” Brahma says to him. Brahma thus grants Hanuman a gift: “Hanuman…you will live as long as you wish to live; you cannot be killed.”
  • While Sugriva and Vali are fighting, despite Vali thinking Rama be fair and would not interfere, Rama hides and sends an arrow through Vali’s heart. His rationale is “when a weakling has been abused and has at last the chance to get even, he is allowed to leave the True.”
  • “The Truth upholds the fragrant Earth and makes the living water wet. Truth makes fire burn and the air move, makes the sun shine and all life grow. A hidden truth supports everything. Find it and win.”
  • When Rama ruminates about his loss of Sita, Lakshmana reminds him, “Better to act than wonder and dream,” and gets to work.
  • On their way to save Sita, Hanuman and the monkey and bear armies exhaustingly find themselves falling into a cave. It is a glorious cave filled with wine and wonders. “Once anyone enters this cave of illusions, especially by mistake, he can never return alive to Earth by his own power.”
  • They’re thankfully sent out, but upon exiting they realize much time has been lost, “through ignorance we entered Maya’s treeful cave underground and lost all the time…”
    • An example of hedonic pleasure being illusory and meaningless, and how it devours time without us even being aware of it.
  • “Oh, gold and silver found in the wild Are better than coins tamely won; Treasures found on a hunt are as good As the pleasures of fancy in heaven.”
  • “Like a storm Hanuman drove away low spirits, like a light he brought courage.”
  • Mainaka, the son of the Mountain King and brother to the River Goddess Ganga, recounts a story of how all mountains once had wings. They would fly around recklessly, causing much damage, so Indra cut off all their wings, and their wings became clouds.
  • Hanuman arrives to Lanka, and at midnight creeps around in search of Sita. What would normally be quiet time for human couples begins “the night-life of every enjoyment” for the Rakshasas.
  • Hanuman heard the “sounds of every enjoyment,” saw some who were “unbelievably handsome, others were maimed and deformed, repulsive and frightful even in their splendid clothes.”
  • He saw “demons who looked wise and powerful even when drunk and asleep with wine, with women, or with their arms round their beloved bags of gold.”
  • Hanuman follows his nose to find the Demon King. “Find the pleasures of the sense, and there find the Demon King.”
  • He must pass through the Demon King’s bedroom, whose bed is littered with thousands of the most beautiful women and whose tables are covered with the most delicious foods and lays dormant the fearsome Demon King himself. Hanuman must resist fear and temptation to continue his search for Sita.
  • The demonesses who console Sita become agitated and urge her to give in to Ravana. “Their eyes could see no more there than a prisoner unarmed, alone and powerless.” Sita refuses, and they retort with “We’ve put up with you so far just to help you! Our words to you are always well-meant, it’s for your own good, face reality…be happy! OR ELSE!”
    • A metaphor of well-meaning people who prioritize the happiness of others rather than the well-being of others. Seeing the strong as weak victims in need of saving. Weak, selfish, and cowardly. When someone shows them strength, as Sita does, it reminds them of their weakness, and they become enraged.
  • “Before true Love, the maces of Death are frail stage-weapons, fragile and useless for combat. Death gives way to Love and has never dared to way with him.”
  • “Her sadness had come and gone, as clouds will draw across the clear night sky, and cover the moonlight, and go again.”
  • Hanuman is captured, and Ravana claims Hanuman has “lost [his] weak wits from seeing the beauties of my city.” Hanuman replies, “I am the son of the Wind, fast or slow, irresistible in my course…what you call beauty won’t turn my head. I crossed the ocean, as a person without attachment to worldly desires easily crosses the ocean of existence.”
  • “Lanka is a celestial fortress, a joyful city of heavenly beauty taken by demons. She is artificial but looks natural…she is the jewel mirror of arts and inventions and the home of happiness in comfort.”
    • Hedonic illusion
  • Ravana’s brother, Vibhishana, urges him to give back Sita, but Ravana fueled by pride is unable to do so. Vibhishana leaves and works with Rama. King Sugriva doesn’t trust Vibhishana, but Hanuman urges him that “withdrawing from Lanka proves his wisdom.”
    • Those who manage to part ways from a life of indulgence and towards the truth may be considered wise.
  • “One must blame the blameworthy and favor the good wherever they appear. Lowly people who know everything may follow their suspicions, but when someone seeks my refuge he cannot be slain, he will be saved though it will cost my life.”
  • Ravana first summons shapeshifting spies to gather information about the incoming army, and then directs his magicians, “by spells of deception and illusion make for me by magic the severed head of Rama.” He proceeds to lie to Sita about the defeat of the army.
    • Again, deception, illusion, and dishonesty being a commonly used sin of the cardinal sinner
  • “Weapons are a sign of fear made visible, and we are afraid.”
  • “The waking world of impermanence, of suffering, and unreality.”
  • “The happiness of others is light for the spirit but you have darkened the worlds.”
  • “You grew strong by following Dharma and by sacrifice…yet once on the throne of power you slighted Dharma, you had no courtesy towards life…Now your wrongs devour us.”
  • Ravana to Time: “Be careful, turn and go, back away from Ravana who will fight and die for love—for Good Love never dies…” Time: “How’d you find that out!?”
  • Rama kills Ravana, and Ravana’s messenger delivers Ravana’s final letter to Rama. Ravana claims that this was his final offering, “I offered you my life and you accepted it.” He also claims that Rama is all these things, “You are Narayana who moves on the waters and flows through us all…and Hanuman like the wind…And born as a man you forget this, you lose the memory, and take on man’s ignorance, as you will, every time.”
  • “I don’t respect the floating borders of Earth, I travel where I will, I love everyone. My friend the Moon has known this for long lifetimes, I am the Sun, All the same. Ancient stories. Ancient Sunpoems.”
  • Sun, “You reveal all things to me; you show me what they truly are…You feed us all; every garden grow by your light. All our energy is yours…If there are clouds you are always behind them…How can I be sad? Am I blind? The Sun shines on me. This very I stand have I won brilliance for my wealth.”
  • “It is Truth, we think, that moves the Sun across the sky.”
  • Valmiki’s song: “*Trust and be True: Serve Right as I serve You” —says the Sun
  • “What can one count on, except that whatever one has, it will soon be gone? Better to do right.”
  • “Rama, from the portion of gentleness in you, people call you a part of the Moon.”
  • Gods keep referring to Rama as Narayana, but Rama questions why. They are all bewildered that he’s forgotten he’s Vishnu. They also reveal that Sita is Lakshmi, the God of good fortune (Vishnu’s wife)
  • “Please yourself. Tell the truth and be tranquil.”
  • Vibhishana to Hanuman: “You are faithful and very wise, when you stop to think. You put your whole heart into what you do; and you don’t think twice when you’ve made up your mind, nor seek for any gain, so I call you my friend.”

    Book 7

  • After ten thousand year of rule, Rama asks his ministers what his kingdom thinks of him, for “people tread in their king’s footsteps, so I must avoid even the report of any wrong.” The ministers urge him to not “seek wisdom from coarse common people, but forget their talk; pity them their ignorance and trust in things to turn out right.”
  • Rama replies with “Those who live uneventfully at home with their wives and families may along really know life.”
  • The people doubt Sita’s faithfulness, and this tarnishes the reputation of the king, which tarnishes the quality of the kingdom. Rama cannot ignore this, despite him knowing that Sita was faithful.
  • “Where there is growth there is decay; where there is prosperity there is ruin; and where there is birth there is death.”
  • Rama orders Lakshmana to abandon Sita at river Ganga.
  • Sumantea the charioteer tells the story of how Kaikeyi earned her two wishes. She rode the chariot for the King in their way against the Asuras of drought. Kaikeyi could “feel an enemy’s shortcoming; she felt when to draw near, when to stay and when to turn away.” She saves the King at some point and is granted the two wishes.
    • Did she sense deep down Ravana’s weakness and that Rama was capable of defeating him if he were to be banished?
  • To finish of the Asura demons of draught, Narayana is called in. He demolishes them, and they run to cover in Ayodhya, in the house of a brahmana. The wife of the brahmana lets them in, and they surrender. Narayana flies by enraged, kills the innocent wife, and slices the heads off the demons.
  • Vasistha the priest, enraged, curses Narayana “to be born on earth, in a royal family rich and wise, a family most honoured and kind, and once born to be parted from his wife as he had broken that brahmana’s marriage.”
  • Brahmanas follow the rule to make things right in other worlds
    • Those other worlds are the past, to ensure our actions honour our ancestors, and the future, to ensure our actions build and do not break our offspring
  • “He warred in the loss of love through unkindness and the fetters of wrong desire; he fought for freedom by blasting the chains of attachment; he killed deceptions with words that released the spirit.”
  • “I give up owning the world’s gear. I give up thirst for things to find true love, that never fades.”
  • “‘What are the limits of your realm?’ ‘Well, my kingdom is not these fields, it might be the city.’ ‘Where?’ ‘No, I see nothing of mine there. Surely then, my own body must be my kingdom, and I will look.’ ‘What do you find?’ …’Even this body is not mine, this I am not. It is no part of me. Or else—I rule all space, for I do not hold onto the sounds that enter these ears; I rule all land, for I desire no scents but let them come and go; I rule the waters for I do not grasp at any taste; my eye does not cling to light and colors and so I rule all fire; I care not for any touch, nor do I avoid it, and so I rule the air and winds…’”
    • When we cling we become slaves, bound in chains of attachment. Claiming special control over a kingdom, or your own body, is always false, for these boundaries blend with everything else. These boundaries are symptoms of attachment; we erect them as illusions and get frustrated when they topple over.
  • “Dissolution is the end of all things compounded out of the elements and each man fares according to his deeds.”
  • “You are forever older than I, and so I call you Father.”
    • Time to Rama. Implying the soul of the universe preceded time itself. Time was borne out of this ever-flowing energy
  • Rama, before he passes, gifts Hanuman an invaluable and rare bracelet. Hanuman breaks it to bits and claims, “Lord, though this bracelet looked expensive it was really worthless, for nowhere on it did it bear your name.”
    • Metaphor for the emptiness of material wealth
  • “Everything counts, and so be kind. Do not dare lie politely with casual unmeant promises, for Indrajit always believes that you will mean what you say to him.”
    • When we lie, we feed the demon of illusion.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Published:

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig

Part 1

  • “But now in July…everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.”
  • “The truth knocks on the door and you say, ‘Go away, I’m looking for the truth.’”
  • On the topic of the new faster-paced radio, tv, and movies, “Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep.”
  • “‘What’s new?’ is a broadening and eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow…’What is best?’…cuts deep rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.”
  • “Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose…and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfilment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.”
  • “What you see in the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs is not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes. And you think, even if I were a part of this, even if I were not a stranger, I would be just another ant serving the shapes.”
  • “I argued that physical discomfort is important only when the mood is wrong. Then you fasten on to whatever thing is uncomfortable and call that the cause. But if the mood is right, then the physical discomfort doesn’t mean much.”
    • When we’re unsatisfied with where we find ourselves, we blame our pain for the dissatisfaction so we can escape. We don’t blame the dissatisfaction itself, or where we find ourselves. If you can foster a healthy relationship with the here and now—where you find yourself—you’ll tolerate the pain.
  • Talking about his old crusty riding gloves, “[They are] impractical, but practicality isn’t the whole things with gloves or with anything else.”
    • Utility isn’t everything.
  • “He isn’t so interested in what things mean as in what they are.”
  • Human understanding can be divided into two kinds: classical and romantic. Classical sees the world primarily as underlying form itself. Romantic sees it primarily in terms of immediate appearance.
  • A romantic may see a blueprint as dull, just a list of names and lines and numbers. A classical may be fascinated, seeing that the lines and shapes and symbols represent a tremendous richness of underlying form
  • Romantic is inspirational, imaginative, creative, and intuitive, not governed by immediate reason or intelligible laws; classical (economic, unemotional, straightforward) proceeds by reason and laws, dominated by fields of medicine, law, and science. Motorcycle riding is romantic; motorcycle maintenance is classic.
  • Classical understanding’s purpose is not to inspire emotionally, but to bring order out of chaos and make the unknown known
  • Classical understanding is what births the industrial death force. Overbearing and oppressive. Romantic, however, seems frivolous, pleasure-seeking, shallow, no substance. “Often a parasite who cannot or will not carry his own weight. A real drag on society.”
    • Apollo versus Dionysus
  • With a classical approach you can break down the motorcycle into parts and functions, describing “what” a motorcycle is, and the “how”, that is, how the “whats” come together and produce “it.”
  • This classical breakdown reveals the following: 1) these understandings are subject-less. We care only about objects which are independent of any observer. 2) With no observer, these objects are value-free. Notions of “good” and “bad” are absent. 3) Objects depend on a knife, how we divide them up. “You get the illusion that all those parts are just there and are being named as they exist. But they can be named quite differently and organized quite differently depending on how the knife moves.”
  • “From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it.”
  • Then the mutated world of which we are conscious is further discriminated with the knife, dividing into this and that.
  • We hold a pile of sand that looks uniform but can find differences and endlessly sort each grain by feature similarities. “Classical understanding is concerned with the piles and the basis for sorting and interrelating them. Romantic is directed toward the handful of sand before the sorting begins. Both are valid ways of looking at the world although irreconcilable with each other.”
    • Reductionist versus holistic thought
  • Talks of the necessity to unite these two modes of understanding without diminishing either, rejecting neither sand-sorting nor contemplation of unsorted sand. Instead, attention must be directed to the endless landscape from which the handful of sand is scooped.
  • “When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process.”
    • Every revelation is the hiding of something else
  • When something is killed, something else is created. This process of death-birth continuity is neither good nor bad, it just is.
  • “This is the ghost of normal everyday assumption which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer.”
  • “They must have been thinking about how bad all this is. That’s what’s really wearing them down. The thought.”

    Part 2

  • “A study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.”
  • “If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.”
  • Finding one’s way through systemic hierarchies and understanding them is through logic
  • Logic can be inductive or deductive. Induction starts top down, observing some pattern and implying causality due to that pattern. Deduction is bottom up, looking at the hierarchy of facts and asking what they produce in a given situation. The scientific method is the interweaving of induction and deduction to further understanding of a system
  • “The real purpose of the scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t led you into thinking you know something that you don’t actually know.”
  • If a man conducts an elaborate gee-whiz science experiment but knows beforehand what the outcome will be, it is not science. It is an artistic rendition of what gives rise to scientific discovery, however without discovery—without learning—it is not science.
  • The paradox of scientific truth: the lifespan of a scientific truth is inversely proportional to the amount of scientific activity surrounding that truth. More activity reveals a new truth, which reveals more ignorance, which reveals more truths, which brings us further from an unchanging, universal Truth—to instead a dynamic, chaotic series of perishable truths.
  • “The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths…Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories, and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones…Science produces antiscience—chaos.”
  • When raising this question to peers, he was met with dismissive disinterest, “the scientific method is valid, why question it?” And because he wasn’t a student of science for personal or utilitarian reasons, this just stopped him completely.
  • “He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for control of individuals in the service of these functions.”
    • Like the individual cells composing a multicellular organism
  • “There’s no real profit to be made from wandering through [the high country of the mind], yet like the high country of the material world all around us, it has its own austere beauty that to some people make the hardships of travelling through it seem worthwhile.”
  • “In the high country of the mind one has to become adjusted to the thinner air of uncertainty, and to the enormous magnitude of the questions asked and the proposed answers.”
  • All knowledge comes from sensory impressions, not the raw sensory data itself.
  • “A priori concepts have their origins in human nature so that they’re neither caused by the sensed object nor bring it into being, but provide a kind of screening function for what sense data we will accept.” When we blink, our sense data momentarily tells us the world disappeared, but a priori experience tells us the world is continuous and filters the data.
    • Embedded in our biological organisation is the memory of past spatial and temporal experience. Patterns of space and time are conserved by our body, and those conserved, perpetuated patterns (intuitions) paint how we come to understand the world
  • When I look at a motorcycle from one angle, the sensory information of components and material tell me it’s a motorcycle, but if I look at it from another angle, the sensory data tells me they’re a motorcycle, but not necessarily the same motorcycle. What unifies these two views? What maintains this continuity? Intuition. History. Time and space.
  • “…the doctrinal differences among Hinduism and Buddhism and Taoism are not anywhere near as important as doctrinal differences among Christianity and Islam and Judaism. Holy wars are not fought over them because verbalized statements about reality are never presumed to be reality itself.”
  • He calls the university the Church of Reason. Citizens who build a religious church and pay for it probably have in mind that they’re doing this for the community. However, a priest’s primary goal is to serve God, not his community. Normally there’s no conflict, but occasionally one creeps in when trustees oppose the minister’s sermons and threaten reduction of funds. Like the priest, a professor’s primary goal is to serve, through reason, the goal of truth—not his community. Normally this goal does not diminish local citizenry, but occasionally conflict arises (as in the case of Socrates), where trustees and legislators who’ve contributed to the university take points of view in opposition to the professor’s lectures. They can then lean on administrators by threatening to cut off funds if the professors don’t say what they want to hear.
  • Despite his lack in faith in scientific reason, he had a fanatic faith towards it. “You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one fanatically shouts that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it’s going to rise tomorrow.” When we’re fanatically dedicated to religious or political faiths or dogmas or goals, it’s because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
  • In doubt by whom? He’s in doubt, so he chases certainty. But some people seem so certain of their faith. Their fanaticism seems to be brought by the doubt of outsiders, not their own. It feels like a fanatical reaction to preserve a dogma, rather than a reaction that their dogma may not be true. Perhaps threats open a realization of doubt that we frantically want to close. But do we want to close the hole of doubt in others (their lack in faith), or ourselves (our lack in faith)?
  • “It’s not technology that’s scary. It’s what it does to the relations between people, like callers and operators, that’s scary.”
    • An expanding interconnection that brings nodes farther apart. Work from home technology expands, reaches out. But it creates distance between coworkers. Scary. Bizarre. Isolating.
  • “The beer and sun begin to toast my head like a marshmallow. Very nice.”
  • “The glow of fire is matched by an inner glow from the wine and fish…”
  • “Science works with chunks and bits and pieces of things with the continuity presumed, and [Art] works only with the continuities of things with the chunks and bit and pieces presumed.”
    • Science breaks things up, emphasizing the parts, and assumes they connect. Further analysis need not be done on the continuity, because of course there’s continuity. Art emphasizes the connections, the continuity, and assumes the parts need no further analysis, because they’re just parts! The whole deserves the attention!
  • “If you don’t have [serenity] when you start and maintain [your material object, e.g., bicycle] while you’re working, you’re likely to build your personal problems right into the machine itself…the material object…can’t be right or wrong…they don’t have any ethical codes to follow except those people give them. The test of the machine is the satisfaction it gives you.”
  • “Technology presumes there’s just one right way to do things and there never is…but if you have to choose among an infinite number of ways to put it together then the relation of the machine to you, and the relation of the machine and you to the rest of the world, has to be considered, because the selection from among many choices, the art of the work is just as dependent upon your own mind and spirit as it is upon the material of the machine. That’s why you need peace of mind.”
  • Art manifests in the bringing to order an infinitude of possibilities. Subject bleeds into object in this ordering. Object bleeds into subject. The subject has feelings that can distort the object, but the object can’t reciprocate…there’s an imbalance there.
  • “Prints are of art and not art themselves.”
    • AI art will follow suit
  • What is quality? What makes something better? Where does this sense of betterness come from?

    Part 3

  • “Most people stand in sight of the spiritual mountains all their lives and never enter them, being content to listen to others who have been there and thus avoid the hardships.”
  • College demands imitation and stifles originality. This imitation is sophisticated—the safest bet is to imitate the professor while trying to convince them you’re not imitating, carrying the essence of the instruction on your own. That got you A’s. Originality is less incentivized; carrying your own essence is risky and can get you an A or F
  • Universities have a tendency to imitate education, “glossed over and concealed by grades and degrees that give the appearance of something happening when, in fact, almost nothing is going on.”
  • “To live only for some future goal is shallow. It’s the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here’s where things grow…But of course, without the top you can’t have any sides. It’s the top that defines the sides.”
  • The man who climbs the mountain for ego fulfillment is never in the here and now, and thus missteps, stumbles. His mind is forever elsewhere, distant. He rejects the here and now, and wants to be farther up trail, but when he arrives he will be just as unhappy because it (his goal) will be here.
  • “When an ego-climber has an image of himself to protect he naturally lies to protect this image.”
  • Does Quality lie in the object? Or is it subjective? Quality (goodness) isn’t measurable by scientific instruments, so if it rests in the object it can’t be detected. If it’s subjective, it can be whatever the subject wants it to be, yet most people can agree and point to Quality.
  • The author argues that Quality doesn’t rest in relationship with solely object or subject. It can be found only in the relationship of the two with each other. Quality is not a thing, it is an event. Subject cannot exist without object since objects create a subject’s relationship with himself. Quality is the event where awareness of both subject and object is made possible.
  • The Quality event causes both subject and object, a gravity that interlinks them and sparks awareness. Quality is not an effect of subject or object. It is the cause.
  • “The silence allows you to do each thing right.”
  • Romantic quality correlates with instantaneous impressions; classic quality with multiple considerations over time. Romantic quality is about the here and now; classic quality about the relation of the present thing to its past and future. A romantic might say, if your motorcycle is working, why worry about it? A classic would consider the neglect of past or future as bad Quality; the bike may be working now, but how’s its oil level?
  • “A person who sees Quality and feels it as he works is a person who cares. A person who cares about what he sees and does is a person who’s bound to have some characteristics of Quality.”
  • Technological hopelessness is caused by the lack of care—the absence of the perception of quality, both from technologists and anti technologists.
  • “By returning our attention to Quality it is hoped that we can get technological work out of the noncaring subject-object dualism and back into craftsmanlike self-involved reality again”
  • “Our structured reality is preselected in the basis of value, and really to understand structured reality requires an understanding of the value source from which it’s derived.”
  • “And when you really understand dynamic reality you never get stuck. It has forms but the forms are capable of change.”
  • Quality leads us from what things are to what they do and why they do it, a melting of static division into continuous process.
  • “Nature has a non-Euclidean geometry of her own that seems to soften the deliberate objectivity of these buildings with a kind of random spontaneity that architects would do well to study.”
    • The sagging of straight lines, the soft weathering of once uniform paint, the sprouts of greenery from cracks in concrete.
  • Technology is the making of things, which can’t be ugly in itself because the making of things can produce beautiful art. Actually, the Greek root of technology, techno, means art. In Ancient Greece, art and the making of things (manufacture) were inseparable
  • “It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has even told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style.”
  • “When one isn’t dominated by feelings of separateness from what he’s working one, then one can be said to ‘care’ about what he’s doing. That is what caring really is, a feeling of identification with what one’s doing.”
  • “Peace of mind produces right values, right values produce right thoughts. Right thoughts produce right actions and right actions produce work which will be a material reflection for others to see of the serenity at the center of it all.”
  • Political programs are end products of social quality, built from social values that are built from individual values. We need to get the individual values right to make meaningful change in the right direction. “Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think what I have to say has more lasting value.”
  • The Greek word enthousiasmos means filled with theos, or God, or Quality.
  • “To run a cycle with parts in it you’ve made yourself gives you a special feeling you can’t possibly get from strictly store-bought parts.”
    • When you can function clear-headed without the help of store-bought supplements. Or when you’ve cultivated a unique way of thought by studying material you’re drawn to, not that someone programs to you. When you’ve created and cared for the raw material that supports you, you feel more at home with yourself.
  • “Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to precious values…You must rediscover what you do as you go. Rigid values makes this impossible…If your values are rigid you can’t really learn new facts.”
  • “Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long, as sure as you love, you’ll get a little nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you’re interested in it.”
  • The South Indian monkey trap: a coconut filled with rice is chained to a stake. The coconut has an opening large enough for a hand but small enough to stop a fist. When a monkey tries to take a handful of rice, his fisted hand gets stuck, and villagers swarm him. He rigidly values the rice over his freedom, and this rigidity masks the facts made available to him. We hold on to certain facts, and in certain contexts we’d be wise to reevaluate and open ourselves to more perspectives.
  • “If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened. Your ego isolates you from the Quality reality.”
  • When we inflate the self, what we’re working on doesn’t see that inflation, it sees the real self. This leads to the inevitable reflection of our underwhelming self in our product, leading to discouragement and disappointment
  • Science grows by “maybe” more than yes or no answers. Yes or no confirms hypotheses, maybe says the answer is beyond the hypotheses. “Maybe” inspires scientific enquiry in the first place!
  • “You want to know how to make the perfect painting? It’s easy. Just make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.”
  • The drivers of cars, driving the maximum they can get away with, are trapped into thinking about where they want to be rather than where they are. With this mindset, they never arrive.

    Part 4

  • “The metal of these wrenches is so cold it hurts the hands. But it’s a good hurt. It’s real, not imaginary, and it’s here, absolutely, in my hand.”
  • “Quality isn’t method. It’s the goal toward which method is aimed.”
  • “I have no resentment at [tourist attractions], just a feeling that it’s all unreal and the quality of the [attraction] is smothered by the fact that it’s so pointed to. You point to something having Quality and the Quality tends to go away.”
  • “Religion isn’t invented by man. Men are invented by religion. Men invent responses to quality, and among these responses is an understanding of what they themselves are.”
    • Sure, men create myths and stories and rituals. But why do they create them? Quality guides our creations, sourcing our creative energy.
  • “People who can’t stand Aristotle’s endless specificity of detail are natural lovers of Plato’s soaring generalities. People who can’t stand the eternal loft idealism of Plato welcome the down-to-earth facts of Aristotle.”
  • “…Plato’s hatred of the rhetoricians (those who try to persuade others towards something better) was a part of a much larger struggle in which the reality of the Good, represented by the Sophists, and the reality of the True, represented by the dialecticians (those who logically decompose things via analysis), were engage in a huge struggle for the future mind of man. Truth won, the Good lost, and that is why we have so little difficulty accepting the reality of truth and so much difficulty accepting the reality of Quality, even though there is no more agreement in one area than in the other.”
  • Nous in Greek or Latin means “mind”, or “intelligence.”
  • “Man is not the source of all things, as the subjective idealists would say. Nor is he the passive observer of all things, as the objective idealist and materialists would say…He is a participant in the creation of all things.”
  • ‘Virtue’, at least in modern English, is almost entirely a moral word; aretê, on the other hand, is used indifferently in all the categories, and simply means excellence…Aretê implies a respect for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of specialization. It implies a contempt for efficiency—or rather a much higher idea of efficiency, an efficiency which exists not in one department of life but in life itself. - quote by Kitto

War and Peace

Published:

War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

  • Tolstoy was a determinist. He still believed firmly in the ability to influence others toward good by example, that is, changing oneself to change others. But he also saw man’s life as having two forms, an individual life where there is relative freedom, and a social life swarmed by a pressure to conform. “Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity.”
  • Tolstoy believed that the grander the immersion in a group, the smaller the scope of freedom of choice. He also makes the distinction between reason and consciousness and how reason can only take one so far, being overwhelmed by unknowables and unpredictability. Consciousness, on the other hand, sources from the whole and thus empowers the characters from war and peace.
  • Tolstoy demonstrates in his fiction how people’s thoughts are far more complex than their actions, and being absorbed in this complexity places a gloss upon our active awareness. This causes us to blurt out words irrelevant to conversation, and to wear the truth of what we feel elsewhere, such as in a facial expression
  • In War and Peace, War acts as a metaphor for false values by which the characters live, and Peace represents true values and spiritual harmony.
  • “The focus of War and Peace is the contrast between two opposite states: on the one hand selfishness, self-indulgence, self-importance, and the attendant evils of careerism, nepotism, vanity, affectation, and the pursuit of purely private pleasures; on the other hand, a turning outwards from the self, a groping towards something larger, an endeavour to surmount individualism, a recognition that the cult of the self is an unworthy alternative to the service of one’s neighbours, one’s family, the community and the country at large.” - R.F Christian
  • “[War and Peace] reveals a profound understanding of human psychology—but no more so than…Stendhal. Turgenev and Jane Austen wrote more economically and with greater wit. Smollet, Fielding, or Sterne had more humour, more entertainment value. Balzac had more historical colouring, more period detail. Dickens had a greater creative imagination; George Eliot no less moral earnestness.” But Tolstoy encapsulates a golden mean of across these qualities, provoking profound thought and emotion in readers.

    Book one

  • “But the princess never saw the beautiful expression of her own eyes—the look they had when she was not thinking of herself. As with everyone, her face assumed a forced unnatural expression as son as she looked in the glass.”
  • “His son made no rejoinder, but it was evident that whatever arguments were presented he was as little able as his father to change his opinion.” - Prince Andrew and his father while discussing matters of war
  • ‘We don’t love people so much for the good they have done us, as for the good we have done them.’ - Sterne
  • “He was evidently pleased at his own display of anger and walking up to the regiment wished to find a further excuse for wrath.”
  • “You fear and yet long to cross that line, and know that sooner or later it must be crossed and you will have to find out what is there, just as you will inevitably have to learn what lies the other side of death. But you are strong, healthy, cheerful, and excited, and are surrounded by other such excitedly-animated and healthy men.”
  • “Prince Vasili did everything to get Pierre to marry his daughter,” but never thought out his plans before hand. His subconscious would assemble plans unbeknownst to him, and nudge him in a certain direction. This allowed Vasili to remain authentic and natural in pursuing selfish desires while his schemes remained hidden.
    • This happens to us more often than we think.
  • “She was so plain that neither of them could think of her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and with the naive and firm conviction women have that dress can make a face pretty.”
  • “Rostov was a truthful young man and would in no account have told a deliberate lie. He began his story meaning to tell everything just as it happened, but imperceptibly, involuntarily, and inevitably he lapsed into falsehood.”
    • When discussing his war story
  • “He was like a horse running downhill harnessed to a heavy cart. Whether he was pulling it or being pushed by it he did not know, but rushed along at headlong speed with no time to consider what this movement might lead to.”
  • During a fated battle, the French outsmart the Russians and demolish them. Prince Andrew starts the battle with a hunger for fame, glory, and recognition, hoping to valiantly lead a regimen to victory. In reality, he ends up charging forward with an unprepared and chaotic group, and gets knocked off his horse almost instantly. He lays on his back, looking at the calm, infinite sky while wounded. All the glory he seeked now seemed unimportant. Napoleon, his hero, later happens upon him and takes him as prisoner. The importance Prince Andrew once gave to Napoleon is extinguished by his brush with mortality
  • Meanwhile, Rostov gallops across the losing battle hoping to send a message to the Emperor. As the loss becomes apparent to him, he cares not for the fallen soldiers but hastens to learn whether the emperor is okay. While the world around him burns, the real war he experiences is within, that is, in his infatuation with the emperor. He eventually finds the emperor alone, but doesn’t dare approach, like a boy that’s afraid to approach his crush. Then, someone else rides up to the emperor and consoles him, and Rostov is filled with despair while thinking that could have been me!

    Book two

  • “The faces of these young people, especially those who were military men, bore that expression of condescending respect for their elders which seems to say to the older generation, ‘We are prepared to respect and honour you, but all the same remember that the future belongs to us.’”
  • “Bagration on seeing the [gift, an engraved tray] glanced around in dismay, as though seeking help. But all eyes demanded that he should submit. Feeling himself in their power, he resolutely took the salver with both hands and looked sternly and reproachfully at the count who had presented it to him.”
    • A rugged military man being brought to submission by high society
  • “Three hundred person took their seats in the dining room, according to their rank and importance: the more important nearer to the honoured guest, as naturally as water flows deepest where the land lies lowest.”
  • “I know your outlook,” said the mason, “and the view of life you mention, and which you think is the result of your own mental efforts, is the one held by the majority of people, and is the invariable fruit of pride, indolence, and ignorance. Forgive me, my dear sir, but if I had not known it I should not have addressed you. Your view of life is a regrettable delusion.”
    • A mason addressing Pierre
  • “Can I receive that pure liquid [the highest wisdom and truth] into an impure vessel and judge its purity? Only by the inner purification of myself can I retain some degree of purity the liquid I receive.”
  • “And especially obedience—which did not even seem to [Pierre] as a virtue but a joy. (He now felt so glad to be free from his own lawlessness and to submit his will to those who knew the indubitable truth.”
  • Recognize no other distinctions but those between virtue and vice. Beware of making distinctions that could infringe equality. “Fly to a brother’s aid whoever he may be, exhort him who goeth astray, raise him that falleth, and never bear malice or enmity towards thy brother. Be kindly or courteous. Kindle in all hearts the flame of virtue. Share thy happiness with thy neighbours, and may envy never dim the purity of that bliss. Forgive thy enemy, do not avenge thyself except by doing him good.”
  • “…growing up and dying with no idea of God and truth beyond ceremonies and meaningless prayers, and are now instructed in a comforting belief in future life, retribution, recompense, and consolation?”
  • “We often think that removing all the difficulties in our life we shall more quickly reach our aim, but…it is only in the midst of world cares that we can attain our three chief aims: 1) self-knowledge — for man can only know himself by comparison. 2) self-perfecting, which can only be attained by conflict and 3) The attainment of the chief virtue — love of death. Only the vicissitudes (unfortunate changes) of life can show us its vanity, and develop our innate love of death or rebirth to a new life.”
  • “[He] was … a diligent newsmonger — one of those men who choose their opinions like their clothes, according to the fashion.”
  • “The chief reason [for his urge to weep] was a sudden, vivid sense of the terrible contrast between something infinitely great and illimitable within him, and that limited and material something he…was.”
  • Pierre notices Vera, being carried away by her self-satisfied talk, talking to Prince Andrew. She references girls ‘these days’, mentioning ‘these days’ as “people of limited intelligence are fond of doing, imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of ‘these days’ and that human characteristics change with times.”
  • Pierre was gloomy, bothered by Prince Andrew’s love story while his love story was nonexistent. “[Pierre] pointed to his manuscript-book with that air of escaping from the ills of life with which unhappy people look at their work.”
  • “The brighter Prince Andrew’s lot appeared to him, the gloomier seemed his own.”
  • “…there was no longer the former poetic and mystic charm of desire, but there was pity for her feminine and childish weakness, fear at her devotion and trustfulness, and an oppressive yet joyful sense of duty that now bound him to her for ever. The present feeling, though not so bright and poetic as the former, was stronger and more serious.”
  • “[Prince Andrew] seldom laughed, but when he did he abandoned himself entirely to his laughter, and after such a laugh [Natasha] always felt nearer to him.”
  • “That latent grudge a mother always has in regard to a daughter’s futures married happiness.”
  • “He was only quite at ease when, having poured several glasses of wine mechanically into his large mouth, he felt a pleasant warmth in his body, an amiability towards all his fellows, and a readiness to respond superficially to every ideal without probing it deeply.”
  • “And she burst into sobs with the despairing vehemence with which people bewail disasters they feel they have themselves caused.”
  • “He did not know that Natasha’s soul was overflowing with despair, shame, and humiliation, and that it was not her fault that her face happened to assume an expression of calm dignity and severity.”
  • “All seemed so pitiful, poor, in comparison with these feeling of tenderness and love he experienced…Only looking up at the sky did Pierre cease to feel how sordid and humiliating were all mundane things compared with the heights to which his soul had just been raised.”

    Book three

  • “To us, their descendants, who are not historians and are not carried away by the process of research, and can therefore regard the event with unclouded common sense, an incalculable number of causes present themselves. The deeper we delve in search of the causes the more of them we find; and each separate cause or whole series of causes appears to us equally valid in itself and equally false by its insignificance compare to the magnitude of the events [war].”
  • Tolstoy gives a number of counterfactuals that if they had occurred the war wouldn’t be. Yet, “all these causes—myriads of causes—coincided to bring it about. And so there was no one cause for that occurrence, but it had to occur because it had to. Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to west slaying their fellows.”
  • “Each man lives for himself, using his freedom to attain his personal aims, and feels with his whole being that he can now do or abstain from doing this or that action; but as soon as he has done it, that action performed at a certain moment in time becomes irrevocable and belongs to history, in which it has not a free but predestined significance.”
  • “There are two sides to the life of every man, his individual life which is the more free the more abstract in its interests, and his elemental swarm-life in which he inevitably obeys laws laid down for him.”
  • “Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity…The higher a man stand on the social ladder, the more people he is connected with and the more power he has over others, the more evident is the predestination and inevitability of his every action…A king is history’s slave.”
  • “When an apple has ripened and falls, why does it fall? Because of its attraction to the earth, because its stalk withers, because it is dried by the sun, because it grows heavier, because the wind shakes it, or because the boy standing below wants to eat it? Nothing is the cause. All this is only the coincidence of conditions in which all vital organic and elemental events occur.”
  • “In historic events the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like the labels they have but the smallest connexion with the event itself.”
  • “One of those men who purposely put themselves in most depressing conditions to have a justification for being gloomy. For the same reason they are always hard at work and in a hurry.”
  • “To talk with the sort of eloquence and unrestrained irritability to which spoilt people are so prone.”
  • “It was evident that he had long been convinced that it was impossible for him to make a mistake, and that in his perception whatever he did was right, not because it harmonized with any idea of right and wrong, but because he did it.”
  • “He was now concerned only with the nearest practical matters unrelated to his past interests…It was as if that loft infinite canopy of heaven that had once towered above him had suddenly turned into a low solid vault that weighed him down, in which all was clear, but nothing eternal or mysterious.”
    • Narrow intellect provides the illusion that all is known, but what is known is finite. Submitting to and pursuing the infinite leads to more fulfillment and wonder.
  • “Whatever question arose, a swarm of these drones, without having finished their buzzing on a previous theme, flew over to the new one and by their hum drowned and obscured the voices of those who disputing honestly.”
    • Tolstoy on the group of men who used war and conflict for political and personal gain, wearing opinions like fashions and wearing only what will get the favour with those higher in rank than them.
  • “He was one of those hopelessly and immutably self-confident men, self-confident to the point of martyrdom…because he was self-confident on the basis of an abstract notion—science, that is, the supposed knowledge only an absolute truth.”
  • “His love of theory made him hate everything practical, and he would not listen to it. He was even pleased by failure, for failures resulting from deviations in practice from the theory, only proved to him the accuracy of the theory.”
    • We build theories in our minds of how things should be. When things in the real world inevitably deviate from the theories in our minds, we claim the real world is the problem.
    • We make a plan of how things should be. When the plan fails, we don’t blame the plan, we blame the fact that the plan wasn’t properly executed. The world should fit to our plan, we shouldn’t have to remodel our plan to fit the world!
  • “Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes—love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he’s doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader.”
  • “Formerly, when going in to action, Rostov had felt afraid, now he had not the least feeling of fear. He was fearless not because he had grown used to being under fire (one cannot grow used to danger), but because he had learned how to manage his thoughts when in danger.”
  • Tolstoy describes doctors as useful not because they cure people, but because they were “indispensable because they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her—and that is why there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths. They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering.”
  • “At the approach of danger there are always two voices that speak with equal power in the human soul: one very reasonably tells a man to consider the nature of the danger and the means of escaping it; the other, still more reasonably, says that it is too depressing and painful to think of the danger since it is not in man’s power to foresee everything and avert the general course of events, and it is therefore better to disregard what is painful till it comes, and to think about what is pleasant.” In solitude, man listens to the former voice; in society, the latter.
  • “‘We were just talking of you,’ she said with the facility in lying natural to a society woman.”
  • Pierre acts kindly to the eldest unmarried princess, to whom he is benefactor, when she makes a reproachful demand of him. “The princess was apparently vexed at not having any one to be angry with.”
  • Pierre experienced a new and joyful feeling he had not experienced before: a “sense of the necessity of undertaking something and sacrificing something. […] He was not occupied with the question of what to sacrifice for, the fact of sacrificing in itself afforded him a new and joyous sensation.”
  • “But what is war? What is needed for success in warfare? What are the habits of the military? The aim of war is murder, the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement, the ruin of a country’s inhabitants, robbing them or stealing to provision the army, and fraud and falsehood termed military craft. The military life is characterized by absence of freedom, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery and drunkenness. And in spite of all this it is the highest class, respected by everyone.”
  • “So the way in which these people killed one another was not decided by Napoleon’s will but occurred independently of him, in accord with the will of hundreds of thousands of people who took part in the common action. It only seemed to Napoleon that it all took place by his will.”
  • “The profoundest and most excellent dispositions and orders seem very bad, and every learned miniaturist criticizes them with looks of importance, when they relate to a battle that has been lost, and the very worst dispositions and orders seem very good, and serious people fill whole volumes to demonstrate their merits, when they relate to a battle that has been won.”
    • This also shows that no matter how profound and excellent a plan might be, if the hive executing the plan are weak willed it cannot succeed. But then we blame the plan and not the innumerable decisions made by the hive.
  • “The forest at the farthest extremity of the panorama seemed carved in some precious stone of a yellowish-green colour…”
  • “As the flames of the fire hidden within come more and more vividly and rapidly from an approaching thunder-cloud, so, as if in opposition to what was taking place [the battle], the lightning of hidden fire growing more and more intense glowed in the faces of these men.”
  • “As soon as [soldiers] left the place where the balls and bullets were flying about, their superiors, located in the background, re-formed them and brought them under discipline, and under the influence of that discipline led them back to the zone of fire, where under the influence of fear and death they lost their discipline and rushed about according to the chance promptings of the throng.”
  • “Napoleon did not notice that in regard to his army he was playing the part of a doctor who hinders by his medicines.”
  • “To speak of what would have happened had Napoleon sent his Guards is like talking of what would happen if autumn became spring. It could not be.”
  • “Absolute continuity of motion is not comprehensible to the human mind. Laws of motion of any kind only become comprehensible to man when he examines arbitrarily selected elements of that motion; but at the same time, a large proportion of human error comes from the arbitrary division of continuous motion into discontinuous elements.”
  • “In seeking the laws of historical movement just the same thing happens. The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous.”
  • “The first method of history is to take an arbitrarily selected series of continuous events and examine it apart from others, though there is and can be no beginning to any events, for one event always flows uninterruptedly from another.”
  • “The second method is to consider the actions of some one man—a king or a commander—as equivalent to the sum of many individual wills; whereas the sum of individual wills is never expressed by the activity of a single historic personage.”
  • “Only by taking an infinitesimally small unit for observation (the differential of history, that is, the individual tendencies of men) and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history.”
  • “‘But every time there have been conquests there have been conquerors; every time there has been a revolution in any state there have been great men,’ says history[…]Whenever I see the movement of a locomotive I hear the whistle and see the valves opening and wheels turning; but I have no right to conclude that the whistling and turning of wheels are the cause of the movement of the engine.”
  • “In quiet and untroubled times it seems to every administrator that it is only by his efforts that the whole population under his rule is kept going…but as soon as a storm arises…suddenly the administrator, instead of appearing a ruler and a source of power, becomes an insignificant, useless, feeble man.”
  • “As happens with passionate people he was mastered by anger but was still seeking an object on which to vent it.”
  • “To a man unswayed by passion, what’s best for the crowd is never certain, but those mastered by passion think they know exactly where that welfare lies.”
    • Rostopchin, to direct the frustration of the mob to someone other than himself, found a French prisoner, blamed all their woes on the Frenchman, and commanded the crowd to beat him. The Frenchman was beaten to death, and Rostopchin’s cowardly psyche did everything it could to deflect responsibility for, or justify, the death. “The crowd needed a vent for their anger and I obeyed their calls,” he thought. Who can be sure what the crowd needed at that moment?
  • “Like a monkey which puts its paw into the narrow neck of a jug, and having seized a handful of nuts will not open its fist for fear of losing what it holds, and therefore perishes, the French when they left Moscow had inevitably to perish because they carried their loot with them,” unable to let go.
  • “When water is spilt on dry ground both the dry ground and the water disappear and mud results; and in the same way the entry of the faminished army into the rich and deserted city resulted in fires and looting and the destruction of both the army and the wealthy city.”
    • The army had been destroyed because the once orderly soldiers transformed into lawless men in the rich and deserted city of Moscow
  • “When living with human love one may pass from love to hatred, but divine love cannot change. No, neither death nor anything else can destroy it. It is the very essence of the soul.”

    Book four

  • “Those who try to understand the general course of events, and to take part in it by self-sacrifice and heroism, were the most useless members of society […] and all they did for the common good turned out to be useless and foolish.”
  • “In historic events the rule forbidding us to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is specially applicable. Only unconscious action bears fruit, and he who plays a part in an historic event never understands its significance. If he tries to realize it his efforts are fruitless.”
    • Those who move the dials of history are those who act authentically and naturally
  • The maggot gnaws the cabbage, yet dies first.
  • “Karataev had no attachments, friendships, or love, as Pierre understood them, but loved and lived affectionately with everything life brought him in contact with, particularly with man—not any particular man, but those with whom he happened to be.”
  • “Platon Karaetev knew nothing by heart, except his prayers. When he began to speak he seemed not to know how he would conclude.”
    • Platon radiates authenticity, creativity, and simplicity. To plan his speech would pervert the authenticity and creativity; part of his speech would service the plan rather than the relationship between speaker and spoken to, and thus hinder that harmony between them.
  • “But his life, as he regarded it, had no meaning as a separate thing. It had meaning only as part of a whole of which he was always conscious. His words and actions flowed from him as evenly, inevitably, and spontaneously as fragrance exhales from a flower. He could not understand the value or significance of any word or deed taken separately.”
  • “During the whole of that period Napoleon, who seems to have been the leader of all those movements—as the figure-head of a ship may seem to a savage to guide the vessel—acted like a child who, holding a couple of strings inside a carriage, thinks he is driving it.”
  • Talks of a dog “basking in the sun with a thoughtful air of importance.” Perfect.
  • “A sweating hand’s an open hand, a dry hand’s close.”
  • “It was terrible, but he felt that in proportion to the efforts of that fatal force to crush him, there grew and strengthened in his soul a power of life independent of it.”
  • “There was within him a deep unexpressed conviction that all would be well, but that one must not trust to this and still less speak about it, but must only attend to one’s own work. And he did his work, giving his whole strength to the task.”
  • “With his sixty years’ experience he knew what value to attach to rumours, knew how apt people who desire anything are to group all news so that it appears to confirm what they desire, and he knew how readily in such cases they omit all that makes for the contrary.”
    • Confirmation bias.
  • Near the end of the campaign, “all Kutuzov’s activity was directed towards restraining his troops, by authority, by guile, and by entreaty, from useless attacks, maneuvers, or encounters with the perishing enemy.”
  • “One must have a prospect of a promised land to have the strength to move.”
  • “Momentum (quantity of motion) is the product of mass and velocity. In military affairs the strength of an army is the product of its men and some unknown x. […] That unknown quantity is the spirit of the army […] Men who want to fight will always put themselves in the most advantageous conditions for fighting.”
  • “And the escort, as if afraid, in the grievous condition they themselves were in, if giving way to the pity they felt for the prisoners, and so rendering their own plight still worse, treated them with particular moroseness and severity.”
  • “That happiness is within him, in the satisfaction of simple human needs, and that all unhappiness arises not from privation but from superfluity. […] He learned that suffering and freedom have their limits and that those limits are very near together; that the person in the bed of roses with one crumpled petal suffered as keenly as he now, sleeping in the bare damp earth with one side growing chilled while the other was warming.”
  • “Only now did Pierre realize the full strength of life in man, and the saving power he has of transferring his attention from one thing to another, which is like the safety valve of a boiler that allows superfluous steam to blow off when the pressure exceeds a certain limit.”
  • “To love life is to love god. Harder and more blessed than all is to love this life in one’s sufferings, in innocent sufferings.”
  • “When actions are clearly contrary to all that humanity calls right or even just, the historians produce a saving conception of ‘greatness’. ‘Greatness,’ it seems, excludes the standards of right and wrong. For the ‘great’ man nothing is wrong; there is no atrocity for which a ‘great’ man can be blamed.”
  • “All the profound plans about cutting off and capturing Napoleon and his army were like the plan of a market-gardener who, when driving out of his garden a cow that had trampled down the beds he had planted, should run to the gate and hit the cow on the head.”
  • “The Russians, half of whom died, did all that could and should have been done to attain an end worthy of the nation, and they are not to blame because other Russians, sitting in warm rooms, proposed that they should do what was impossible.”
  • “A spiritual wound produced by a rending of the spiritual body is like a physical wound and, strange as it may seem, just as a deep wound may heal and its edges join, yet physical and spiritual wounds alike can heal completely only as the result of a vital force within. Natasha’s wound healed in that way. She thought her life was ended, but her love for her mother unexpectedly showed her that the essence of life—love—was still active within her. Love awoke, and so did life.”
  • “She did not know and would not have believed it, but beneath the layer of slime that covered her soul and seemed to her impenetrable, delicate young shoots of grass were already sprouting, which, taking root, would so cover with their living verdure the grief that weighed her down that it would soon no longer be seen or noticed. The wound had begun to heal from within.”
  • “Such is the fate, not of great men whom the Russian mind does not acknowledge, but of those rare and always solitary individuals who discerning the will of Providence submit their personal will to it. The hatred and contempt of the crowd punishes such men for discerning the higher laws.”
  • “…who by experience of life had reached the conviction that thoughts, and the words serving their expression, are not what move people.”
  • “In his captivity he had learnt that in Karataev [a good-natured peasant] God was greater, more infinite, more unfathomable, than in the Architect of the Universe the Freemasons acknowledged.”
  • “Yet Pierre’s cunning consisted simply in finding pleasure in drawing out the human qualities of the embittered, hard, and (in her own way) proud princess.”
  • “Though he considered it his duty as a doctor to pose as a man whose every moment was of value to suffering humanity…”
  • “By being ruined I have become much richer.”
  • “Prince Vasili, who having obtained a new post and some fresh decorations was particularly proud at this time, seemed to him a pathetic, kindly old man, much to be pitied.”
  • “Pierre’s insanity consisted in not waiting, as he used to do, to discover personal attributes, which he termed ‘good qualities’, in people before loving them; his heart was now overflowing with love, and by loving people without cause he discover indubitable causes for loving them.”

    First Epilogue

  • “Do not the very actions for which the historians praise Alexander I flow from the same sources: the circumstances of his birth, education, and life, that made his personality what it was and from which the actions for which they blame him also flowed?”
  • “‘Chance created the situation; genius utilized it,’ says history. But what is chance? What is genius? The words chance and genius do not denote any really existing thing and therefore cannot be defined. Those words only denote a certain stage of understanding of phenomena. I do not know why a certain event occurs; I think I cannot know it; so I do not try to know it and I talk about chance. I see a force producing effects beyond the scope of ordinary human agencies; I do not understand why this occurs and I talk of genius.”
  • By delving into the essence of extraordinary movements, we have no need to see the extraordinary abilities and genius of extraordinary people, “but we shall be unable to consider them to be anything but men like other men, and we shall not be obliged to have recourse to chance for an explanation of those small events which made these people what they were, but it will be clear that all those small events were inevitable.”
  • “The flood of nations begins to subside into its normal channels. The waves of the great movement abate, and in the calm surface eddies are formed in which float the diplomatists who imagine that they have caused the floods to abate.”
  • “It is not beauty that endears, it’s love that makes us see beauty.”
  • “‘Always the same thing,’ said Pierre […] ‘Everybody sees that things are going so badly that they cannot be allowed to go on so and that it is the duty of all decent men to counteract it as far as they can.’”
  • “…and promised in her heart to do better and to accomplish the impossible—in this life to love her husband, her children, little Nicholas, and all her neighbours, as Christ loved mankind. Countess Mary’s soul always strove towards the infinite, the eternal, and the absolute, and could therefore never be at peace.”

    Second Epilogue

  • The only conception that can explain the movement of a locomotive is that of a force commensurate with the movement observed. That force does not lie in the devil, although this can’t be refuted. It doesn’t lie in the wheels, for the comes the question of what causes the wheels to turn. And so with movements of people. “Some people see it as a force directly inherent in heroes, as the peasant sees the devil in the locomotive; others as a force resulting from several forces, like the movement of the wheels.”
  • “As gold is gold only if it is serviceable not merely for exchange but also for use, so universal historians will only be valuable when they can reply to history’s essential questions: What is power? The universal historians give contradictory replies to that question, while the historians of culture evade it and answer something quite different. And as counters of imitation gold can only be used among a group of people who agree to accept them as gold or among those who do not know the nature of gold, so universal historians and historians of culture, not answering humanity’s essential question, only serve as currency for some purposes of their own in universities and among the mass of readers who have a taste for what they call serious reading.”
  • “No command ever appears spontaneously, or itself covers a whole series of occurrences; but each command follows from another, and never refers to a whole series of events but always to one moment only of an event.”
    • Taking a jab at free will. We act as though we spontaneously make commands of ourself, that is, we will our own decisions. This is a product of hubris, a neglecting of the continuity. Our decisions don’t spontaneously arise within us, they are provoked by a collection other sources. Our assumption that the individual’s power to spontaneously choose their path is a result of a lack of understanding of what caused that choice (ignorance), and also reflects of our self-serving, hubristic desire to be the sole author of our decisions
  • Justifying atrocities generally serve the purpose of allowing those who produce the atrocities from moral responsibility. The French kill and drown one another, and say it necessary for the welfare of France, liberty, and equality of man. Hamas kill and mutilate Israelis, call it a necessary cost to bring justice for years of power imbalance. These justifications merely enable horrendous behaviour that serves selfish aims.
  • “Is there any collective action which cannot find its justification in political unity, in patriotism, in the balance of power, or in civilization?”
  • Organizations of humans arrange themselves into a hierarchical cone. The plentiful at the bottom tend to participate most but command least, and thus have the least responsibility; whereas those at the top participate least but command most, thus having the most responsibility.
  • What is power? “Power is the relation of a given person to other individuals, in which the more this person expresses opinions, predictions, and justifications of the collective action that is performed, the less his participation in that action.
  • What force produces the movement of nations? Not power, nor intellectual activity, or a combination of the two as historians suppose, “but by the activity of all the people who participate in the events, and who always combine in such a way that those taking the largest direct share in the event take on themselves the least responsibility and vice versa.”
  • “Morally the wielder of power appears to cause the event, physically it is those who submit to the power. But as the moral activity is inconceivable without the physical, the cause of the event is neither in the one nor in the other, but in the union of the two.”
    • Struggling to understand the second sentence.
  • Without a conception of free will, it seems man would be unable to understand life and unable to live for a single moment, for freedom (seemingly) is life. “All man’s efforts, all his impulses into life, are only efforts to increase freedom. Wealth and poverty, fame and obscurity, power and subordination, strength and weakness, health and disease, culture and ignorance, work and leisure, repletion and hunger, virtue and vice, are only greater or lesser degrees of freedom. A man having no freedom cannot be conceived of except as deprived of life.”
  • Our conception of freedom and necessity is increased or decreased by the following:
    1. How we perceive the spatial relationship of the actor. * A man alone seems more free in his actions than a man in society. Societal conditions seem to bind us more. Yet, if we look deeper, we can find that the man in solitude is just as influenced by his environment: in the food he hunts, the books he reads, and the air he breathes.
    2. The temporal relationship between us and the actor. * Our actions performed a moment ago feel more in our control than those taken in the past. The longer the duration, the more inevitable they seem. ‘Of course I picked up the cup! But that traumatic event in my past, well, that happened because I was naive and couldn’t have known otherwise.’ This is because time provides perspective, and increased perspective always increases inevitability, because it unveils more that hubris hides from us.
    3. The degree to which we apprehend the endless chain of causation that led to a decision to act. * The more we learn, the more we reveal the reason that an event turned out the way it did. This is interesting; the scientific pursuit of Truth (the real truth—the one unrestricted to merely one group or one species) will necessarily decrease perceived freedom and increase perceived necessity. * The less we understand something, the more freedom we ascribe to it. For a crime we don’t understand, we attribute more blame to the actor; for a virtuous act we don’t understand, we attribute more merit to the actor.
  • “Thus our conception of free will and inevitability gradually diminishes or increases according to the greater or lesser connexion with the external world, the greater or lesser remoteness of time, and the greater or lesser dependence on the causes, under which we contemplate a man’s life.”
    • Spatial and temporal continuity (interconnectedness) and interdependence. An understanding of the causal links in that interconnected chain, that is, the chain of dependencies.
  • The action of a man absent of free will assumes infinite knowledge of space relations, an infinitely long period of time, and an infinite series of causes.
  • The action of man perfectly free assumes man is all alone, beyond space, beyond time, and free from dependence on cause.
  • Reason says: space is infinite, time is infinite motion without a moment of rest, and the connection between cause and effect has no beginning or end.
  • Consciousness says: I am all there is, I measure flowing time by a fixed moment of the present, and I feel myself to be the cause of every manifestation of my life.
  • “Freedom is the thing examined. Inevitability is what examines. Freedom is the content. Inevitability is the form.”
  • “In history what is known to us we call laws of inevitability, what is unknown we call free will. Free will is for history only an expression for the unknown remained of what we know about the laws of human life.”
  • “But as in astronomy the new view said: ‘It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws,’ so also in history the new view says: ‘It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws.’”
  • As in astronomy, which revealed to humanity a motion we do not feel, so with free will we must recognize dependencies of which we are not conscious.

Noise

Published:

Noise by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein

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teaching

SYDE 261 - Design, Systems, and Society

Teaching Assistant, University of Waterloo, Systems Design Engineering Department, 2021

Identifying, understanding, and analyzing the interactions and impacts among technology, society and the environment for current and emerging technologies.

SYDE 383 - Fluid Mechanics

Teaching Assistant, University of Waterloo, Systems Design Engineering Department, 2021

Fundamental concepts in systems involving fluid flow. Basic treatment of statics, kinematics and dynamics of fluids. Conservation of mass, momentum and energy for a control volume. Dimensional analysis and similarity. Flow in pipes and channels. Brief introduction to boundary layers, lift and drag, ideal and compressible flow.

SYDE 113 - Matrices and Linear Systems

Teaching Assistant, University of Waterloo, Systems Design Engineering Department, 2021

Geometry and algebra: root-finding, vectors, coordinate systems, lines and planes, conic sections, complex numbers. Introduction to numerical computation. Floating point arithmetic, accuracy and sources of error. Matrix algebra, inverses. Analytical and numerical techniques for systems of linear equations.