Holiday reading
I did a lot of reading on holiday. Somehow I managed to do a lot of holiday too! It’s amazing how much mental energy not going to work frees up for thinking.
I finished 12 books in just over 4 weeks. Here’s what I read and what I thought!
Kindle’s give you the option to highlight, then those highlights are collected. I’ve put the highlights below the descriptions. There is a strong correlation between number of highlights and how useful the book seemed at the time, but a weaker one with enjoyment.
Influence by Robert B. Cialdini
I started reading this because it was mentioned in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. My motivation was that it doesn’t matter how clever you are, if you can’t get others to help you then you won’t get anywhere.
The book goes through methods that “compliance professionals” get people to do things. It’s partially a playbook, and partially a self defence manual. He talks about influence being like jujitsu; you need to exert it over others without yourself being influenced unwillingly.
It’s quite long, but quite chatty so it’s easy going. In a strange twist of fate, just after finishing it someone I know was a victim of a criminal compliance professional (or in normal speech, a conman!). Reading through their emails it was amazing how many of the techniques from the book they’s used. It was like some kind of worked example of how to get people’s trust.
- Alfred North Whitehead recognized this inescapable quality of modern life when he asserted that “civilization advances by extending the number of operations we can perform without thinking about them.”
- “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
- Where all think alike, no one thinks very much. —WALTER LIPPMANN
- in an ambiguous situation, the tendency for everyone to be looking to see what everyone else is doing can lead to a fascinating phenomenon called “pluralistic ignorance.”
- The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost. —G. K. CHESTERTON
- the most prominent proponent of this argument is James C. Davies, who states that we are most likely to find revolutions where a period of improving economic and social conditions is followed by a short, sharp reversal in those conditions. Thus it is not the traditionally most downtrodden people—who have come to see their deprivation as part of the natural order of things—who are especially liable to revolt. Instead, revolutionaries are more likely to be those who have been given at least some taste of a better life.
- The joy is not in experiencing a scarce commodity but in possessing it. It is important that we not confuse the two.
- PINE: I guess your long hair makes you a girl. ZAPPA: I guess your wooden leg makes you a table.
- The University of Chicago jury experiment on inadmissible evidence was reported by Broeder (1959).
Be Slightly Evil: A Playbook for Sociopaths by Venkatesh Rao
This is along the same lines as Influence. It’s a the condensation of a long running email newsletter that was about how to use evil techniques to achieve your ends. I suppose it means good ends because otherwise it’d be straight up evil. Being slightly evil recognises that “evil” methods are usually more powerful that their “good” counterparts, so if you want to get to an endpoint, then the evil way is the path of least resistance. The book’s tagline is “a playbook for sociopaths”.
I read it after influence, but I think that it has more methods that you can act on. There are lots of methods for adjusting others’ perception of your status, and theirs relative to you. This kind of status play is really powerful in setting yourself up to be listened to in a room.
- On the good/evil axis, Slightly Evil drives towards action whether or not the consequences are clearly good or evil upfront, and starts with the assumption that simply acting for the sake of acting (otherwise known as creative destruction), and choosing churn over stability, is central to life. This is not “good” because it does not equal a belief in change as progress. But it is also not “evil” because it is not a belief in value-driven stability.
- Action for the Slightly Evil favors chaos creation.
- Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip he wants to dominate, not be dominated...
- (door opening is probably the e. coli of status science;
- if status doesn’t matter to you, it becomes available to you as a situational control variable when dealing with those to whom status does matter.
- If your team can’t escape certain consequences when things go wrong, by saying “my manager said it was okay,” you are not doing enough for them.
- Examine your own reading tastes, and the books you quote most often. How do you think you appear to others?
- being able to tell apart people who are telling the truth from people who think they are telling the truth, is a far more important skill than lie detection.
- I believe in responsiveness, empathy and listening. I also believe the world is phenomenally full of morons who are too full of themselves, whose opinions on most subjects can be ignored. Especially their opinions on your personality
- Adults are more likely to mix a conflict/harmony intention with a status intention. So you get the following four basic types of attitude informing an interaction: Condescension: I am better than you and for you Contempt: I am better than you and against you Supplication: I am worse than you and for you Insolence: I am worse than you and against you
- “Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, small minds discuss people.” But jumping straight to discussing ideas does not make yours a great mind. Discussing ideas is only a sign of great minds if events and people – both matters of context and motivation – have been adequately dealt with.
- Hanlon’s Razor: never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
- “The standard Foreign Office response to any crisis is: Stage One: We say nothing is going to happen Stage Two: We say that something may be going to happen, but we should do nothing about it Stage Three: We say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do Stage Four: We say that maybe there was something we could have done but it’s too late now.”
- Reputations take a long time to establish and minutes to lose. Of all potential consequences, “looking foolish” is the most damaging. You can rebuild assets, re-establish trust and credibility and find life-lines and future opportunities in even the worst chaos. But once people start thinking of you as “foolish,” you’ve put yourself in a pigeonhole that is very hard to climb out of.
- When two parties have divergent agendas, the party that controls data flows is usually the one that wins.
- Because they are often more competent around data tools than their peers, they mistakenly believe they are also more insightful around data in general.
- Dealing with people who trade in childlike absolute loyalties is not worth it unless they are actually children.
- unlike artificial games, where everybody notices when the game starts, real-world games can begin stealthily and asymmetrically. Some players may start before others. They can also close stealthily: early, big winners might stealthily cash out and move on and as part of the setup for the next game, to try to keep potential competitors playing the last game as though it still mattered.
- When resources are exhausted, players simply drop out. When resources remain, but attention is fully absorbed on multiple active fronts, fatal vulnerabilities open up for others to exploit, even without FUD-creation. These are unforced errors. So ceding some contests in order to create a reserve of attention, before a fatal number of unforced errors accumulate, is a necessary strategy.
Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock,Gardner</h2>
I put my Diploma Major Study up on here a few days ago. Embarrassingly, I hadn’t read Philip Tetlock’s first book, Expert Political Judgement (EPG), when I wrote it. This book is his pop-version of EPJ, with examples from his recent DARPA funded prediction project - The Good Judgement Project.
It is to his body of work what Thinking Fast and Slow was to Daniel Kahneman’s work. It’s much more accessible than EPJ, and makes the case in a much friendlier way[1. EPJ was dense and wasn’t really trying to make a case as much as it was reporting the state of the world.].
- “like blind men arguing over the colors of the rainbow.”
- Physicians and the institutions they controlled didn’t want to let go of the idea that their judgment alone revealed the truth, so they kept doing what they did because they had always done it that way—and they were backed up by respected authority. They didn’t need scientific validation. They just knew. Cochrane despised this attitude. He called it “the God complex.”
- even Kahneman guesses are just guesses.
- vague thoughts are easily expressed with vague language
- To have accountability for process but not accuracy is like ensuring that physicians wash their hands, examine the patient, and consider all the symptoms, but never checking to see whether the treatment works.
- “estimate the number of square inches of pizza consumed by all the students at the University of Maryland during one semester”—are
- “If you don’t get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
- finding meaning in events is positively correlated with well-being but negatively correlated with foresight. That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of accuracy?
- this book is not about how to be happy. It’s about how to be accurate,
- In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including “never use a long word where a short one will do” and “never use the passive where you can use the active.” But the sixth rule was the key: “Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.”
- “There is no harm in being sometimes wrong, especially if one is promptly found out,”
- Pointed questions are as essential to a team as vitamins are to a human body.
- “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,”
- Decision-making power must be pushed down the hierarchy so that those on the ground—the first to encounter surprises on the evolving battlefield—can respond quickly.
- Auftragstaktik blended strategic coherence and decentralized decision making with a simple principle: commanders were to tell subordinates what their goal is but not how to achieve it.
- “Great success requires boldness and daring, but good judgment must take precedence,”
- A leader “needs to figure out what’s the right move and then execute it boldly.”
- The catch is that the Kahneman-Klein collaboration presumed good faith. Each side wanted to be right but they wanted the truth more. Sadly, in noisy public arenas, strident voices dominate debates, and they have zero interest in adversarial collaboration.
- inscription at the St. Paul’s tomb of the architect Christopher Wren: “look around you.”
Speaker For The Dead and Xenocide by Orson Scott Card
These are books 2 & 3 from the Ender saga. Trying to remember where the gap between to two books is might get a bit blurry, so I’ll do them together.
At the end of Ender’s Game, the child Ender has killed a whole sentient species except for one hive queen. These books deal with an older Ender (30s) who is travelling the world in the role of a secular priest. He’s only aged a little, but it’s 3000 years later because he’s spent so much of his life in near-light-speed travel.
They encounter a new sentient species the ‘piggies’ who have a strange culture and reproductive system. Most science fiction is physics based, this is anthropology-fiction. There is a lot of discussion of how humans deal with otherness. (There’s a fair bit of physics and biology too.)
The story line can get a bit slow occasionally, but I’m really enjoying the saga in general. I find that it sparks a lot of other ideas, so as a catalyst for other thoughts it’s really productive!
Speaker for the dead
- Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence.
Xenocide
- within a few years their hunger had given way to patience and trust
- Hierarchy of Foreignness. Utlannings are strangers from our own world. Framlings are strangers of our own species, but from another world. Ramen are strangers of another species, but capable of communication with us, capable of coexistence with humanity. Last are varelse –
- loquacious,
- She seemed to trust her guesses every bit as much as she trusted her memories; and yet when her guesses turned out wrong, she seemed not to remember that she had ever expected a different future from the one that now was past.
- I want to call back the blackberry flowers that have fallen though pear blossoms remain
- ‘You treated me the way you like to be treated when you grieve, and now I’m treating you the way I like to be treated. We prescribe our own medicine for each other.’
- There are many different purposes in this world, many different causes of everything. Just because one cause you believed in turned out to be false doesn’t mean that there aren’t other causes that can still be trusted.’
- A real god doesn’t care about control. A real god already has control of everything that needs controlling. Real gods would want to teach you how to be just like them.’
- ‘Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count
It is to his body of work what Thinking Fast and Slow was to Daniel Kahneman's work. It's much more accessible than EPJ, and makes the case in a much friendlier way[^1].
- “like blind men arguing over the colors of the rainbow.”
- Physicians and the institutions they controlled didn’t want to let go of the idea that their judgment alone revealed the truth, so they kept doing what they did because they had always done it that way—and they were backed up by respected authority. They didn’t need scientific validation. They just knew. Cochrane despised this attitude. He called it “the God complex.”
- even Kahneman guesses are just guesses.
- vague thoughts are easily expressed with vague language
- To have accountability for process but not accuracy is like ensuring that physicians wash their hands, examine the patient, and consider all the symptoms, but never checking to see whether the treatment works.
- “estimate the number of square inches of pizza consumed by all the students at the University of Maryland during one semester”—are
- “If you don’t get this elementary, but mildly unnatural, mathematics of elementary probability into your repertoire, then you go through a long life like a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest.”
- finding meaning in events is positively correlated with well-being but negatively correlated with foresight. That sets up a depressing possibility: Is misery the price of accuracy?
- this book is not about how to be happy. It’s about how to be accurate,
- In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” George Orwell concluded with six emphatic rules, including “never use a long word where a short one will do” and “never use the passive where you can use the active.” But the sixth rule was the key: “Break any of these rules sooner than saying anything outright barbarous.”
- “There is no harm in being sometimes wrong, especially if one is promptly found out,”
- Pointed questions are as essential to a team as vitamins are to a human body.
- “No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy’s main strength,”
- Decision-making power must be pushed down the hierarchy so that those on the ground—the first to encounter surprises on the evolving battlefield—can respond quickly.
- Auftragstaktik blended strategic coherence and decentralized decision making with a simple principle: commanders were to tell subordinates what their goal is but not how to achieve it.
- “Great success requires boldness and daring, but good judgment must take precedence,”
- A leader “needs to figure out what’s the right move and then execute it boldly.”
- The catch is that the Kahneman-Klein collaboration presumed good faith. Each side wanted to be right but they wanted the truth more. Sadly, in noisy public arenas, strident voices dominate debates, and they have zero interest in adversarial collaboration.
- inscription at the St. Paul’s tomb of the architect Christopher Wren: “look around you.”
Speaker for the dead
- Since we are not yet fully comfortable with the idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths and see not beasts but brothers, not rivals but fellow pilgrims journeying to the shrine of intelligence.
Xenocide
- within a few years their hunger had given way to patience and trust
- Hierarchy of Foreignness. Utlannings are strangers from our own world. Framlings are strangers of our own species, but from another world. Ramen are strangers of another species, but capable of communication with us, capable of coexistence with humanity. Last are varelse" height="150" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe> I'm not really sure where to start with this. I feel a bit like I missed out having not read this earlier in life. That said, maybe I needed to have a lot of concepts in place before I could really enjoy it. It's a philosophy book, disguised as a story about a motorbike trip. It helped me settle my ideas about categories. I think the number of highlights is a good indicator of how useful I found it. I also really enjoyed it. Give it a go, you might too!- ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?’, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.
- Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
- The fourth is that there is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don’t see it moving. 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.
- It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that motorcycles or anything else are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. Later I will want to show how an ability to use this knife creatively and effectively can result in solutions to the classic and romantic split.
- Phaedrus was a master with this knife, and used it with dexterity and a sense of power. With a single stroke of analytic thought he split the whole world into parts of his own choosing, split the parts and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until he had reduced it to what he wanted it to be. Even the special use of the terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ are examples of his knifemanship.
- The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. There’s not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn’t suffered from that one so much that he’s not instinctively on guard. That’s the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.
- An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking.
- ‘The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.’
- It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
- The school was what could euphemistically be called a ‘teaching college.’ At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community.
- If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.’
- ‘You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
- Then we say perfunctory things about how good it’s all been and how we’ll see each other soon, and this is suddenly very sad to have to talk like this – like casual acquaintances.
- The phenomenon of relaxation and friendliness was explained later by a couple of students who told him, ‘A lot of us got together outside of class to try to figure out how to beat this system. Everyone decided the best way was just to figure you were going to fail and then go ahead and do what you could anyway. Then you start to relax. Otherwise you go out of your mind!’
- the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.
- Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.
- Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
- ‘Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.’
- I think he might even have said that statements of the kind he had made, which fall short of their mark, are even worse than no statement at all, since they can be easily mistaken for truth, and thus retard an understanding of Quality.
- Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He answered, The question has no meaning. As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
- Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place.
- Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration’s programs, ‘We’ll just try them . . . and if they don’t work . . . why then we’ll just try something else.’ That may not be an exact quote, but it’s close.
- The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
- Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects,
- Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing.
- You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having put so much time to ‘no account’ because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so.
- 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.
- If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
- You should remember that it’s peace of mind you’re after and not just a fixed machine.
- You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
- the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the
- Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê.
- Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.
- ‘Our great civilizations are nothing more than social machines to create the ideal female setting, where a woman can count" height="150" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no">
</iframe> I'm not really sure where to start with this. I feel a bit like I missed out having not read this earlier in life. That said, maybe I needed to have a lot of concepts in place before I could really enjoy it. It's a philosophy book, disguised as a story about a motorbike trip. It helped me settle my ideas about categories. I think the number of highlights is a good indicator of how useful I found it. I also really enjoyed it. Give it a go, you might too!- ‘What’s new?’ is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question ‘What is best?’, a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream.
- Although motorcycle riding is romantic, motorcycle maintenance is purely classic.
- The fourth is that there is a knife moving here. A very deadly one; an intellectual scalpel so swift and so sharp you sometimes don’t see it moving. 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.
- It is important to see this knife for what it is and not to be fooled into thinking that motorcycles or anything else are the way they are just because the knife happened to cut it up that way. It is important to concentrate on the knife itself. Later I will want to show how an ability to use this knife creatively and effectively can result in solutions to the classic and romantic split.
- Phaedrus was a master with this knife, and used it with dexterity and a sense of power. With a single stroke of analytic thought he split the whole world into parts of his own choosing, split the parts and split the fragments of the parts, finer and finer and finer until he had reduced it to what he wanted it to be. Even the special use of the terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ are examples of his knifemanship.
- The real purpose of scientific method is to make sure Nature hasn’t misled you into thinking you know something you don’t actually know. There’s not a mechanic or scientist or technician alive who hasn’t suffered from that one so much that he’s not instinctively on guard. That’s the main reason why so much scientific and mechanical information sounds so dull and so cautious. If you get careless or go romanticizing scientific information, giving it a flourish here and there, Nature will soon make a complete fool out of you.
- An untrained observer will see only physical labor and often get the idea that physical labor is mainly what the mechanic does. Actually the physical labor is the smallest and easiest part of what the mechanic does. By far the greatest part of his work is careful observation and precise thinking.
- ‘The number of rational hypotheses that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite.’
- It’s so hard when contemplated in advance, and so easy when you do it.
- The school was what could euphemistically be called a ‘teaching college.’ At a teaching college you teach and you teach and you teach with no time for research, no time for contemplation, no time for participation in outside affairs. Just teach and teach and teach until your mind grows dull and your creativity vanishes and you become an automaton saying the same dull things over and over to endless waves of innocent students who cannot understand why you are so dull, lose respect and fan this disrespect out into the community.
- If the machine produces tranquillity it’s right. If it disturbs you it’s wrong until either the machine or your mind is changed. The test of the machine’s always your own mind. There isn’t any other test.’
- ‘You look at where you’re going and where you are and it never makes sense, but then you look back at where you’ve been and a pattern seems to emerge. And if you project forward from that pattern, then sometimes you can come up with something.
- Then we say perfunctory things about how good it’s all been and how we’ll see each other soon, and this is suddenly very sad to have to talk like this – like casual acquaintances.
- The phenomenon of relaxation and friendliness was explained later by a couple of students who told him, ‘A lot of us got together outside of class to try to figure out how to beat this system. Everyone decided the best way was just to figure you were going to fail and then go ahead and do what you could anyway. Then you start to relax. Otherwise you go out of your mind!’
- the brighter, more serious students were the least desirous of grades, possibly because they were more interested in the subject matter of the course, whereas the dull or lazy students were the most desirous of grades, possibly because grades told them if they were getting by.
- Mountains should be climbed with as little effort as possible and without desire.
- Mental reflection is so much more interesting than TV it’s a shame more people don’t switch over to it. They probably think what they hear is unimportant but it never is.
- ‘Quality is a characteristic of thought and statement that is recognized by a nonthinking process. Because definitions are a product of rigid, formal thinking, quality cannot be defined.’
- I think he might even have said that statements of the kind he had made, which fall short of their mark, are even worse than no statement at all, since they can be easily mistaken for truth, and thus retard an understanding of Quality.
- Is Euclidian geometry true or is Riemann geometry true? He answered, The question has no meaning. As well ask whether the metric system is true and the avoirdupois system is false; whether Cartesian coordinates are true and polar coordinates are false. One geometry can not be more true than another; it can only be more convenient. Geometry is not true, it is advantageous.
- Every day he seated himself at his work-table, stayed an hour or two, tried a great number of combinations and reached no results. Then one evening, contrary to his custom, he drank black coffee and couldn’t sleep. Ideas arose in crowds. He felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination. The next morning he had only to write out the results. A wave of crystallization had taken place.
- Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he said, concerning his administration’s programs, ‘We’ll just try them . . . and if they don’t work . . . why then we’ll just try something else.’ That may not be an exact quote, but it’s close.
- The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.
- Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects,
- Peace of mind isn’t at all superficial to technical work. It’s the whole thing.
- You see it often in people who return from long, quiet fishing trips. Often they’re a little defensive about having put so much time to ‘no account’ because there’s no intellectual justification for what they’ve been doing. But the returned fisherman usually has a peculiar abundance of gumption, usually for the very same things he was sick to death of a few weeks before. He hasn’t been wasting time. It’s only our limited cultural viewpoint that makes it seem so.
- 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.
- If you have a high evaluation of yourself then your ability to recognize new facts is weakened.
- You should remember that it’s peace of mind you’re after and not just a fixed machine.
- You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
- the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the
- Thus the hero of the Odyssey is a great fighter, a wily schemer, a ready speaker, a man of stout heart and broad wisdom who knows that he must endure without too much complaining what the gods send; and he can both build and sail a boat, drive a furrow as straight as anyone, beat a young braggart at throwing the discus, challenge the Pheacian youth at boxing, wrestling or running; flay, skin, cut up and cook an ox, and be moved to tears by a song. He is in fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing aretê.
- Degeneracy can be fun but it’s hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.