
  ## Impressions

*[Leadership](https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Six-Studies-World-Strategy/dp/0593489446/ref=asc_df_0593489446/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=532660552781&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=15035015911338731310&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9032520&hvtargid=pla-1411574914459&psc=1)* by Henry Kissinger profiled six leaders who led during a dramatic half-century. The leaders in this book influenced the world that followed the two colossal world wars that engulfed Europe and its allies. Their duties included reorganizing collapsing governments, cities, and countries; humbly accepting defeat and enduring global embarrassment; attempting to create global peace; and much more. These leaders struggled to create long term policies when everything that came before was focused on the immediate.

Kissinger's own experience with each of the leaders made this book all the more interesting. There was plenty of research and due diligence from Kissinger that profiled each subject well, but each chapter ended with Kissinger's reflections and lessons from the personal relationships he maintained with each statesmen. I didn't know that when I started reading it and it was a welcomed surprise. For some reason, these interactions made each subject more personal and real, not just someone whose name is in the history books a few times.

## Practical lessons

- **If you want to have respect in the world, live by principle and not by slogans, pressure, or persuasion**. In a discussion on the qualities of strong leadership, Konrad Adenauer cautioned Kissinger to 'never confuse energy with strength.'

- **Be cautious of whom you show incompetence to, or why you say something can't be done.** "Young man," Eisenhower said to Kissinger, "Never tell anyone that you are unable to carry out a task entrusted to you."

- The First World War eroded trust in the political elite, after Europe's leaders failed to navigate the oncoming disasters.

- **Keep reading and learning widely.** Each of the leaders profiled in this book "were taught a wide range of subjects, including especially the humanities, as if in preparation for the challenges of leadership, for which a sense of history and the ability to deal with tragedy are indispensable. Above all, they received an education which would help them to understand the world, the psychology of others and themselves."

- **Attain 'deep literacy'.** Defined by Adam Garfinkle as '[engaging with] an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning.' "Ubiquitous and penetrating, yet invisible," Kissinger writes, "deep literacy was the 'background radiation' of the period in which the six leaders profiled in this book come of age." He wrote also, "Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically...Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning."

- **Discipline (self-mastery) and the ability to take the long view are two essential attributes of great leaders.** This is helpful to know for myself, but also be wary of the opposite in leaders I'm following. If a leader is constantly falling prey to their desires, not doing what they said they would, or constantly looking for short-term wins, Dalton beware.

- **Be direct. Don't be afraid to tell hard truths.** 'Who do you think lost the war?' Adenauer famously said to his fellow members of parliament after they were complaining about the rule and reign of the Allied powers in postwar Germany.

- **Be in tune with reality, but have a guiding vision** Kissinger writes, "Mediocre leaders are unable to distinguish between the significant from the ordinary; they tend to be overwhelmed by the inexorable aspect of history." They are able to identify the essential elements of their state and determine which are necessary, which must be improved, and which must be forgotten. 

- **Be bold.** When faced with important decisions, especially with unfavorable conditions, each leader did what had to be done. Thatcher, under doubt from experts and facing an economic crisis, sent a Royal Navy Task Force to recover the Falkland Islands from Argentina. De Gaulle's attitude with France was to act like it was much bigger, more unified, and much more confident than it actually was.

- **Continue with the practice of solitude** Sadat, in prison, initiated his reflective habits. Adenauer followed suit in a monastery as he was in exile. Thatcher made some of the most important decisions while she was reviewing her papers, early in the morning.

- **Paradoxically, they embraced divisiveness. Some divisiveness is okay.** Each leader, rightly so, wanted their people to follow on the path that they lead. Naturally, not everyone would follow. But that's okay. They weren't looking for consensus. Naturally, tension was to follow. When de Gaulle appeared in Paris to meet with members of the French defense establishment, a soldier told Kissinger, "whenever he appears, he divides the country." Kissinger writes, "A leader does not undertake fundamental economic reforms as Thatcher did, or seek peace with historic adversaries as Sadat, or build a successful mutliethnic society from the ground up as Lee, without offending entrenched interests and alienating important constituencies." He continues, "Both during their years in government and afterwards, not everyone admired these six leaders or subscribed to their policies. In each case, they faced resistance–often carried out for honorable motives and sometimes by distinguished opposing figures. Such is the price of making history."

- **Be virtuous** James Q. Wilson defines virtue as, "habits of moderate action; more specifically, acting with due restraint on one's impulses, due regard for the rights of others, and reasonable concern for distant consequences." #quote  Kissinger writes, "Good character does not assure worldly success or triumph, but it does provide firm grounding in victory and consolation in failure."

## Notes

- Any and all systems are in transit between and must balance the effects of a past that forms its memory and a vision of the future that inspires its evolution.

- The vital attributes of leadership are courage and character: courage to make decisions among a set of complex and difficult options and character to continue on that course where the benefits and dangers are not fully realized yet.

- Leaders operate in scarcity, for every situation has certain limitations placed upon it. They operate in time, for each era will have different values and habits that form the eventual outcome. They also operate in competition, with their allies and those they are up against. They also have to make judgements based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of a decision. 

- Different times call for a different style of leadership, these can be classified as a statesman and a prophet. The statesman understands that one of their tasks is to preserve their society by changing their circumstances rather than be overwhelmed by them. They also must balance an exciting vision with a tough of wariness. Statesmen are suspicious of those who personalize policy, because throughout history, many rules and reigns rooted in personality have come down. The second type of leader, the visionary prophet seeks to erase the past. They are suspicious of anything that's gradual because they seek to upheave the past. 

- Konrad Adenauer's strategy to rebuild Germany as an equal with the rest of the powers was composed of four elements: accepting the consequences of defeat; regaining the confidence of the victors; building a democratic society; and creating a European federation that would transcend the historic divisions of Europe.

- His embracing of the humility of the Allies to "babysit" Germany was his plan to turn submission of the rules into a virtue, and he realized that a temporary inequality of conditions was a necessary precursor to equality of status.

- He said, "We cannot and must not assume that with the others there has occurred suddenly a complete change in mood toward Germany, but instead trust can only be recovered slowly, bit by bit."

- To whom can I confide/the secrets of my soul and the cares of my life?

 - De Gaulle's authority rested in his innate sense of personal confidence and an unshakeable faith in France and its history.

  - De Gaulle proclaimed something to be so, and so it was so. He persuaded his people through the creation of a political reality by a sheer force of will.

  - "One must become a man of character. The best way to succeed in action is to know how to dominate oneself perpetually."

- Three principles from Nixon's time in office would benefit the US:

	- The centrality of national interest

	- The maintenance of a global equilibrium

	- The creation of sustained and intense discussions among major countries to construct a framework of legitimacy within which the balance of power can be defined and observed. 

- Sadat's tendency toward solitude endowed him with insight and independent thought but also marked him as a loner. Though he had been in the highest echelons of Egyptian power, no one really trusted him when he took over from Nasser because he never stepped into the limelight.

- In 1973, twice Sadat faked-out the Israeli army, causing them to mobilize at great expense. On the third time, Sadat actually struck, this time facing no Israeli reinforcements because, says Israel's then-defense minister that Sadat, "made me do it twice, at a cost of ten million dollars each time. So, when it was the third time around I thought he wasn't serious. But he tricked me!"

## Quotes

- Leadership is needed to help people reach from where they are to where they have never been and, sometimes, can scarcely imagine going.

- Leaders think and act at the intersection of two axes: the first, between the past and the future; the second, between the abiding values and aspirations of those they lead.

- Ordinary leaders seek to manage the immediate; great ones attempt to raise their society to their visions.

- "...what seems inevitable becomes so by human agency."

- Great leadership is more than an evocation of transitory exultation; it requires the capacity to inspire and to sustain vision over time.

- Something is amiss when the relationship between the leadership class and much of the public is defined by mutual hostility and suspicion.

- "Intense reading can help leaders cultivate the mental distance from external stimuli and personalities that sustains a sense of proportion. When combined with reflection and the training of memory, it also provides a storehouse of detailed and granular knowledge from which leaders can reason analogically. More profoundly, books offer a reality that is reasonable, sequential and orderly–a reality that can be mastered, or at least managed, by reflection and planning. And, perhaps, most importantly for leadership, reading creates a 'skein of intergenerational conversation', encouraging learning with a sense of perspective. Finally, reading is a source of inspiration. **Books record the deeds of leaders who once dared greatly, as well as those who dared too much, as a warning.**"

- "For information to be transmitted into something approaching wisdom, it must be placed within a broader context of history and experience."

- "Great leadership results from the collision of the intangible and the malleable, from that which is given and that which is exerted. Scope remains for individual effort–to deepen historical understanding, hone strategy and improve character. The Stoic philosopher Epictetus wrote long ago, 'We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.' It is the role of leaders to help guide that choice and inspire their people in its execution."

## Random Tidbits

- "Study history. Study history," Churchill said, "In history lie all the secrets of statecraft." when asked about how one might prepare for the challenges of leadership in may 1953.

- In prison, Anwar Sadat had undergone a profound transformation. Instead of whittling time away in solitary confinement, he developed what he called 'inner strength.' This was his 'capacity...for change.' He said, "My contemplation of life and human nature in that secluded place had taught me that he who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality, and will never, therefore, make any progress. "

9780593489444

Leadership by Henry Kissinger

Are kind acts done for selfish reasons still considered kind?

I'm not sure...but there's a reason I'm asking.

I have a rule that whenever someone asks to borrow one of my books, I just buy them their own copy. I do this because:

1.  I doubt I'll ever get them back. And also because there are personal marginalia in most of them that contain my deepest secrets and I don't want anyone reading those.

2.  But I also want the person to go on a journey with the book, much like I did. That's hard to do if you can't write in it, are on a time crunch to get through the book and give it back, or if you're constantly seeing passages marked up and thinking *I wonder why they liked this paragraph so much?*

Someone recently asked to borrow a copy of a book that has impacted greatly: *Einstein: His Life and Universe* by Walter Isaacson (and yes, I winced a little bit when the person asked to just bring my copy over the next time I see them lol).

Like I always do, I ordered their own copy and wrote a note in the cover. Here's what I said:

> Exploring Einstein's life and universe lead me to think about the world in a whole new way. Rather than seeing it as something fixed, I realized it was malleable, changing and full of endless curiosities--and not one of them too small to wonder about.
>
> Eisenhower said it best when he said there are few who contributed as much as Einstein did to the abundant growth in knowledge of the world in the 20th Century, yet not other who was more modest in the possession of power that is knowledge.
>
> I think that's why this booked touched me so much, for I finally understood the great benefit of knowledge for knowledge's sake; for scratching that itch that makes you think, "I wonder how that works."
>
> I hope your eyes are opened ever wider to the beauty of this world and the knowledge it contains, as mine were.
>
> With love, wonder, and curiosity,
> Dalton.

So, is this still considered a kind act, even though the motives are half selfish and half selfless?

P.S. *Einstein* really was amazing. If you're curious to find out more, you can [read my notes on it here](https://www.dltn.io/book-notes/einstein-his-life-and-universe).

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What I do when someone asks to borrow a book

The greatest things in life can also be the worst.

Sophocles said, "Nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse."

In *Essentialism*, author Greg McKeown talks about the "[success paradox](https://substack.com/redirect/695201e2-204b-4548-81dd-de476274fb80?r=3jw8b)" and it's a clear illustration of something great turning into a curse. Here's how he defines it:

> **Phase one.** We have clarity of purpose, enabling us to succeed in our endeavor. 
>
> **Phase two. **When we succeed, we gain a reputation as a go-to person, and we are presented with increased options and opportunities. 
>
> **Phase three. **When we have increased options and opportunities, it leads to diffused efforts as we get spread thinner and thinner. 
>
> **Phase four. **We become distracted from what would otherwise be our highest level of contribution.

When an author writes a book that took three years in solitude to write and helps them break out into the world as a "Domain Expert on X," everyone will want to talk to them about X. Now they're getting invited to give TedTalks, appear on podcasts, and write columns for *The New York Times*. With each appearance, they become a bigger name and more people want to hear from them. Naturally, this leads to more invitations and the cycle continues.

Gone with the wind are the mornings of five-hour writing blocks and week long research retreats. They're famous now! They have obligations to their fans. They have to make money.

But giving TedTalks isn't what helped them achieve "success." It was being alone with their keyboard in the still small hours of the morning writing one word, and another one, and another one, and over again 60,000 times. But since they haven't been able to research or write at all since their book came out, they've got nothing else to go on. Maybe they've written a few blog posts here and there, but nothing close to the quality of their first book.

Now that they're pressed for time, they cut corners on their next book. They don't research as much, they don't think critically about the data and their implication, there's no clear organization structure--the second book is a joke.

That is the Paradox of Success.

Being well-researched and thinking critically about their first book lead them to write a smash-hit. But the success that followed prohibited them from working hard on their second one. They became distracted from what would "otherwise be [their] highest level of contribution."

It wasn't intentional. They weren't distracted by the limelight. They were just doing what they thought they had to do and said "yes" to everything.

Winston Churchill said, "You can never tell whether bad luck may not after all turn out to be good luck." I think *you can never tell whether good luck may not after all turn out to be bad luck*.

Beware of the curse.

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Beware of the curse

There are few professions that impact future generations more than being a teacher. Not only do teachers teach students about history and science, but they teach students about the world. Through this teaching, students not only discover who they are, but who they want to become.

Days after [Albert Camus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Camus) became the second youngest person to win the Nobel Prize, Camus showed gratitude to whom it was due–his former teacher. Camus [writes to Monsieur Germain](https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/11/19/albert-camus-letter-teacher/):

> Without you, without the affectionate hand you extended to the small poor child that I was, without your teaching and example, none of all this would have happened. I don’t make too much of this sort of honor. But at least it gives me the opportunity to tell you what you have been and still are for me, and to assure you that your efforts, your work, and the generous heart you put into it still live in one of your little schoolboys who, despite the years, has never stopped being your grateful pupil. I embrace you with all my heart.

With that generous heart guiding us, we shall appreciate all methods of teaching and learning.

But I'd be a fool to say all teachers are the same. Some care only about their students passing the tests. Some don't care at all one way or the other. Many are great experts in their fields, but don't have the unique ability to communicate that expertise to a mere novice.

So what is it that makes a great teacher? This is what Vannevar Bush explores in the penultimate chapter to his memoir *Pieces of the Action* ([notes](https://www.dltn.io/book-notes/pieces-of-action)). [Vannevar Bush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the [U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Scientific_Research_and_Development) (OSRD) during WWII. Bush reported directly to President Roosevelt. His book is a culmination of those experiences distilled down to the lessons Bush learned about dealing with "tyros", going toe to toe with Churchill, his philosophy on organizational structure, what's wrong with the patent system, how engines work, and for the sake of this article, an ode to great teaching.

Bush begins by laying out the foundations for a great teacher:

> We can discern a few conditions that any teacher worthy of the name must meet. Clearly, he must know the subject he is teaching. But this does not necessarily mean that he must be a master of all its higher complexities. In fact, he may be all the better a teacher if he does not know too much, especially when he is dealing with introductory courses. If he is far enough ahead of his students to treat the subject with assurance, to be unafraid of their questions, and to be able to explore with them, that is enough. But there is a corollary: he needs to stay that way. Subjects alter and advance. So he has to be a student himself, avid to learn, willing to struggle to keep well ahead.

But this attitude doesn't mean the teacher has to know every answer. In fact, Bush commends the teacher that explores questions with this students as they themselves are learning about it. Quoting Oppenheimer, he writes:

> "To teach a mistake is unfortunate; to teach indifference is a crime." Teaching indifference occurs, of course, only if the teacher himself is indifferent, if he is not really and genuinely interested in the subject. It is all right to say "I don't know" to a student or to a class, provided it is said in an answer to a good questions and carries with it the connotation "But let's find out."...I think it creates a fine spirit among a class when the professor says, "Well, now, that's a good question, but I can't give you an offhand answer. Let's see what we can work out," and starts to examine the thing in detail right before the class. This attitude is, of course, at the heart of nearly all good teaching in graduate school.

This spirit of honesty and openness is important for a classroom, Bush notes, because:

> Much of the way in which classes regard their teacher depends upon whether they think the man is honest or just a poser doing some kind of act.

These practical matters are quite important in determining a teacher's value, but they're not everything. Like any great art, there are practical skills that are required for a bare minimum job, but also required are less tangible skills. For those, Bush writes:

> This is the spirit of success, and the ability, the deep, subtle ability, to transmit it, the mysterious characteristic which inspires emulation. And be it emphasized again, this by no means implies just material success, although that should be included too. My most inspiring teachers led me to seek understanding that was not worth a nickel in this world's goods. It is intangible–this spirit–somewhat an aura, which the ablest teachers bring with them to lecture hall or laboratory or classroom or conference, and to which in definable ways the student mind and spirit respond.
>
>The task of teaching in colleges is not merely to provide students with the skills necessary for a professional career and to prepare them for the bases on which informal collaboration with their fellows is facilitated, but to go beyond these and provide the foundations for associative relationships that may become worthy, not merely trivial, and which confer genuine satisfaction upon those who participate.

The importance of being a great teacher are of utmost importance for not only the present generation, but for future ones as well. Influencing the future to come is the main driving force behind Bush's philosophy for great teaching. He writes:

> The basic function of education is to ensure that the experience of one generation may be passed on to the next. It is the ability to make this transfer that distinguishes man from beast.

Bush concludes the chapter with a declaration for different types of courses, allowing students to combine key ideas in one field and relate them to key ideas in another:

> Thus, we need a balance. Alongside the course in the mathematics of electric circuits, we need a course in the history of ideas. And we need that balance wherever older minds seek to help younger minds on the way of life.

His last words on the subject of teaching come as an encouragement for teachers to remember the duality between what they're teaching–the actual course content–and how to be someone in this strange world:

>What is true in the college classroom is true in the kindergarten as well. Every teacher, no matter his subject, needs to remember that he is preparing most of his students for a life marked by a great duality, one part as a tiny element in a complex social structure, the other in informal relations with their fellows. As he remembers this, and puts it to work in all he does, as he leads his student to be useful, but also to find joy in life, he is a great teacher.

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film so89deadpoetssociety

What It Takes To Be a Great Teacher

Imagine a game where participants choose a number between 0-100, with the goal of guessing as close to 2/3 of the average as possible. So if the average guess was 50, the correct guess would be 33.3.

How would you solve it?

I couldn't tell you the answer this morning, but now I can (I think). To solve it, you would use *k-level reasoning*.

## K-level reasoning
There isn't a good one-sentence definition of this, but I'll try my best. Someone who is a k-level 0 player, in a given circumstance, acts completely non-rationally and random. A level-0 player guessing the all-too-common "how many jelly beans are in the jar" problem, just guesses a random number.

A >1 level player assumes all other participants are level (k – 1). So a level-2 player assumes everyone else is a level-1 player; a level 5-player assumes everyone else is a level-4 player.

Now back to our problem.

A level-0 player attempting to solve our problem would just choose randomly as normal. Nothing special there.

But a level-1 person would assume *everyone else* is level-0, so they're all guessing randomly. This level-1 thinker would assume the average is about 50, so they'd guess 33.3 as their number.

A level-2 person would follow a similar pattern. Since they think everyone else is level-1, and therefore they are all guessing 33.3, this level-2 person would choose 2/3 of that: 22.2.

A level-3 player assumes everyone else is a level-2 player...and so on and so forth until eventually, the rational number to guess is zero.

This sort of infinite thinking is defined [by Brilliant](https://brilliant.org/wiki/k-level-thinking/#:~:text=K-level%20thinking%20refers%20to,else%20shares%20the%20same%20capability.), as having an unbounded/infinite depth and in all types of problems like these, it's assumed all actors have infinite depth.

Vizzini battle of the wits

K-Level Reasoning

*[The Man From the Future](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann-ebook/dp/B098TYZN67?crid=3FM501TO8DIZ6&keywords=The%20Man%20From%20The%20Future&qid=1657608834&sprefix=the%20man%20from%20the%20future,aps,140&sr=8-1&linkCode=sl1&tag=slatestarcode-20&linkId=90b726e6acb3d8ccb1fe7b31e3d3ab21&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl)* explores the life of a time-traveler. Someone who theorized, pondered, and invented tools that would create the lives of some and destroy the lives of many. [Game theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory), quantum mechanics, [The Manhattan Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Project), computers, and the [RAND Corporation](https://www.rand.org/) are just some of the many disciplines which von Neumann dabbled. This book explores those wide-reaching fields and the many lives they impacted.

At times during this book, I was a bit lost. Part of that wandering was due to the highly technical chapters that didn't come with any explanation–though I didn't expect much seeing how this book was written by someone with a PhD in physics. But part of that wandering was that this book didn't really explore the "visionary life of John von Neumann" as the subtitle claims. Instead, it explored more of the inventions and fields that the life of John Von Neumann invented. The beginning has the traditional origin story of our main character, but after that, the narrative of his life isn't cohesive. You do, however, learn much about the lives of the people he worked with and the work they produced together.

It was still a lovely read and I want to understand two fields better after reading this: game theory and the birth of the computer. I want to understand how to use game theory to demolish friends at Risk and I'd like a complete understanding of how the [ENIAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC) created the [EDVAC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDVAC) and how that lead to the modern computer. To that, I shall continue my exploration of the shelves of libraries that holds the wisdom of the world–all for my taking.

## Takeaways/Learnings
- The brilliant Hungarian scientists, who were abundant in the physics and math world of the 20th Century, called themselves The Martians because of their strange accents and exceptional intellects–they must have been born on another planet.
	- It makes me wonder though, *why were there so many brilliant minds from Hungary in the 20th Century and specifically, how were they all working together*?
	- Von Neumann would attribute his generation's success to cultural factors that produced "a feeling of extreme insecurity in the individuals, and the necessity to produce the unusual or face extinction."

- Orthogonal polynomials are sets of independent mathematical functions that can be added together to make any other.

- Von Neumann was 17 when he shipped his first publication. It investigated the zeroes of Chebyshev polynomials. This is the first time Von Neumann's voice appears and it wouldn't change much. Freeman Dyson notes, "Johnny's unique gift as a mathematician was to transform problems in all areas of mathematics into problems of logic."

- Schrödinger came up with his famous thought experiment because he was trying to illustrate the ridiculousness that was von Neumann's claim of turning everyday objects into those of quantum mechanics.

> "Von Neumann would carry on a conversation with my three-year-old son, and the two of them would talk as equals, and I sometimes wondered if he used the same principle when he talked to the rest of us." – Edward Teller

- When von Neumann was offered a lectureship at Princeton, his arrival was delayed because he had to "fix a family matter." That family matter would be getting married. 

- Fabian Waldinger, an economist, analysed the impact of the war on German research. He found that "university science departments that were bombed during the war recovered by the 1960s, but those that had lost their staff remained sub-par well into the 1980s."

- Von Neumann had an act for driving fast. So much so, in fact, that he would buy a new car every year because he had totaled the previous one. He drove a Cadillac because, he would say, "no one would sell me a tank."

- Feynman hated the idea of the Institute for Advanced Study. The idea of the institute was to allow professors to think deeply about hard problems, without the burden of teaching and getting paid handsomely to do so. Feynman thought the whole idea was a shame, saying: "these poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all day by themselves, ok? They have every opportunity to do something, and they're not getting any ideas...Nothing happens because there's not enough real activity and challenge: You're not in contact with the experimental guys. You don't have to answer questions from the students. Nothing!"

- Von Neumann was an exceptional thinker, but that cost him. His daughter, Marina, said, "Although he genuinely adored my mother, my father's first love in life was thinking, a pursuit that occupied most of his waking hours, and, like many geniuses, he tended to be oblivious to the emotional needs of those around him." His wife, Klari, notes other peculiarities. "A drawer could not be opened unless it was pushed in and out seven times, the same with a light switch, which also had to be flipped seven times because you could let it stay."

- The design for Von Neumann's EDVAC had five distinct parts. The first three were a central arithmetic unit for performing mathematical operations; a central control unit to ensure that instructions were executed in the proper order; and a memory to store the code and numbers. The final components were the input and output units.

- Gleb Watahin once commented to Von Neumann that he was done thinking about mathematics and on to just thinking about bombs. "That is quite wrong, I am thinking about something much more important than bombs. I am thinking about computers."

- In 1947, Jean Batrik, one of the ENIAC's original operators, was hired to program the EDVAC–"the first time anyone had been employed solely for that task. The job of the computer programmer was born."

	- Von Neumann's wife, Klari, wrote complex Monte Carlo simulation to run on the EDVAC. It was the first truly useful modern program ever to have been executed. 

- The birth of the field of Game Theory into the world spung from Von Neumann's urge to find neat mathematical solutions to complicated real-world problems. 

> "The task of the perfect strategist is to gain the upper hand with as little effort as possible." – Emmanual Lasker

- Von Neumann boiled games down to a series of events. Some events depended entirely on chance, which he called 'draws'; and other which depend on the "free decision" of the players, which he called 'steps.' Each player's goal in a zero-sum game, is to minimize the amount they can lose while minimizing the amount they can win. This became known as Von Neumann's 'minimax' theory.

> "Any event may be regarded as a game of strategy if one looks at the effect it has on participants" - von Neumann.

- Chess, tic-tac-toe, and other similar games von Neumann calls games of "perfect information" because all the moves are available to every player. Every game of perfect information must end in a win or a draw and there is always only one optimal move for each player at a time.

> "The point of bluffing is not so much that you might win with a bad hand, as that you want to encourage the opposition to bet with middle-range hands when you have a good hand." – Kenneth Binmore

- When formulating a strategy, one always has to account for actions of a completely rational enemy.

- For a machine to copy itself, von Neumann argues three things are required. 1) The machine must have a set of instructions that describe how to build another like it. 2) It must have a construction unit to build new automaton by executing the instructions. 3) Finally, it needs a way to copy the instructions and insert them into the new machine. 

- Floccinaucinihilipilification - The habit of regarding something as worthless.

- The first conference dedicated to artificial life was at Los Alamos in September, 1987.

- John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky originally coined the term "artificial intelligence" and founded one of the first labs to study it at MIT in the 1950s.

- Terrified of his own death, von Neumann saw the catholic priest while he was in the hospital. Marina, von Neumann's daughter, said he was thinking of Pascal's wager and had always believed that in the face "of even a small possibility of suffering eternal damnation the only logical course is to be a believer before the end." According to her, von Neumann once told her, "Catholicism was a very rough religion to love in but it was the only one to die in."

- In a page of her unfinished memoirs, von Neumann's longtime wife, Klári writes: "I would like to tell about the man, the strange contradictory and controversial person; childish and good-humored, sophisticated and savage, brilliantly clever yet with a very limited, almost primitive lack of ability to handle his emotions–an enigma of nature that will have to remain unresolved."

56155133

The Man From The Future

__I had two priorities when building this blog:__

1\. I wanted to learn the nitty gritty of a functioning web application.
- How does data get sent from one place to another?
- Where do I add all of the social shares and open graph settings?
- Etc.

2\. I wanted it to be fully customizable and relatively easy to add new functionality as I come across cool things online.

Essentially, I used this project to apply the theories and skills I've been learning to create something greater than the sum of its parts and as a testing ground for anything I learn. So far, it has exceeded both of these expectations and I'm quite proud of it.

## The Stack

This blog is a [Next.js](https://nextjs.org/) application.

All blog posts and book notes are fetched from [Contentful CMS](https://www.contentful.com/). Next.js has a nifty [getStaticProps](https://nextjs.org/docs/basic-features/data-fetching/get-static-props) function that allows you to fetch data before the page is built, making it blazing fast.

For styling, I rely on [Tailwind CSS](https://tailwindcss.com/) (with some custom CSS for things like the scrollbar). If Tailwind didn't exists and Bootstrap was the only option, I probably *would've* used vanilla CSS because as a designer, Bootstrap is not as aesthetic as Tailwind.

The most important part of my blog is how I render the body content of the blog posts. I use [markdown-to-jsx](https://www.npmjs.com/package/markdown-to-jsx) which allows me to write posts in  markdown, and then render those posts as JSX elements. This allows me to add custom React components wherever I want inside a post. Here's how it works.

## The berries to my pie

When I first started this blog, I was using `.mdx` files and using MDX to render the posts, but that didn't work for me for two reasons:

1\. I wanted to practice fetching data from an API

2\. I didn't like how I had to make a commit when I made a small change on one of my files.

So, I switched to using Contentful as a CMS. About halfway through the rebuild, I realized I wouldn't be able to use React components in any of my posts because I was rendering rich text from Contentful. I was crushed, but I learned a valuable lesson. **Before making any changes to a project, make sure to identify the second-order effects of those changes.** Failure is a waste if you don't learn something from it.

I also learned another valuable lesson: **there is more than one way to skin a cat**. Breaking MDX down to its first principles (as far as I understand it), it takes markdown content, renders it as JSX and sends that to the DOM. Simple enough. If I could write my posts through Contentful in markdown and then convert that to JSX somehow, I should still be able to add React components.

After some Googling, I found the perfect library: markdown-to-jsx. Here's an example of how I use it.

Here is some of the code for a SideNote component I made.

```js
    const SideNote = (props) => {
return (
    <div className="mt-4 mb-5">
        <div className="text-md translate-y-6 font-mono font-bold text-slate-900 bg-slate-100 inline px-3 py-2 rounded-md ml-5 translate-y-6">{props.title}</div>
        <div className="-mt-1 text-slate-100 text-md font-mono bg-slate-700 pl-6 rounded py-3 border border-blue-300">{props.content}</div>
    </div>

)
    }

    export default SideNote;

```

Sometimes when I write, I want to add a side note but don't want to interrupt the flow of the text nor confuse the reader. To achieve this, I wanted something visually different and not just to write "Sidenote:'' followed by text that looks like the rest of the blog post. So I decided to make a component that takes a title and content as props.

When I'm writing a post and want to use it in Contentful, I can just write:

`< SideNote title="Quick note'' content="Here's something else I want you to know." />`

That will get displayed in the post like this:

<SideNote title="Quick note" content="Here's something else I want you to know" />

That's a simple example, but it gives you an idea of the flexibility of writing content like this. Say I was writing documentation about how to do something with Framer Motion. Instead of just showing what the code looks like or linking to a Codepen, I can actually show you the contents.

Try tapping on one of these and see what happens.

<SquareWhileTap />

Neat, huh! The possibilities are truly endless. To add that component to a post in Contentful, I just have to add it like I would directly in JSX. It looks like this

![Screen Shot 2022-09-11 at 12.21.59 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5Njq7hHj7kmKgYXFTHrq7y/b13a1d05b7f043b5a85991ca087fb31f/Screen_Shot_2022-09-11_at_12.21.59_PM.png)

I could have achieved this same functionality using `.MDX` posts, but again, I wanted to write in Contentful because the writing experience was better and I wanted to practice fetching API calls. Another benefit of this is that it allows anyone to edit React components once they're built.

I'm probably the only person who is going to write on my blog, but if I were using a team of writers who weren't developers, I could make the components and write simple documentation for them to actually use them. Email sign up forms, call outs, animations, you name it. I'm proud of what I've built here.

Speaking of which, here's my `Subscribe` component. Sign up to my email list of you enjoy new posts on technology, history, and science.

<Subscribe />

## Layout

The home page is pretty simple. I have a `PageTitle` component that takes the title of the page and a description. It also has the option to take an image property because I use the GIF on the home page, but no other pages. I tried leaving the GIF on every page, but it was distracting from the rest of the content. It feels more special when it's left just on the `/index` page.

```js
import Image from 'next/image';

function PageTitle({ title, description, image, width, height, small }) {
  const condition = image ? 'flex' : 'flex-none sm:flex';
  const secondary = small ? 'text-3xl' : 'text-5xl';

  return (
    <div className={`flex-row items-center ${condition}`}>
      <div className="basis-2/3">
        <div className={`${secondary} text-slate-300 font-bold mb-2 font-mono`}>
          {title}
        </div>
        <p className="text-slate-300">{description}</p>
      </div>
      {image ? (
        <div className="ml-2">
          <Image
            alt="Rotating gif of astronaut illustration"
            src={image}
            width={width || 175}
            height={height || 175}
            loading="lazy" />
        </div>
      ) : (
        null
      )}
    </div>
  );
}

export default PageTitle;
```

Then, I have a list of my latest posts called from Contentful. I limit this call to 8 so it only fetches my most recent posts. I then map through each post and render a `PostListSimple` component that takes the title, the slug, and the date it was created as props.

```js
const PostListSimple = (props) => {

const {contentType} = props;
const slugFunction = () => {

    if (contentType === 'bookNotes') {
        return 'book-notes/';
    } else if (contentType === 'tinyThought') {
        return 'thoughts/';
    } else if (contentType === "til") {
        return 'til/';
    } else if (contentType === 'snippet') {
        return 'essays/';
   }
}

return (
        <div>
            <div className="max-w-lg text-blue-500 mb-1" key={props.key}>
                <LinkText slug={slugFunction() + props.slug} text={props.title} type="bright" />
            <span className="text-xs text-neutral-300 ml-1 hidden md:inline">{props.date.slice(0,10)}</span>
            </div>
        </div>
)}

export default PostListSimple;
```

Following all of that is my `Subscribe` component. The title and description of this component are props so I can specialize the call to action depending on what page it's on.  For example, if I added a subscribe element to a book notes post, I could say this "Subscribe for more book notes directly in your inbox" instead of just "Subscribe for more posts."

```js
<div className="text-xl font-medium text-neutral-100 text-white -mb-5">
  {title}
</div>
<div className="text-sm text-neutral-300">
  {caption}
</div>
```

The rest of the site is pretty standard, except for the scrollbar. I'm simply using `webkit` to add custom CSS to the scrollbar.

I went back and forth multiple times on the color scheme because I love the minimal look, but I also want to showcase my skills with design and color theory. To be frank, I think most people can make a black and white blog with an accent color look good, so I wanted to challenge myself. The links were yellow at first, but something about blue links seems more professional to me--I can't quite put my finger on what that is.

## Contentful

There wasn't much deliberate thought into choosing a CMS. I wanted something I could try for free and was quick to set up. Contentful satisfied both of those criteria. But I wouldn't recommend it. I've had trouble finding support and their docs aren't the most informative. Part of this could be the fact that I'm using a REST API instead of GraphQL though.

The biggest challenge I've had, that I've yet to conquer, is working with tags. Contentful has tags built into content models, but they're difficult to query. This is a problem I've been pondering since I've started. I shall make progress one day.

Since I couldn't query tags, I used a band-aid solution, but it works great. Essentially, I have a few different content models that are identical: Essays, Asides, Book Notes, and Today I Learned.

For the `/index` page, I query all the posts in my Contentful space and limit the results to 8.

```js
export const getAllPostsFromContentful = async (limit) => {
    const client = createClient({
        space: space,
        accessToken: accessToken,
    })
    const posts = await client.getEntries({ limit: {limit} })

    return {
        props: {
            posts: posts.items
        },
        revalidate: 1
    }
}

```

For the `/writing` page, I query the Essays and Asides models and filter through those results, displaying a `PostList` component. I have a prop that's conditionally rendered to display an Essay tag or an Aside tag to differentiate the two. As you could imagine, essays are longer posts and asides are short snippets I want to share.

```js
const Writing = ({ posts }) => {
  const writing = posts.filter(post => post.sys.contentType.sys.id === "snippet" || post.sys.contentType.sys.id === "tinyThought")

    return (
      <>
        <Meta title="Writing" description="A codex of my personal journey to understand the world" />
        <PageTitle title="Writing" description=""      />
        <div className="flex flex-row gap-6">
          <div className=''>
            {writing.map((writing, index) => (
                  <PostList title={writing.fields.title} description={documentToReactComponents(writing.fields.description)} date={writing.sys.createdAt} slug={writing.fields.slug} key={writing.sys.id} contentType={writing.sys.contentType.sys.id}/>
                ))}
          </div>
        </div>
      </>
    )
}

export default Writing;
```

I follow this same format for the `/notes` page and the `/til` page.

## What's next

There are a lot of things I can keep improving, like figuring out a proper tags query and cleaning the code up, but I'm hesitant to continue optimizing it. For now, it's just a personal blog that I wanted to take pride in building and I wanted to have a space to share my writing that looks clean. I'm afraid continued optimization will prevent me from working on bigger projects where I learn more things.

Speaking of which, I'm looking for more things to build and continue expanding my abilities. If you have ideas or need help with something, [reach out on Twitter](https://twitter.com/dltnio)!

Screen Shot 2022-09-11 at 12.24.43 PM

How I Built My Blog

I've been slowly reading the biography of Alan Turing by Andrew Hodges, ***[The Engima](https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Turing-Enigma-Inspired-Imitation/dp/069116472X)***, and came across countless stories of Turing respectfully defying the orders of authority figures. One such story illustrates his attitude (and skill) the best. It's told by Peter Hilton.

**[Bletchley Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bletchley_Park#German_signals)** was where the cryptanalysis worked from and in their spare time, Hodges notes, "the authorities quaintly insisted upon the Bletchley analysts doing soldierly work. The heads of sections were exempt, but Alan conceived a passion for becoming proficient with a rifle...Alan enrolled in the infantry section of the Home Guard and to do so," recounts Hilton:

> [Turing] had to complete a form, and one of the questions on this form was: 'Do you understand that by enrolling in the Home Guard you place yourself liable to military law?' Well, Turing, absolutely characteristically, said: T"here can be no conceivable advantage in answering this question "Yes"" and therefore he answered it 'No'. And of course he was duly enrolled, because people only look to see that these things are signed at the bottom.
>
> And so he went through the training, and became a first-class shot. Having become a first-class shot he had no further use for the Home Guard. So he ceased to attend parades. And then in particular we were approaching a time when the danger of a German invasion was receding and so Turing wanted to get on to other and better things. But of course the reports that he was missing on parade were constantly being relayed back to Headquarters and the officer commanding the Home Guard eventually summoned Turing to explain his repeated absence. It was a Colonel Fillingham, I remember him very well, because he became absolutely apoplectic in situations of this kind.
>
> This was perhaps the worst that he had had to deal with, because Turing went along and when asked why he had not been attending parades he explained it was because he was now an excellent shot and that was why he had joined. And Fillingham said, 'But it is not up to you whether you attend parades or not. When you are called on parade, it is your duty as a soldier to attend.' And Turing said, But I am not a soldier. Fillingham: 'What do you mean, you are not a soldier! You are under military law!' And Turing: 'You know, I rather thought this sort of situation could arise,' and to Fillingham he said: I don't know I am under military law' And anyway, to cut a long story short, Turing said, If you look at my form you will see that I protected myself against this situation.
>
> And so, of course, they got the form; they could not touch him; he had been improperly enrolled. So all they could do was to declare that he was not a member of the Home Guard. Of course that suited him perfectly. It was quite characteristic of him. And it was not being clever. It was just taking this form, taking it at its face value and deciding what was the optimal strategy if you had to complete a form of this kind. So much like the man all the way through.

On Turing's work habits and routines clashing with those in authority, Hilton would recount:

> But there again, he began to be beset by the bureaucrats who wanted him to be in at a certain time and work till five o'clock and leave. His procedure and that of many others of us, let me say, not only he, who were really fascinated by the work - would be maybe to come in at midday and work until midnight the next day. And then, the problem being essentially solved, go off and rest up and not come back for 24 hours perhaps .. they were getting much more work out of Alan Turing that way. But, as I say, the bureaucrats came along and wanted forms to be filled in and wanted us to clock in, and so on.

But Hilton was quite fond of Mr. Turing, explaining how he approached calculations both simple and complex:

> In all these ways, he always tackled the whole problem and never ran away from a calculation. If it was a question of wanting to know how something would in fact behave in practice, he would do all the numerical calculations as well.
>
> We were all very much inspired by him, his interest in the work but the simultaneous interest in almost everything else...And he was a delightful person to work with. He had great patience with those who were not as gifted as himself. I remember he always gave me an enormous encouragement when I did anything that was at all noteworthy. And we were very very fond of him.

The Mischievous Acts of Alan Turing

Since October of last year, I've been diligently studying programming, I've done so on and off over the past few years, but took a very in-depth course in October that helped put me into gear. I've also met a few people who have been willing to extend a hand and help me get a footing in the field and for that, I'm ever thankful.

But as I approach learning for a year, I was wondering: **how do I know I'm getting better?** Luckily, I stumbled upon [this great essay from Julia Evans](https://jvns.ca/blog/2022/03/13/celebrate-tiny-learning-milestones/) about celebrating tiny learning milestones that answered this exact question. Evans writes:

> Hello! Today I want to talk about – how do you know you’re getting
> better at programming?
> 
> One obvious approach is:
> 
> 1.  make goals
> 2.  periodically check if you achieved those goals
> 3.  if you did, celebrate

She goes on to explain the cons of setting vague goals like "learn a new programming language" or "write enough code that's useful for someone." *Why do you want to write enough code that's useful for someone?* *What's the point of learning a new language? Does it do something you can't already do?* The fact that these questions aren't clear leaves room for vague interpretations, and with them, unmet goals.

## What to do instead
Instead of setting goals, Evans encourages celebrating **tiny milestones**. She explains the etymology of the word in that it's **stones** placed every **mile** along a path so that you know how far you've travelled.

Instead of something grandiose like "learn a new programming language", a tiny milestone might be using a new tool or fixing a new type of bug you've never seen before.

## Some of my developing milestones
Here are some examples of my tiny milestones from the last year.

 - Learned a few different [frameworks](https://nextjs.org/) and [libraries](https://reactjs.org/) to write JavaScript in
 - Learned how to read API docs and make API calls
 - Built a [simple YouTube clone](https://github.com/dmabery/yt-clone) that lets someone search for a term and gets back the related videos
 - Built a [small calculator](https://github.com/dmabery/cool-calculator) that helped me practice updating the screen on button clicks (something I've always wondered)
 - Learned the basics of [Tailwind](https://tailwindcss.com/)
 - Learned how to deploy a site on [Vercel](https://vercel.com/)
 - Learned how to read the vague errors Vercel gives and troubleshoot production errors that I didn't get in dev
 - Implemented prettier and ESLint on my codebases to learn how to write cleaner code
 - Understood the importance of git and how to use CLI tools for version control
 - This is a bigger milestone, but built [my blog](https://www.daltonmabery.com/) using Next and Tailwind.

When I look back at where I was a year ago, I'm so proud of how far I've come! I couldn't write JavaScript code from scratch without looking up every little thing online, I had no idea what React was or how it worked, and didn't really know what was so important about GitHub. Now, I know a lot of those things. How cool!

## Why I felt stuck
Getting into development can be very intimidating because of the abundance of information out there. There are so many programming languages you can start with and varying advice about where to start depending on what website you read. Most of the time once you get started, everything is so abstract that you're not really sure how it all comes together. Once I finally stuck to a course ([this one](https://www.udemy.com/course/the-web-developer-bootcamp/)) and got over the initial confusion by just telling myself "Keep going and it will all make sense" everything seemed to click!

Now that I know enough jargon to understand some of the abstract concepts, most of my tiny milestones happen by accident. For example, this weekend I was trying to write a function to check if something was true and if it was, return an object with certain key-value pairs and if it was false, return an object with different key-value pairs. Writing the function was easy enough, but then I was confused on how to actually access that object later when I needed the results of the function. I did some research and understood I had to call the function and then just chain the key of the property onto the function. Now I'll know how to do this in the future.

I may have learned something like that in a tutorial, but it didn't stick because I didn't have to really *learn* it.

dim-hou-bfFX9KZJvhQ-unsplash

On Celebrating Tiny Learning Milestones

In 1925, John von Neumann published one of the first papers introducing "game theory" into popular discourse. In it, he explained that most games are just a series of events. Some of those events depend entirely on chance–which von Neumann calls 'draws'– and others on the decision of a player–what von Neumann calls 'steps.'

Ultimately, he concluded a game, as *[The Man from the Future](https://www.amazon.com/Man-Future-Visionary-Life-Neumann/dp/1324003995)* explains, "could be represented simply as the choice by each player of a single strategy (effectively an amalgam of all the strategies they play in the game), followed by a calculation of their respective payouts that accounts for everyone's choices (and which factors in their luck)." 

But he couldn't get any further in his thinking with multi-player games, so he started thinking about games with two players whose payouts equal 0.

Since there are only two players, one *has* to win and the other *has* to lose. What one person wins is equal to what the other person loses. So if Player A wins $5, then Player B has to have lost $5 somehow. The two payouts, when added together equal 0 (5 + (-5) = 0). Therefore, these games were determined to be *zero-sum*: the sum equals zero.

## Why this matters
The terms "zero-sum" and "positive-sum" are popular in the online world I hang out in. The benefits of the world and the creator economy being "positive-sum" or touted and the mindset that the world is "zero-sum" is negative. I always understood what they meant, but didn't know the background behind them. It turns out, John von Neumann helped birth these terms into the world through his earlier work on game theory.

The paper in which he lays out these terms is the one where he describes his 'minimax' strategy. In our example above, Player B wants to minimize the maximum amount of money they can lose and Player A wants to maximize the minimum amount they can win (called the 'maximin' strategy).

People who are described as having a "zero-sum mindset" are those that don't think there can be multiple winners. They'll do anything they can to climb the ladder or make the sale. They are also usually very jealous of other people's success because in their world, if someone else is winning, that means they're losing.

Though that's not how the world really works, so the world can be described as "positive-sum." There is enough winnings for everyone. Thankfully this is the case, because we're a few million years late to the party.

20211009 bkp002

Where the term "zero-sum" comes from

*You can purchase [the book here](https://www.amazon.com/Pieces-Action-Vannevar-Bush/dp/1953953204).*

I've been wondering lately how the process of scientific research has developed over the years and this book helped shed some light on a potential answer. As I understand, it was Bush who helped create the current funding structure between the government and universities, as he thought it was of great importance for the military to work with the best civillian researchers, all of whom held positions at a university.

[Vannevar Bush](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vannevar_Bush) was an engineer, inventor, and administrator who headed the [U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Scientific_Research_and_Development) (OSRD) during WWII. Bush reported directly to President Roosevelt. Essentially all of the R&D of military equipment and operations were conducted through this department. This book is a culmination of those experiences distilled down to the lessons Bush learned about dealing with "tyros", going toe to toe with Churchill, his philosophy on organizational structure, what's wrong with the patent system, how engines work, an ode to teachers and colleges, and much more.

The foreword to this book, written by Ben Reinhardt, puts it well by saying:

> So dive in. Have fun with it. Be curious. Skip around. Go deep. **I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be.**

I echo that statement.

## Practical Takeaways
- Change depends on two things: someone to work in a new way and an effective organization to bring those changes around. One is not more important than the other.

- A leader's job is coordination. It requires a trust in the people doing the actual work (Bush did not appreciate how Churchill handled many scientific matters during the war), and it requires a clear line of communication with someone 100% responsible and able to make a drastic decision if that need be. Bush recounts times where there was confusion as to who could actually make a decision about going forward and this lead to more confusion and frustration.

- This country pays greater attention to those who yell and complain about how something works today, or how it once worked, and seems to ignore those who are quietly working away towards a solution–especially those trying to work towards a solution within the confines of the current "screwed up" system.

- The success of our democratic government is dependent on at least two things: 1) We must learn and impress upon ourselves the difference between the freedom to do what we please and the infringement upon the right's of others to do the same. 2) The nature and stability of the democratic system itself. Namely, the success and cooperation between the three branches of the government, and, whether when its forces get out of play, it has within itself the ability to restore itself to equilibrium.

- A key trait of great leaders and workers is not just that they can get the job done when everything is going well, but that they know what to do and how to do it when everything goes wrong.

- There are two primary ways to lose a battle (with all other things being equal): The first is by having confused lines of communication. The second is to have someone in charge with poor judgement.

- A program, product, or initiative is guaranteed to fail if the CEO, leader, or president does not actively seek to make it work. If they don't care about it or are indifferent to it, it will not succeed. It may be average, but it won't ever achieve greatness.

- The more complex something becomes, the more likely it is that just one thing can break or go wrong and cause throw the whole system into shambles. This is true of engineering and of relations and organizations.

- In any large organization, there has to be a system for tracking and maintaining innovations that arise outside a specific field that would be useful for it. If not, they will get tossed aside and thrown in the "not useful" pile when in reality it was very useful, just for a different department.

- In meetings where strategy is being discussed, there should be someone present who is a master of technical advancements that are just being put into use or will be put into use sometime in the near future.

- Any group working in isolation will not sufficiently make adequate technological advancements. 

- In an industry that is standardized, where basically all companies are making profits, small changes can be introduced but nothing major will happen. There is no sense in disrupting something that seems to be working out okay, especially if the future is unknown.

- An invention by itself is usually useless. It must be paired with promotion, financing, development, engineering, and marketing if the inventor wants to actually make some money and go somewhere with it.

- There are two main ways to go about inventing something. One is to identify something the public needs and hurry to make something that fits that need. The other is to develop new knowledge in areas where there may be useful results and see where it leads.

- When giving a speech, or really any conversation for that matter, don't start talking unless you know the exact sentence you're going to say at the end. Also, look at someone in the back row. If they become restless, put more volume into your voice. If they are still restless, stop talking.

- When someone gets to the age where they start observing, understanding, and questioning how things in the world are done, they separate into three groups: The first is those who meekly conform to how things have always been and follow suit. The second, a smaller minority, attack the system and get really rebellious. A smaller third group, who is usually overlooked, propose to do something about what they don't like and propose to accomplish this by working within the system itself–repairing from the inside out.

- Great teachers can teach you a lot about pride, humility, accomplishment, and a great many other virtues without ever saying a specific word about any of those topics.

- For anyone working in a professional setting, understanding human relations and having sound social skills are just as important, if not more, than being a master of the actual facts of the field in which they operate.

## Notes
- Anybody who is serious about creating enduring change realizes that it's critical to understand the origins of the institutions that shape our world. 

- This book, provides a perspective "on the modern innovation environment as an evolved system with simple origins."

- Ben Reinhardt in the foreword: "I went into this book with little more than a name and came out with the closest thing to a mentor someone you've never met can be."

- The development of the atomic bomb fell into two phases, as I imagine most big technical breakthroughs follow. The first was the actual underlying physics behind it. The second was how to actually use those physics for something beneficial. I think this pattern is common: first comes the idea/discovery/breakthrough and then comes the "Okay, so what can we actually do with it." That is all fine and well, but we must be careful not to ask the second question too soon, for if no use is discovered, the breakthrough might be tossed to the waste bin. We must be able to recognize the value of the idea and not just the use case for the idea.

- The tyro, as new recruits were called by the Romans, have contempt for channels of authority and ducks around them. They just butt into all sorts of levels and clash into the train of gears. A common type of tyro is the chap who assumes and flaunts his boss's authority, either without the boss's knowledge or simply because the boss does not realize the havoc being caused.

## Quotes
*The following are direct quotes from Bush's words in the book.*

- Youth has always been in rebellion and should be if society is not to become static.

- The study of history can aid in avoiding mistakes, provided it is recent history and accurate, that is, before it has degenerated into a myth.

- The essence of civilization is the transmission of the findings of each generation to the next. 

- "Much of this book will be devoted to how we can keep our business rolling in the right direction."

- Apparently in this strange country, we just continue practices that injure our neighbors until enough people get mad and make us quit.

- For, after all, there is happiness in the world, in this cruel and confused world, if we but seek it, and welcome it when it appears.
- Little things become submerged when great things are dominant.

- There should never be, throughout an organization, any doubt as to where authority for making decisions resides, or any doubt that they will be promptly made.

- When he knows stumbling blocks may get in the way of a joint effort in which he is engaged, a man who is light on his feet tries to anticipate them, to figure out where they may arise and why, and how best to evade them...Planning strategies means taking into account the personal quirks of some individual who almost always is the source of the blockade, and devising ways to annul his blockade by disarming him, by avoiding him by and end run, or, if necessary and possible, by knocking him on the head–figuratively of course.

- As we subdivide fields of learning and render all of them more precise and more intricate, no man can be a master of all, but a man who sets his mind to it can become a valuable amateur in fields outside his mastership.

- A man of intelligence can become well acquainted with a subject in surprisingly short time if he puts his mind to it. This is not to master it, but to arrive at a point where he speaks the language and can judge whether a proposal before him has been thought through and is sound. If a man is a good judge of men, he can go far on that skill alone.

- A lot of invention appears merely because of curiosity and with little thought at the time of possible utility.
- I think any man who has a bit of ingenuity in his soul gets quite a lot of fun out of following around with things that do not amount to anything, for the reason that when he does so, he has no pressures.

- It would be well if people, youth in particular, recognized the debt society owes to the quiet workers whom we never hear of, especially those who are led on by their curiosity and their desire to explore, with very little thought about acclaim or fortune. 

- The inventor who works alone, who is isolated from the current trend of thought, and who hence does not grasp where the real opportunities lie, seldom makes a worthwhile invention.

- The reward of a great teacher lies in the success in later life of his students.

- Teachers are a vital ingredient in the long and delicate process by which the young mind attains the ability to make informed wise choices between alternatives at any level of simplicity or sophistication. The teacher's task... is to guide the student mind in its search for knowledge–the gathering of information, the understanding of its implications and applications, the consequent growth of knowledge, and, it is to be hoped, the ultimate growth of wisdom.

- One learns about teaching by observing teachers, by being taught, by teaching, and by thinking about it. Above all, it depends upon the realization that teaching is an art, as elusive as the art of painting or sculpture, that it is an individual art, developed by each man for himself, that it must be genuine and not forced, and that its mastery can bring joy and satisfaction.

- He taught me pride of scholarly accomplishment. And he never said a word to me on that subject.

- If a college or university is permeated with a spirit of success, so will its students be, and one who expects success is well on the way to attaining it.

- For every professional man...an understanding of human relations, the acquisition of a sound and effective grasp and practice in regard to them, is fully as important as excellence in the knowledge of facts and principles applicable to the area in which he operates.

- The basic function of education is to ensure that the experience of one generation may be passed on to the next. It is the ability to make this transfer that distinguishes man from beast.

- As an actual fact, much of the failure of management is due to a mistreatment of simple elementary principles rather than to any lack of handling of complex affairs.

- Alongside the course of mathematics of electric circuits, we need a course in the history of ideas. And we need that balance whenever older minds seek to help younger minds on the way of life.

## Random Tidbits
- What work needs to be done to remove the constraints preventing today's impossibles from becoming tomorrow's amazing?

## Books/sources recommended
- Preparing Tomorrow's Business Leaders, Drucker
- Bush's Meet the Press interview in 1959
- Bush's article on the memex

IMG 2984

Pieces of the Action

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Book Review and Summary: Revolt of the Public

## Impressions
I didn't have many impressions before reading this book, other than being excited by the beautiful design and color theory. I also assumed it to be of some importance because Stripe Press was the publisher. I'm happy to say it did not disappoint.

I wrote about this in [my summary/review of this book](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/book-review-and-summary-revolt-of-the-public), but Gurri's writing helped me navigate the world as I see it today, which will be invaluable for navigating the world in the future. It combines geopolitics, social phenomena, and historical events into a cohesive narrative about the world. It also gave me language to talk about certain political situations.

## Key Learnings
Under conditions of scarcity, sources of information become authoritative. Increase the access to information and you decrease the authority of any one person on that topic.

There are two groups going head to head right now, The Public and The Authorities. **The Public**, from Walter Lippmann: "is not a fixed body of individuals. It is merely the persons who are interested in an affair and can affect it only be supporting or opposing the actors." Guru agrees with this, but thinks the public today has become an actor: "It is composed of amateurs, and it had fractured into vital communities, each clustered around an affair of interest to the group." **Authority** pertains to the source. We believe something because of who said it. At an individual level, this standing is achieved by a professionalization. The person in authority is trained in a certain way and has access to hidden knowledge. But at an institutional level, there is lasting authority. This authority doesn't waiver with people. They have a certain connection to monopoly conditions on their field. These are government, corporations, research institutes, foundations, and so on.

Gurri's thesis is that a revolution in the nature and content of communication ended the top-down control elites exerted on the public during the industrial age. This is only true though, if we can show that information can actually influence the arrangement of power and create real-life effects and those effects have to be big enough to create a real crisis of authority.

We are, what Gurri calls, *homo informaticus* (HI), or information man. HI is literate and has access to newspapers, radio, movies, and TV. This is a new threat to the regime, because the public "with a longer reach may gain access to information that subverts its story of legitimacy." That story of legitimacy is currently the only thing holding the "public" to obeying/following the authorities power. The regime would try to control this new form of media, and can do so to a current extent, but the sheer volume of channels prohibits it from doing so completely. "As messages and images proliferate, it becomes progressively hard to determine exactly what their relationship is to the regime's justifying story."
This new channel of information broadens HI's field of vision to think about different worldviews. No longer is there one idea or opinion. "When judging his government, HI can then do so in light of alternative possibilities–different views of the same policy or event, different values invoked for an action or inaction, different performance by other governments, real or imagined." Since HI can't absorb *all* of the new information, he has to be selective. So he picks and chooses, as do other members of the public, who they listen to, what they watch, and inevitably, what they believe. Since all information has to either be mediated or recieved directly, the mass media mediators no longer can persuade the public to think one way about the regime.

The two groups came to a head in 2011, a period Gurri refers to as the "Phase Change." Most of the people, in each of the phase change events of 2011 were young, middle class, educated. "Sectarian ideals propelled them into politics." Neither, did any of the movements insist in a new way of governing, new policies or plans to move forward. They made no demands, but felt free to accuse.

Though the Occupy Wall Street movements didn't have large numbers compared to Tel Aviv or Egypt, it somehow tipped the scales for the public to distrust government institutions and with it, democracy. Their message was that the 1% tyrannized the other 99%, who was supposedly part of the march, but they didn't actually represent that 99%, only a small subset of people within that 99%. Somehow though, their message became interpreted as: "This is how the American public is feeling."

Thanks to the information sphere, the public sees their unmet expectations daily of the Center-based institutions. The public uses that information to attack the legitimacy of the institutions. Sometimes they're right in attacking the corruption, but other times they go to far. This all stems from the fact that the Center can't say "we don't know" and they're too busy making sure "bad science" from amateur's doesn't spread. This supposed confidence of certainty is received by the public as legit, until it isn't and they say something that isn't true or something happens that they said wasn't going to, because inevitably it will because they can't be certain of every little thing. 

For a government to fail, two things must occur:

1. First some empirical event must occur that is perceived as a failure.
2. Second, The relationship between the government and the governed must somehow be ruptured. Trust must be broken for failure to have lasting consequences.

If the industrial age hierarchies of contemporary democracy are suffering a crisis of authority (they are), and if the public is on the move and expecting impossibilities (yes), then all things being equal, the system will continue to bleed away legitimacy–and there will be those who argue it should be put out of its misery. Gurri explains the road we're on leads to nihilism. The Nihilist heard George W. Bush say the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, but none were found there. He heard Obama say unemployment would be capped, only for millions to lose their job. But he doesn't see these as failures. He assumes the government are liars and cheaters. Without his digital devices, the nihilist would be nothing. Instead, he is overly informed about those few odd topics that obsess him, "and he produces a torrent of hard-core negations posted about about the world around him."

## Quotes
"When proof for and against approaches infinity, a cloud of suspicion about cherry-picking data will hang over authoritative judgement."

"Even the simplest human events constitute complex systems ruled by nonlinearities. Within such systems, teasing out a single episode and proclaiming it the prime mover makes as much sense as picking a grain of sand and calling it 'the beach'."

"The anxiety to control information in those who already controlled the guns should alert us that political power may be less "hard""

"Propaganda was the totalitarian's admission that his power wasn't total."

414lZg+LS7L. SX342 SY445 QL70 ML2

Revolt of the Public

*This is the first publication of my new column Codex Curiositatis (Codex of Curiosities). When I first launched my newsletter in 2020, I started sending interesting links about tech and productivity. I shifted away from links to original content around January of this year, but I've decided to bring it back. I really enjoyed sharing what I read as I think it's pretty niche and something you wouldn't have been able to find on your own. I'll continue writing original pieces and sharing them here, so nothing is being removed, this column is just getting added. It will come once per week every Friday. I hope you enjoy :)*

* * * * *

[Henry David Thoreau shares a much-needed reminder on success](https://www.themarginalian.org/2012/07/12/thoreau-on-success/): Thoreau is famed for his seminal work on solitude and living a simple life, *Walden*, which I suspect most people contemplate doing at least a few times per year. Thoreau painted a romantic picture of what life would have looked like in 1850s America and yes, they were much simpler times. But Thoreau was much more than a monk by a pond. He thought deeply about life, success, and love. "In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness," Thoreau penned, "If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

[Why we need to seriously study progress:](https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/we-need-new-science-progress/594946/) Imagine, for a second, all of the technological and societal progress that has happened in the last 100 years, 50 years, or even just 10 years. How did these things happen? Over the past 100 years, our living standards has drastically increased: clean water, electricity, medicine, cars, computers, and more have provided ways for us to live a life that would be incomprehensible just *150* years in the past. But did we get here on accident? *Probably not*. So, what happened? *Well, we're not sure.* Can we increase the process going forward? *...maybe?* It's time for a new science of progress.

A meeting of the minds, [when Richard Feynman met Albert Einstein:](https://www.cantorsparadise.com/when-richard-feynman-met-albert-einstein-b92533e4a580) "Einstein was a giant. His head was in the clouds, but his feet were on the ground. But those of us who are not that tall have to choose!" -- Feynman

[What to learn, what to learn:](https://danluu.com/learn-what/) I'm constantly asking myself (as evident through the phase changes of this newsletter) should I attempt to be a specialist in one area or a well-rounded generalist in a variety? Though David Epstein [has some thoughts](https://www.amazon.com/Range-Generalists-Triumph-Specialized-World/dp/0735214484), maybe that's not the right question to be asking. Rather, it might be important to ask *what should I learn?* If I learn the right things, theoretically they should give me a well-rounded knowledge of the world (generalist) while also providing me the opportunity to go deep in the areas I learn well (specialist). So, how does one figure out what to learn? By [reading this](https://danluu.com/learn-what/).

Codex Curiositatis #1

I'm taking an [advanced React course][1] and instead of powering through the tutorials to finish as fast as I can, I'm trying to slow down and make sure I understand each line of code. Naturally, I wanted to share for others to see and potentially benefit from.

The following lines of code come from a custom React hook to handle basic form submissions.

## The Code

First, I created a function and initialized state for my form inputs. When the hook is called, I can pass default properties to it.

```js
    import  {  useState  }  from  "react";

    export  default  function  useForm(initial  =  [])  {
	    // create a state object for our inputs
	    const  [inputs,  setInputs]  =  useState(initial);
```
I then created a function to handle the change of the form. It first destructures values from the event handler (using let because they will change). I then have some if statements checking to see if the input is a number or file because the behavior will change if either of those are true. Finally, I use the `setInputs` function to copy the current inputs and assign them to the value of the form. The spread operator copies the current inputs and overrides whatever is changed on the form.  I wrote `[name]` because it allows the function to be dynamically used on a form that changes the price, the name, or something else.

 ```js
    function  handleChange(e)  {
	    let  {  value,  name,  type  }  =  e.target;

	    if(type  ===  'number')  {
		value  =  parseInt(value);
    }
	    if(type  ===  'file'){
		    value[0]  =  e.target.files;
	    }

	    setInputs({
		    // copy the exisisting state
		    ...inputs,
		    [name]:  e.target.value,
		 });
	  }
```
Finally, I have some simple functions to reset the form to the initial properties (what was passed when the `useForm` function was called) and clear the form so it's empty.

The `clearForm` function is a bit confusing, but necessary. The `Object.entries` converts each of the inputs to arrays. Within each of those arrays are two other arrays, one for the property and one for the value. I then map over those arrays, destructure the key and value from them and assign new values of empty strings to them all. Finally, that's wrapped in an outer `Object.entries` function to convert those arrays back into an object. Next, I pass the `blankSlate` function to our `setInputs` state to clear the forms with the empty values passed during the mapping.

```js
    function  resetForm()  {
    	setInputs(initial);
    }

    function  clearForm()  {
    	const  blankState  =  Object.fromEntries(
    	Object.entries(inputs).map(([key,  value])  =>  [key,  ''])
	  );
	  setInputs(blankState);
    }
```

In the end, I return each of the functions I want available when I use the hook.

```js
    return  {
	    inputs,
	    handleChange,
	    resetForm,
	    clearForm,
    }
```

[1]: https://advancedreact.com/

christopher-gower-m HRfLhgABo-unsplash

Building a Custom React Form Hook

## Impressions
I had been eyeing this for about a month before I bought it because reading a 400+ page book about the history of the library seemed like a big undertaking. Much to my surprise, it was a fun read and flowed nicely. I expected it to be much more pedantic than it was.

I do wish the contents were organized in a more structured timeline. I don't get why authors who write biographies or histories on something specific try and be creative with the structure by organizing the book by topic, like this one was, or in reverse-chronological order like *[Edison](https://www.amazon.com/Edison-Edmund-Morris/dp/081299311X)* was. This book wasn't completely random and followed a rough outline, but did not advance year to year. 

## Actionable Takeaways
1. A good description of a library could be: *making the genius of man public property.*
2. A good way to tell what's important to someone, or a group of people, is to look at where the store things in their home. If they have a special room for something, it's a good indication that whatever is in there means a lot. We can use this strategy to infer books and the process of writing was very important to monastic monks, because they had a dedicated room for this endeavor: the scriptorium. 
3. The earlier Stages of libraries had chains connected to books to prevent thieves from stealing anything. Once universities started displaying their books on shelves, the got rid of the chains to make it easier for people to study, but this also meant they lost more books. By 1338, over 300 of the mere 2,000 books in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.
4. Before the invention of the printing press, books were used as a display of wealth. But once they became cheaper to buy, this practice became less so. It's a good illustration of scarcity creating an appearance of wealth and also how, even hundreds of years ago, people still wanted to "show off."
5. Like with any technological advancement, the incumbents thought printed books were not as equal in value to books written by hand. Those critics were often those who were in the business of writing books by hand or who had an uptight taste. The everyday person didn't care whether it was written by hand or printed, they just wanted the value that could be found inside. This is a great illustration about how people don't care what technology is used to build something–they just want that thing.
6. Throughout history, libraries were always a big target during any war. People could steal books to sell them, sure. But what was of more value was changing the city's ideology, for what people read, they became. So if you want to influence a group of people, they realized one of the best places to do that was the library. So they got rid of any books that talked about "the old way" and replaced them with books that matched that attackers philosophy. We see this play out from the early 1000s even up to WW2.

## Notes
- [Pliny the Elder](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pliny_the_Elder), when talking about [Asinius](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Asinius_Pollio), the friend of Julius Cesear who would bring Ceser's plan for a library in Rome to fruition, said Asinius was "the first to make the genius of man public property." I quite like that description for a library.
- "A monk who works is troubled by only one devil, while a monk who is idle is troubled by many." This is similar to Newton's quote about resisting temptation by keeping busy with intellectual practices in *[The Clockwork Universe](https://www.daltonmabery.com/book-notes/the-clockwork-universe)*.
- After the fall of the Roman Empire disrupted the papyrus supply throughout the Mediterranean, parchment became the standard replacement. It was more expensive, but lasted longer and could be written on on both sides.
- The importance of books in the monastic life could be symbolized through the existence of the scriptorium or writing room. For no one ever dedicated a room to something that wasn't important. 
- Around the twelfth century, monasteries lost their monopoly on book collections and creations and universities took the reins. 
- The word *studio* is derived from the Latin *studium*, which describes a monk's cell. 
- Eventually, in the rooms of those colleges, books began to be put on display for anyone to use, rather than locked away in chests like they were in monasteries. This was a positive, for it made knowledge-sharing much easier and people could reference books in a much faster way. This also meant it was easier to lose books. By 1338, over 300 of the mere 2,000 books in the possession of the College of the Sorbonne had already disappeared.
- After the invention of the printing press, owning and collecting books no longer became a status symbol because it was much cheaper to get a book. Before, when things were produced by hand, they were much more expensive and it was a fun thing to "flex" on. That was no longer the case after the invention of the printing press.
	- "Ownership of a library no longer marked a man out as a member of the European social and political elite."
	- Paris became the center of printing in Northern Europe; in the south, it was Venice.
- Though some tried to make an argument that printed books weren't as "worthy" of books that were written by hand, owners didn't seem to mind: "Those buyers who bought a book for its text do not seem to have minded whether it came from a press or a pen."
- Whether the press had any role on the value of books is up for debate, but it certainly had an impact on the creation of libraries. Before the press, wealthy people wanted to make libraries to show off their wealth, but they were open for other people to use. But since the press made it much easier for anyone to get a book, the ruling class, the only people building libraries at the time, weren't as inclined to donate their generous books and money. 
- Fernando Colon was one of the first people to recognize building a library for what it is today: a place for all books on all subjects for all people in all languages. This was not the common attitude for most collector's of the day.
- We lost a lot of potential collections and libraries once the owner passed on. Though they had a plan and intention to pass it on to an heir, it was a common thread throughout history that the heir didn't want to bare the responsibility. It was much easier to just get a little pay day from the collections.
- The Reformation had a quite a lasting impact on libraries and it was the beginning of a common pattern that is still happening today. After the Protestant's rose up, a lot of the Catholic works were no longer accurate (which at that point, was a lot of Europe's book stock), so they got rid of the Catholic works in libraries and started to replace them with Protestant works. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 acknowledged King Henry as head of the Church of England. This granted him the power to dissolve monasteries and with it, a lot of their books. Later in 1550, another Act was passed that made owning of the former monastic books illegal, which only sped up the rate of destruction that was currently taking place. But it wasn't just Catholic works that were lost, because when you're in a frenzy of book burning, it's quite difficult to tell the difference between "secular manuscripts of historical importance and works of catholic theology."
- When Queen Mary took over, the reformed books act were reversed and everyone started stacking shelves with catholic works again. This wasn't as vicious of a process as before, but it did have an effect on Oxford and other colleges, for they were where those of the future were being taught. This was again reversed under Queen Elizabeth, which added space for more protestant works again. But to this day, "No Oxford colleges own any Protestant books acquired before the reign of Elizabeth." It makes sense though, for "Why would colleges spend money on books when the books might be confiscated or burned after the next reversal of royal policy?"
	- This pattern of one ideology ruling, burning the others books or trying to censor them, and someone else coming into power would be a running thread through history.
- Between 1550 and 1750, normal tradesmen such as doctors, lawyers, and merchants starting collecting more books. Essentially, they picked up where the monks left off. 
- By the middle of the 17th century, the Dutch Republic had become the center of the international book market. Book auctions had been around since the 15th Century, but the Dutch Republic were the first to separate books out from the rest of the estate. They also provided a printed catalogue people could look through ahead of time and come ready to bid. This had an interesting second order effect. Because books were now making much more money posthumously than before, people were much more encouraged to invest in books throughout their life, because they knew it could be used as a sort of an investment for their family when they passed.
- Thomas Bodley restored the Oxford library to what it is today completely on his own dime. He may have been the first to incorporate, strictly, the "silence rule" in libraries. By 1711, this rule had been adopted more widely; where the user in Amsterdam was greeted with this severe warning:
	- "You learned sir, who enter among books, don't slam the door with your tumultuous hand...here it's the dead who speak to them who work." (147)
- Libraries were a popular target to destroy during wars because what people read, they become. So if you wanted to change the culture, starting at the libraries was a good thing to do.
- The success of early public libraries depended on the degree of access and excitement of the leaders to treat it as a genuine public good, not just an off-shoot of their personal collection. **When someone cares about something, they make it last.**
- Starting around 1720, older books became much more valued. Hitherto, a book was valued solely on the contents of it, not when it was published, by whom it was written, or how it was published. This started to change around 1720, as people started to value older manuscripts and earlier printed books as much more valuable as later ones. 
- The Library Company of Philadelphia was the world's first subscription library. We can thank Benjamin Franklin for this beautiful addition to the library economy. It still flourishes to this day.
- Fiction became it's own industry around the 19th Century, even though it carried with it a sense of disrespectfulness and "childish" attitude. 
- Carnegie, with his generous donation of libraries in the Americas and Europe, truly inaugurated the golden age of the public library. 
- WW1 and WW2 destroyed many of Europe's great libraries and books.

## Quotes
- As with so many of the libraries we will meet in this book, neglect was a much more potent enemy than war or malice.
- Libraries were a private encyclopedia of the world's wisdom and follies.

<Subscribe />


512zzQOPOxL. SX416 BO1,204,203,200

The Library: A Fragile History

Let's pretend one day you find magic machine that could grant any lifestyle you asked it for. Professional golfer? Done. Star of *Pulp Fiction*? Say no more. Enlightened writer? Easy. Any lifestyle you wished to live could be yours upon demand.

But like with any magical box or genie, there's a catch: **The only thing it gave you was *exactly* what you asked it for.**

If you asked to be a star of *Pulp Fiction*, it could do that, but who knows what *Pulp Fiction* would become. It certainly wouldn't be the genre-breaking film it was. Perhaps it would be a book about orange juice, but hey, you'd be the star!

You could be a professional golfer, but it would be the year 1100 and golf would be nowhere near the sport it is today. It would take your prompt, but it would not give you the assumed preferences–the things you value and care about–unless you *specifically* asked for every single one.

Let's look at a more concrete example: that of a young couple wishing to get married, buy a house with a white picket fence, and have two kids with a dog. If this couple gave the machine with that criteria for a lifestyle, they would get their house with a white picket fence and two kids, but they might be the only people on their side of the Mississippi. Since they didn't specify they wanted a car–or any other technology for that matter–they wouldn't have it.

But for the purpose of this thought experiment, let's say before the young couple entered their lifestyle preferences into the machine, they had a teacher instruct them on the complications of it:

"Make sure to specify exactly the kind of lifestyle you want to live. If you want to live in Paris in the 1950s, make sure to specify you want to live in the 1950s Paris, just as it was in the real 1950s," says the teacher. "This machine will do *exactly* what you tell it to do with no assumed preferences or inherited human belief systems, so be specific and precise about the things you care about. Don't forget anything!"

Even on a good day, that couple isn't getting their lifestyle exactly as it is today. Maybe they have the technology that they have today, but since they didn't specify that they also wanted the ability to love, they now hate each other.

## Complexity of value
The task of defining your every preference is difficult. If you didn't follow along with that thought experiment, just imagine all the different ideals and preferences you have about your current lifestyle. When I say preferences, I don't mean drinking lattes over americanos, though that is a valid preference. Instead, I mean how you define love, the legacy you wish to leave behind, and your definition of living a "good life." You could try listing things for hours and you're guaranteed to miss at least a couple of preferences. 

This idea, the fact that our preferences and values cannot be explained with just a few sentences, is known as our **Complexity of value**. [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/complexity-of-value), a popular blog geared towards improving decision-making and reasoning, explains that it's impossible for human values to be "summed up by a few simple rules, or compressed."

This is true because of the [fragility of our human values](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GNnHHmm8EzePmKzPk/value-is-fragile). If we all woke up tomorrow and *kindness* didn't exist, the world would be *wildly* different. 99.999% of everything else in the world could be the exact same as it is today, but if we're missing kindness, or love, or humor, the world would cease to be the same. It might not be horrible, or evil, or bad, but it would most certainly be dull. Imagine a world without beauty. Everything, everywhere you look, was just one shade of black or gray. Not black *and* gray, but just different shades of either black *or* gray.

[Eliezer Yudkowsky](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliezer_Yudkowsky), a computer scientist who wrote the post cited above explaining the fragility of our value puts it this way:

> Consider the [incredibly important human value of "boredom"](https://www.lesswrong.com/lw/xr/in_praise_of_boredom/) - our desire not to do "the same thing" over and over and over again.  You can imagine a mind that contained _almost_ the whole specification of human value, almost all the morals and metamorals, but left out _just this one thing_ -
> 
> and so it spent until the end of time, and until the farthest reaches of its light cone, replaying a single highly optimized experience, over and over and over again
> 
> Or imagine a mind that contained almost the whole specification of which sort of feelings humans most enjoy - but not the idea that those feelings had important _external referents._  So that the mind just went around _feeling_ like it had made an important discovery, _feeling_ it had found the perfect lover, _feeling_ it had helped a friend, but not actually _doing_ any of those things - having become its own experience machine.  And if the mind pursued those feelings _and their referents,_ it would be a good future and true; but because this _one dimension_ of value was left out, the future became something dull.  Boring and repetitive, because although this mind _felt_ that it was encountering experiences of incredible novelty, this feeling was in no wise true.

Humans are complex. Our values might be even more so.

## Kolmogorov Complexity
If we want to get technical, which I always do, you can say that human values have a high Kolmogorov complexity. [The Kolmogorov Complexity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity) of something refers to the size of the shortest possible description of that thing. If the Kolmogorov Complexity is high, like we know our human values are, it's difficult to describe that thing in any shorter way than actually just actually saying that thing. Since our values are very complicated, we are unable to create a rule, theory, or formula to feed to the magical machine and say "Give us this lifestyle with these parameters," because we have to then go and define every single one of those parameters. It reminds me of that classic illustration where someone is blindfolded and they have to relay instructions to someone else on how to make a peanut butter and jelly, but the person making the sandwich does exactly what the boss tells them to do. If they say, "Put the peanut butter on the bread," but fail to mention anything about opening the peanut butter jar or taking bread out from the bag, the sandwich-maker might just put the peanut butter jar on top of the bag of bread and call it good. In this case, the Kolmogorov Complexity of making a PB&J is high.

Inversely, if something is low in Kolmogorov Complexity, its description can be shorter without sacrificing any detail.

Let's pretend you and I went out for Chinese food after a long day at the office. I don't like fortune cookies, so I gave you mine and said you could pick the best one. Here they are:

    dmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdmdm
    83jsns02u84nlw9jsn48anw2kfmv8940

After reading both of them, I ask you what the first one said. You could say, `"It says dm 32 times"`, which is only a 19 character response and is a simple description. Now I ask you what the second one said. The only real way to describe it is to say aloud the random string of characters exactly as they appear.

So naturally, *the first set is less complex than the second set* because the description of the first set is shorter (without sacrificing any detail) than the actual output. If for some reason I wanted to copy the fortunes, you could have said "Write dm 32 times." That's a very short input for the same output.

Conversely, what you might say for the second string, "Write `83jsns02u84nlw9jsn48anw2kfmv8940` ", is longer than the original output, so the Kolmogorov Complexity is high. It's interesting, though, that the complexity of any string cannot be much higher than the length of the string itself. Even with our high complexity string, the input is only 6 more characters long.

## Why this matters
Calculating the Kolmogorov Complexity of a 32 character strings is not exciting, but when using Kolmogorov Complexity as a model as to how the world works, it gets fun. You start to understand the intricacies of everyday life and see how the world is actually really complicated, no matter what someone else says. It's hard to accurately represent something using just a map or description of that thing. As you start to realize that more and more, you become aware of all the possible, "Oh and this too"'s that are in the world.

battle scene 2000.159.1

An attempt to understand the Kolmogorov Complexity of human values

I chose to read a 500+ page biography on a strange renaissance artist because, [much like Einstein](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/albert-einstein), I was fascinated with how he approached the world through curiosity. I read Isaacson's biography of [Einstein](https://www.daltonmabery.com/book-notes/einstein-his-life-and-universe) first, and he made comments about how da Vinci's life was filled with even more wonder and curiosity than Einstein's, and I wanted to know how, what that was like, and how I can do the same.

It turns out it's simple: Never complete what you say you're going to and spend years perfecting every intricate detail of your work. Easy, right?

Joke aside, da Vinci was infamous for not completing most of his commissions (more on that later) and was also known for spending hours perfecting the stroke of a tiny rock in the background that the normal layman would probably never see. But this isn't what made him so intelligent and wise in a broad array of fields. Oh no. That, he can thank his "relentless curiosity" for. His goal in life, above being an amazing painter, war machine architect, or city designer, was to know "everything there was to know about the world." Although he didn't quite get there, it wasn't for a lack of trying.

✓

How did da Vinci's life start?
------------------------------

Being born out of wedlock in 1400s Italy didn't leave a lot of options for the son of a multi-generation notary. It was custom in that day for the sons of tradesmen to acquire the skills of the father, but da Vinci didn't have that luxury since he was illegitimate. That fact also made it very difficult to engage in proper schooling, which da Vinci lacked. Most people would attempt to use this as a crutch against him later in life. But to him, it was a strength. What he did didn't require *words* but *experience*, which he learned early on how to become an apprentice of. Da Vinci, going against the typical image of the "Renaissance Man" that loved acquiring knowledge and wisdom from lost work, once wrote:

> He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water jar.

As he matured though, it became clear that knowledge is neither all experience or past wisdom, but a combination of both.

Though da Vinci lacked education in the traditional sense, he did attend an abacus school to learn useful skills in math and commerce. It was here that he learned the value of thinking about subjects through analogies and patterns, which became "for him a rudimentary method of theorizing."

It was after, where he got an apprenticeship in [Verrocchio's workshop](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_del_Verrocchio), that his true genius began to shine.

On da Vinci's art
-----------------

One critique I have with the book is that Isaacson doesn't go into much detail about how da Vinci got into the different paths of life. Nevertheless we know da Vinci became an apprentice of Andrea del Verrocchio (1435 - 1488) at about 14 years old, but it seems he was mostly a natural.

The first painting da Vinci worked on with Verrocchio was *[The Baptism of Christ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Baptism_of_Christ_%28Verrocchio_and_Leonardo%29)*. It's believed he worked on the leftmost angel because of its soft facial features, which the other subjects in the painting are not graced with.

Being a disciple of experience, da Vinci noticed when he looked at something in real life, it wasn't obvious where one object ended and another began, like it is so often painted in pictures. It's hard to describe what he saw, but he didn't think there should be a harsh boundary between different objects in paintings. This lead him to embrace a painting technique called *[sfumato](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sfumato)*. The word, derived from the Italian word for smoke, *fumo*, can be roughly translated to "soft, vague, or blurred." It makes the painting look very airy and kind of smashed together.

This was just one example of da Vinci's acute observational skills represented in his paintings. He wrote in a notebook:

> If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory.

The genius of Da Vinci isn't realized in his incredible observational skills about how the world works though. Instead, it was realized in his ability to make those observations appear on a canvas. This was the true genius.

When he had an idea for a new painting, he would think about what type of social setting and emotion the piece should illustrate. When he got his answer, he would go to the places that held that type of emotion and observe how people behave, how their bodies are positioned, and what their faces look like. Then, "he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying on his belt." But da Vinci didn't just recreate that scene on a canvas. He used that as a starting point in reality and would add imagination and fantasy to make the painting truly come alive. Isaacson notes:

> Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy

Leonardo's artistic genius is undoubted, but his business suave could have been a bit better. He seemed to get by okay, but was never truly rich because he couldn't finish most of the pieces he was commissioned to do. There's no *real* reason why this happened, but there are some hypothesis.

One hypothesis is that *what could be* excited Leonardo much more than *what was*. He got so excited about an idea when he thought of it that he abandoned everything else he was working on. This cycle just continued. Isaacson wrote, "he was a genius undisciplined by diligence."

Another example could be that da Vinci wasn't about "the grind." He preferred to work very little and follow his curiosity about the world instead. This was found in one of his notebooks:

> Men of loft genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Another reason he may have not been able to finish paintings, was because his ideas were so close to reality, they could never be pulled off to the degree of perfection Leonardo expected of himself. So, he got as far as he could on some paintings and then just stopped. He didn't like to finish pieces because he would inevitably learn a new technique or fact about how a body should be positioned that he could use to make the piece better. To him, nothing was more beautiful than representing Nature like it ought to be represented:

> Though human ingenuity may make various inventions it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous.

An example of this relentless perfectionism can be seen by examining *St. Jerome in the Wilderness.* This painting was done in two phases: the first being in 1480 when he started the painting and the second being in 1510. Under infrared analysis of the painting, one can see there were dual neck muscles and other parts added in 1510 that were not part of the original drawing. The muscles and parts added seem to align with the anatomical discoveries da Vinci was making through his autopsies (coming soon). This implied he started the painting in 1480, but then changed it *30 years later* to add small neck muscles that he didn't know existed before. His perfectionism was a virtue, but it was also his vice.

So back to the autopsies. Da Vinci was so much a disciple of experience that he dissected some 300+ bodies throughout his lifetime. This wasn't some crazy fantasy for him though, he wanted to understand the layout of the human body so he knew which muscles moved which body parts. He also did a detailed analysis of the skull and brain.

He made very, very detailed drawings of his work and debated with himself about writing a treatise on the anatomy of the human body. He discovered things about how the body works centuries before someone would make the "real" discovery. But because Leonardo didn't have the organizational skills, drive, or desire to publish many of his writings or drawings, he didn't get credit for them until they were discovered.

Lesson: Be more curious
-----------------------

Da Vinci never intended to be a famous painter and artist, he simply went about his life as he thought he should and had some lucky breaks along the way. So even though he didn't intend for his life to come under a microscope 500 years later, there is one thing we can learn when we do so: **to observe and be curious about the little things in life more often**.

Isaacson writes:

> I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.

He continued:

> Yes, he was a genius: wildly imaginative, passionately curious, and creative across multiple disciplines. His genius was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.

If we look at Leonardo for a thesis on how to approach life, he might say to do so "with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders."

That, Mr. da Vinci, I will strive to do.

91Ey0+6N-LL

Book Review: da Vinci

I like schedules.

I like to be able to look at my week and know exactly what I'm doing when and what I'm supposed to be working on.

This is a beneficial attribute of mine, but at the same time it’s tormenting because it makes it nearly impossible to completely relax and take time off.

For the past four weeks though, I've been able to incorporate a time of deliberate leisure and it's delightful. Here's what I do:

During July and August, the company I work for is taking Fridays off. It's very nice. Not just because you have a three day weekend, but because the work week is only four days. Instead of using that Friday as a bonus Saturday, I've been using it to leisure deliberately. For me, that means planning a very structured day of rest.

I sleep in an hour later than normal, so I'm up around 6:00 or 6:30 am.

Once I wake up, I make my coffee and read for about an hour. I then take care of my dog and head to the gym. I workout for an hour but spend extra time in the hot tub and sauna to relax and think about my week. I then shower and head to my favorite coffee shop.

I order a bagel sandwich with an extra fried egg, bacon, and no tomato aioli with an iced pour over. While I wait for my sandwich, I unpack my backpack that contains my laptop, two or three books, my notebook, and headphones. I then scroll Instapaper to catch up on anything I saved that week. Articles that look interesting I read and those that seem boring I archive. I continue reading Instapaper while I finish my scrumptious bagel.

Once I'm finished with my breakfast, I put on my headphones, listen to brown noise, and read one of the books I'm currently working through. I typically read one for an hour or so and then move on to another book to spice things up. I like to stay for 3 or 4 hours, but sometimes I get much too hungry and can't focus. Whenever my stomach comes knockin', I head home for lunch and TV. If I'm up for it, I'll make another cup of coffee and read some more, write, and do some programming until about 4 or 5. At that point, my wife and I decide what we want for dinner (usually take out on Fridays), pick a movie, open up a cold beer (sometimes), and watch away.

I love it. For me, it’s true leisure, real otium. It’s not about sleeping in, having donuts for breakfast and binge watching Stranger Things for the third time. None of that is a true act of rest, it’s just an attempt to numb the mind in hopes you forget about your problems for a while.

Instead, a day (or time period) of deliberate leisure is a day filled with things you love but things that also make you feel refreshed and productive. Personally, the days I learn the most are the days I end up feeling the most refreshed.

Creating space for this routine was hard for me when I only had Saturday and Sunday off because I had errands to run, a honey-do list, or a side project to work on. But now, Fridays act as a buffer for me and I've been able to truly rest.

This wasn't a post to make you feel like you have to have Fridays off to leisure deliberately. Instead, it was meant as an exercise to recognize what truly makes me feel "rested" and to start thinking about how I can do this on a Saturday or Sunday morning when we go back to 5-day workweeks.

To figure that out for yourself, run a thought experiment planning a day full of deliberate leisure. Next, look at the different parts of the day and think about which you value the most. Is it sleeping in? Making breakfast with your partner? Going to dinner with family or friends? Whatever it is, try to do that once every other week, if not more often.

The part I value the most is reading at the coffee shop. Whenever I’m there, time withers away and I'm no longer focused on the next thing. Luckily, nothing is stopping me from getting there right when they open (just in time for my favorite lemon-blueberry scone to come out of the oven) and reading for an hour and a half on a Saturday morning. That would be enough time for me to feel relaxed and refreshed, but not take up too much of the day.

I'm sure there's something small like that you value just as equally that could be incorporated somewhere in your weekly routine. How should we expect ourselves to work deliberately if we don't leisure deliberately?


FYNW88QUUAAsSV2

Deliberare Otium

When it comes to our ideas and mindsets, we're one of three personalities.

We're either a preacher, a prosecutor, or a politician.

Preacher mode comes out when our long-held, sacred beliefs are in jeopardy. We preach elegant messages and illustrations to protect and promote our precious ideas.

Prosecutor mode reveals itself when we see mishaps, flaws, or illogical thinking in someone else's argument. We do everything we can to prove them wrong and win our case.

Finally we all become "influential" politicians when we're trying to win over a crowd or an audience. We flash a smile, crack some jokes (or laugh at their corny jokes), all in hopes they will choose our idea to start thinking.

## The Danger

But there's danger in each of these. As Adam Grant puts it in the book, "**The risk is that we become so wrapped up in preaching that we're right, prosecuting others who are wrong, and politicking for support that we don't bother to rethink our own views."**

Once we choose how to think of something, we often stick to that mindset no matter the evidence that presented to us.

So instead of being a stupid "P", Grant proposes we need to all be scientists. Don't worry, you don't have to quit your job and go buy a white lab coat, although you could. Instead, being a scientist means to search for truth, embrace evidence that seems to differ from your current position, and run experiments and tests to discover what the world holds beyond the views you've held for the past twenty years.

If you change your mind in preacher mode, it's a sure sign of weakness. But in scientist mode, it shows you have intellectual integrity.

But what if we're in scientist mode, have the data and research, but can't get other people to change their mind. Then what do we do?

<Callout title="Note" Content={Note, there are times when preaching and prosecuting make the argument stronger. Grant puts it this way, "Research suggests that the effectiveness of these approaches hinges on three key factors: how much people care about the issue, how open they are to our particular argument, and how strong-willed they are in general"} />

Through an incredible story about how Steve Jobs was first resistant to creating the iPhone, Grant demonstrates there is power in arguing what will stay the same. Change is scary. People might think if things are going well in the moment, why change what we're doing now? But when you affirm what's going to stay the same through this change, they're more open to hearing and enacting your idea. They realize, "Oh, not that much is *actually* changing. A,B,C, and D are all staying the same, we're just changing E. Sure, let's try it."

## Counterfactual Thinking

If reinforcing what will stay the same won't help, you could try leading them down a path to imagine a world in which their lives circumstances would have unfolded differently. This is what psychologists call "Counterfactual thinking."

It's easy to forget how influential things like where we were born, who raised us, or where we went to school can be on our thinking. If you can successfully get someone to understand how easy they might have held different initial opinions or stereotypes, they might be much more willing to change their view.

If you're in a heated debate, argument, or conflict at work (or elsewhere), it can helpful to ask, "What evidence would change you mind?" Because sometimes, that answer is nothing. And that's okay. I don't know about you, but I'd rather know that before I spend hours investing in trying to do so.

## The Confident Impostor

I played baseball for 15 years as a child (My goal was to play in college, but I had other plans I guess.)

No matter where we played or who we played against, there was always the teammate or parent on the bleachers who thought they could do a better job of coaching the time than the actual coach. Sometimes they honestly might have been able to, there weren't many requirements for being a baseball coach in travel ball. But most of the time, they weren't.

That's what's called the armchair quarterback. The parent or fan who thinks they know how to do a better job than the actual coach. Armchair quarterbacks confidence exceeds competence.

On the other end of the spectrum is the imposter syndrome. This is a bit more common than the armchair quarterback but people who have imposter syndrome's competence exceeds their confidence. They are actually really good at what they do, but don't believe in themselves enough or don't want others to think they are good.

Obviously either end of that spectrum is negative. If your confidence exceeds your competence, you're just a jerk. But if you're competence exceeds your confidence, you won't get anything done and no one will trust you. So the ideal amount of confidence lies somewhere in the middle. Your competence and your confidence need to be in sync. You have to be confident in your ability to achieve a goal in the future, yet humble enough to question whether you have the right tools or you're the right person for the job.

It's when someone *lacks* skills in a certain area that they're afraid to ask for help or for someone else to do it. When someone tries and forces them to change their mind, they just double down. If that person is leading your team, you're headed straight for a nose dive that ends in a fiery crash.

Humility is a reflective lens: It helps us see weaknesses clearly. Confident humility is a corrective lens: it enables us to overcome those weaknesses.

## You Are Not Your Ideas

When we think we know better than someone else, it's not just the armchair quarterback doing all that work by themselves. He's got a teammate and that teammate is the totalitarian ego.

The totalitarian ego is like a mini-dictator living inside your head, sitting right next to that pesky little armchair quarterback. Their job is to control the facts that flow into our heads, swatting down anything that disproves our hypothesis about a topic.

This happens in a two-step process:

First, the opinions that we hold are shielded in "filter bubbles." These filter bubbles get bigger and bigger with the more information that *proves* our opinion; and with the bubble grows the ego.

Once these opinions are reinforced by enough confirming data, they're sealed behind an impenetrable safe that forms an echo chamber of information  only saying what we want it to say. Sound familiar?

There's only one cure to this totalitarian ego and it comes from Daniel Kahneman -- detachment.

As a psychologist, Kahneman doesn't go a day without thinking of a new, weakly held opinion. But also as a psychologist, his job is to look at the studies, interpret the data, and see if his hypothesis was right. And if it wasn't, change it. The only way he's able have so many fleeting ideas is that he refuses to let his beliefs become apart of his identity.

One practical way to go about this tomorrow is whenever you form a new idea, opinion, or hypothesis about how something works, ask yourself, "What would have to happen to prove this false?"

71K+FclxRdL

Book Summary - Think Again by Adam Grant

![aae25daf-898c-4951-a0d5-139b1460db35 3590x3559](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5Guq0hhOnzCTnnx6LqS2K4/8d4126494ec55417763724798ee5ac09/aae25daf-898c-4951-a0d5-139b1460db35_3590x3559.webp)
I.

Obviously named after Galileo Galilei, Galilean relativity states that the laws of physics should be the same in all inertial reference frames. Inertial reference frames means any frame of reference that isn’t accelerating or decelerating. If either of those are the case, there is no experiment that can “prove” someone in one frame is really moving and someone else in another isn’t because the laws of physics are the same in both instances.

For example, someone in a plane 30,000 feet in the air could say the plane is stationary and the earth is moving away from it. Someone on the ground could say the plane is moving and the earth is stationary. With Galilean relativity in mind, they’re both right because they can’t perform an experiment that clearly determines one is moving and one isn’t.

It sounds obvious to us now, but to Galileo and his peers, it was revolutionary. Galileo thought about it like this:

“Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship,” Galileo wrote. If the ship was moving at a constant speed in one direction and you dropped a ball, it would drop to your feet in a perfectly straight line. But a fish outside of the boat, let’s say with x-ray vision (we’re thinking hypotheticals here folks), would see the ball move down and forward, even though you yourself didn’t see that change. If the ship didn’t have any portholes and you just woke up below decks and couldn’t remember how you got there, you would not be able to tell if you were on dry land “standing still”, or moving. That’s Galilean relativity and it helped explain why we can’t feel the motion of the earth.

But it also explains an existential crisis each of face at least once in our own lives, if not more.

II.

You see, in Galilean relativity the motion has to be constant because as soon as we felt the acceleration or deceleration, we’d know we’re the ones in motion.

This phenomenon helps explain why after being stuck somewhere for too long in life, we feel like we’re not moving forward. Whether you’re living in your hometown you swore to escape as soon as you could, or working the same job you are when you graduated college, or hanging out with the same group of friends you’ve had since middle school, a long period of constant motion makes us dull to the experiences of life’s motions. On the other hand, this is why starting a new job, getting into a new relationship, or moving somewhere new makes you feel alive. That acceleration reminds you that you are actually in motion–it’s just a bit slower at some points than at others.

This sounds a bit sad, but it’s actually quite encouraging. Galilean relativity helps explain why college feels like such a drag of doing the same thing for four years until that exciting day of graduation. You’re moving at a slow, constant speed freshmen - junior year which makes it difficult to notice how far you’ve come until you get to the destination. Then you get to senior year and it flies by because at least once a week you get a jolt of acceleration through job interviews, filling out graduation paperwork, and experiencing those bittersweet Friday nights. Somehow, it feels like you just moved into your dorm last month and four years just went by in an instant. Though that didn’t practically happen, it did in theory.

Everyday you woke up, went to class, went to work, studied, and went to sleep. That cycle moved you forward at a constant speed, making the same amount of progress each day, but you just never noticed. You were like the person beneath decks of a ship with no portholes. Friends and family members, on the other hand, were able to see your slow, steady progress the whole time. To them, college really did feel like four years.

Obviously since this is all a theory, I’m hesitant to provide any thing further than making an observation, but I will say if you’re struggling with the effects of Galilean relativity in your everyday life, try to force some functions of acceleration. This could be (again, just proposing how this might work) taking a vacation, trying something you’ve always wanted to try, learning a new hobby, or anything else that could remind yourself that you’re actually in motion, though it may be little, and slowly moving forward.

Question is: are you going where you want to end up, or have you just been hanging on to the tide?

Galileo, astonished by changes in the face of the earth, from 'News of the day,' published in Le Charivari, February 21, 1867

aae25daf-898c-4951-a0d5-139b1460db35 3590x3559

Why you feel stuck in life

I was reminded of this beautiful hymn I listened to during an extended period of my morning devotions in 2019. I later learned it was a hymn sung during Maundy Thursday, the day in which Jesus washed the disciples feet. Here is the original Latin paired with the English translation:

![Screen Shot 2022-07-24 at 7.38.06 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5ACsy9ewz0eAkmTs8ednYt/1e8e0fe6a3a4df21fd6beabe9a4d35a1/Screen_Shot_2022-07-24_at_7.38.06_PM.png)

[This is a beautful version of it](https://open.spotify.com/track/00hBlI8O2jJyJjaQFQyrHA?si=c0f4c1917e704b72), sung by Audrey Assad.

Screen Shot 2022-07-24 at 7.38.06 PM

Ubi Caritas

## Notes

During the 1650s and 60s, the universal view at the time was that the world had been falling apart since Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. Any time disaster struck, it was because God was angry at the Europeans. This is why floods and earthquakes are still called, "acts of God."

The custom of saying "Bless you" dates from 1660s England. When someone would sneeze, it was thought of as the first sign of the bubonic plague. Saying "bless you" was a gesture to hope you didn't suffer and die.

The Royal Society was one of the first groups to welcome experiments to test ideas. At the time, accepted wisdom and eye-witness testimony of the past was the most credible form of "evidence." Anyone going against the grain and trying to seek out something "new," was not doing what they should be doing.

The Royal Society also created the idea of expressed knowledge and to do experiments in public and to share what you discover with others. Until then, discoveries and intricacies of fields were kept secret for only those who were "worthy". One might tell someone about their discovery or find, but the details were written in code, only to be used if someone tried to argue them. The early group of the Royal Society would have understood Gore Vidal's remark, "it is not enough to succeed. Others must fail."

The first time a major scientific discovery was announced in print via a periodical, was Newton's observation that white light actually contains all colors of the spectrum. He did so in a 1672 edition of *Philosophical Transactions*, the first ever scientific journal and that was started by the Royal Society.

"Planet" is Greek for *wanderer*.

Greek physics began by dividing its subject into two pieces:\
1.) One was the cosmos above, where motion represents the natural state of things and goes on forever.\
2.) The other was Earth, where *rest* is the natural state of things and motion must have an explanation.

After Galileo and Newton, science would "communicate in the language of mathematics, the measure of quantity," a language "in which no terms exist for good or bad, kind or cruel... or will and purpose and hope." The word *force* would cease meaning "personal power" and instead mean *mass X acceleration*.

Upon the invention of the telescope, Galileo made sure to point out the warfare uses first, even though he knew the true beauty would be in looking at the heavens with it. But this got the general public excited about what he saw and they understood it merely makes far away images look closer, and doesn't make a mirage of something. If he didn't do that, people may have excused his findings, blaming a technical error on the telescope.

**The Great Chain of Being** - a Seventeenth Century idea that all objects that had ever been created, from sand to angels, had a particular rank in a great chain that extended from the lowest to the low to the God's right hand. In this vein, there was a strange dichotomy between God being a mathematician and designing everything beautifully, and God allowing randomness to play (dichotomy because the physicists chose the former and biologists chose the later, but I'm not sure how they are mutually exclusive.)

Pythagoras discovered that there was a harmony in music if the instruments that were making the sound were similar in ratio. For example, if a blacksmith hit a piece of iron with a 12 pound hammer and the same piece of iron with a 6 pound hammer, the sound would be harmonious. But not if he hit the iron with a 9 pound hammer.

Was math invented or discovered? The Greeks came to say discovered, but it's an interesting thought.

-   On the one hand, geometry and algebra as concepts are clearly invented by humans. When have you ever gone for a walk and tripped over a 3?

-   On the other, what could be more obvious than that the truths of mathematics are facts about the world, whether or not humans catch on to them at all. If two dinosaurs were drinking water and two more came to join them, would that not meant there were four dinosaurs all together?

There are only five "Platonic Solids," three-dimensional objects where each face is symmetrical and all the faces are identical.

Though Kepler's incessant shape-rotating proved to be sort of useless, he did provide one correct answer in his *Mystery of the Universe.* Since he mapped each orbit of the planets getting bigger and bigger as you got further from the sun, that had to have meant it was moving slower. Therefore, whatever force *propelled* the planets around the sun must have grown weaker with distance. Before Kepler, the works of the sky had been descriptive and predictive, not explanation. No one before him had thought to ask *how the planets move about their courses*.

#### Kepler's Laws:

1.  The planets travel around the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one focus.

2.  The line from a planet to the sun is always equal in area in equal times. So the line from where a planet was one day 1 to the sun and where that planet was on day 10 to the sun can be connected and form a triangle. That area is always equal during an equal time period.

3.  His third law is confusing, but the speed of planets can be multiplied by the length of the year raised to the 3/4th power. *Note: I'm not sure I've been given a clear definition.*

Any object launched into the air--arrow, bullet, cannonball--travels in a curved path like a parabola. The moving object covers the same horizontal distance during each second of its flight.

Horizontal movement of a falling object and vertical movement of a falling object are always independent of one another. This means the horizontal speed of something doesn't impact the vertical speed and so on. So a bullet fired from a gun and a bullet dropped below the gun, let go at the same time, will hit the ground at exactly the same time. If you launch something like this from a high enough altitude, and by the time it falls 4 feet the earth would have dropped 4 feet due to its curvature. This would continue happening, the object falling and falling and the earth curving and curving. This is how a satellite works.

The Law of Pendulums--a pendulum takes the same time to swing through a small arc as through a large one.

In the mind of Aristotle, math and science were to be used to understand the physical, real world better. There was no point in talking about a sphere rolling forever or weights falling in a vacuum because it wouldn't affect the day to day life. In Galileo's view, this was backward. The way to better understand the world was to look beyond those day to day distractions and focus instead on the deeper truths that governed those things. Even though there may never be a vacuum in nature, understanding how things react in a vacuum helps to understand those day to day interactions. It's here that the concept of *abstraction* is so important, it was a means by seeing truth unadorned by sinful man.

Zeno, the famed Greek philosopher, had tripped up those who came after him with his strange fables. Often, they had to do with motion and time, usually infinity specifically. It was difficult to find an answer to those fables, though philosophers debated for ages. Eventually, the Greeks decided they'd stay away from motion and time all together. This could be a reason as to why they seemed so infant in motion and time theories.

-   Galileo was the first to come up with a sort of definition, being: If a small section of a larger set of numbers is the same size as the large set. But even he didn't go much further than this observation/insight.

-   Eventually, they were able to find a conclusion to Zeno's problem. If they added up 1 and then 1/2 and then 1/4 and then 1/8 and then 1/16 and so on, the number would hit it's limit at about 2 - it would never go higher than that. So they concluded it would take 2 seconds to get to the other side of the room. This also helped solve the "speed at X distance problem". Before, they would decrease to a smaller and smaller limit: "X speed between 12 and 12:30, between 12 and 12:15, and so on. They realized this too had a limit and that would be the approximated speed at X distance."

Calculus is the Latin word for *pebble.* A reference to the heaps of stones once used as a calculating aid in addition and multiplication.

God could have made humans as intelligent as dogs. The world may be a bit happier that way, because we wouldn't be able to understand and conceive of evil, cancer, sickness, or disaster--but this assumes God's intention was to create a happy, meaningless world. Surely that wasn't God's goal. So this begs the question, *what is God's goal?* Why would he give us the capability and capacity to understand the good and the bad things of this world, but be able to do only very little about them all. Essentially, we're living at the mercy of them. God had conceived every possible universe, and this was the best one, given the boundaries God put on himself (not the boundaries that were on God). If he designed us in a way that we only chose good and never evil, we may be great but we'd be completely autonomous beings.

v = 32t is the only equation we need to determine the speed of a falling object at any give time. Where v is velocity and t is time elapsed.

Acceleration is a measure of how fast velocity is changing. Velocity is a measure of how fast position is changing. And position (my words here) is a measure of how fast everything around an object is changing in relation to that object.

## Quotes

The group was one of curious men studying the heavens and scribbling in their notebook.

God was a mathematician, seventeenth-century scientists firmly believed. He had written His laws in a mathematical code. Their task was to find the key.

On Newton's lack of travel: "The man who explained the tides never saw the sea" p.48

"To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature. If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in." -- Richard Feynman

Change came not from finding new answers to old questions but from abandoning the old questions, unanswered, in favor of new, more fruitful ones.

Aristotle had asked *why*. Galileo has asked *how*. Aristotle's *why* explained the world. Galileo's *how* described it.

What is a man in the midst of infinity? -- Pascal

Both telescope and microscope had opened up new worlds. The new vistas served to reinforce the belief that on every scale the universe was a flawless, harmonious, and unimaginably complex mechanism.

Only those who themselves have wandered lost, wrote Einstein, know the misery and joy of "the years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding."

"The mission of science was to honor God and the best way to pay homage was to discover and proclaim the perfection of his plans."

The discovery of Pythagoras' Theorem was so amazing because:\
- One, Simply by thinking, without using any real tools, they had discovered one of nature's secrets, and eternal and never-before suspected truth about the structure of the world.\
- Second, they could prove it. Unlike other observations, this was definitely provable and not just true but *necessarily* true. "One of God's thoughts, finally grasped by man."

Abstraction is the pathway to truth.

"As a blind man has no idea of colors, so have we no idea of the manner by which the all-wise God perceives and understands all things" -- Newton

"A world with sin was better than a world without choice."

Giant wars are fought on narrow battlegrounds.

"For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb" -- Aldous Huxley

9449985

The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick

Love is cruel mistress.

It’s a unique experience that opens up our hearts and minds to a place we didn’t know existed. A place far beyond our imagination, but somewhere we conjured up. A place filled with mountains of joy, streams of smiles, and fields of laughter depressingly contrasted by the valleys of sorrow and the rivers of pain.

Love may bring us to a high place we’ve never been before, but it also tears us down to a low we didn’t know existed. A place we know how bad it hurts, but a place we leave ourselves open to experiencing once more, for to forfeit the pain, we must also forfeit the joy.

It’s this experience of how good it would be combined with the fear and trouble of how bad it could be that leaves us open to not just love, but wonder and amazement about what this mathematically-beautiful world is and where it came from. Because it is only those who have wandered lost, in the words of Einstein, who know the mystery and joy of

> [T]he years of searching in the dark for a truth that one feels but cannot express; the intense desire and the alternations of confidence and misgiving, until one breaks through to clarity and understanding.

It is those whom this newsletter is for: the curious, adventure-seeking humans who refuse to be content with the disarray of information, facts, and figures that populate our everyday experience. It’s for those who have caught themselves more than once gazing at the sea of lights in our night sky wondering what’s out there? And for those who have been starstruck by the glorious sight of the face of the man on the moon piercing back into their eyes as they thank the gray hunk of what was once earth for keeping our little planet so safe to live our puny little lives on.

It’s for those wonderers. Those seekers. Those who are kept up at night thinking about the Atoms of the Universe.


My Manifesto

## Impressions
I could not have been happier with the few hours I spent reading this book. How da Vinci's life ebbs and flows through his curiosity is a whirlwind of unbelievable stories. This book encouraged me to do two things:

1.) **Write more on physical paper.** Isaacson explained how much easier it was to piece parts of da Vinci's life together because most of his journals were still around, unlike most of Steve Job's writing.

2.) **Continue to be unashamedly curious.** Da Vinci wrote down things like "describe the tongue of a woodpecker" in his notebook multiple times. Some of the research was for a painting, but most of it was to soothe his insatiable curiosity. I aim to do the same.

## Takeaways
-  da Vinci's goal in life, through his practice of art and study of science, was no less than to know "everything there was to know about the world."
- Kenneth Clark called da Vinci "the most relentlessly curious man in history."
- He didn't have any traditional education and learning with art, science, or math. Some people would use this as a crutch against him, saying he didn't really know what he was talking about. But he famously whipped back saying what he does doesn't require words, it requires experience. So, Leonardo became a disciple of experience early on. As he got more curious, he learned to use others books and advice better to blend with his experience for the ultimate learning machine. He wrote in a notebook, "He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water jar." Isaacson went on to write, "This makes him different from the archetypal Renaissance Man, who embraced the rebirth of wisdom that came from rediscovered works of classical antiquity." Eventually, though, he realized that **knowledge is a mix between acquired wisdom and life experience.**
- The leading thinkers of Florence "embraced a Renaissance humanity that put its faith in the dignity of the individual and in the aspiration to find happiness on this earth through knowledge."
- Leonardo's only formal education was through an abacus school, where he learned useful math skills for commerce. One skill that was emphasized mainly was how to draw analogies between cases. "Analogies and spotting patterns became for him a rudimentary method of theorizing."
- As a left-hander, da Vinci wrote from right to left on a page and each letter was facing backwards. Often, they had to be read with a mirror. (p. 32)
- One defining method of his works in art is the realistic appearance of light and shadows. He observed greatly how things *should* look in real life and then figured out a way to make that happen on a canvas. But, he never let the realities limit his imagination of what was able to be accomplished in a painting. Reality informed his paintings, but it *never* constrained them.
- A sometimes surprising fact of the life of Leonardo is that he started many, many more works than he actually finished. He was a great artist, but a horrible business man. A hypothesis as to why this is was that his ideas were so close to reality, they could never be pulled off to the degree of perfection Leonardo expected of himself. So he got as far as he could on some paintings and then just stopped. Another reason this happened was because what could be excited Leonardo much more than what was. He got so excited about an idea when he thought of it that he abandoned everything else he was working on. This cycle just continued. 'He was a genius undisciplined by diligence.' He was afraid to call a painting completed, for he knew he would learn something new eventually that would make the piece better.
- da Vinci was not motivated at all by wealth or luxury. In one of his notebooks he wrote, "men who desire nothing but material riches and are absolutely devoid of the desire for wisdom, which is the sustenance and truly dependable wealth of the mind."
- da Vinci's *Virtuvian Man* was birthed from a treatise written by Virtruvius, a Roman military officer and engineer from the first century B.C. What his work did for Leonardo was that it gave a concrete example of the Renaissance humanism: "the relationship between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of the earth" p.149
- da Vinci, unlike Einstein, struggled with theory, thought experiments, and abstract concepts. He preferred to look at the effects of something and deduce the cause instead of knowing the case and thinking about what effects it may have.
- da Vinci started to work on many problems that he could, and we haven't still, solved. But he showed there is at least a value to trying because even if we may never know how to solve them, it's important to understand why we wouldn't.
	- Lots of examples in page 199 of da Vinci creating something years before it became mainstream. And another on p.272
- Mastery requires focusing intently on the little details.
- Contrary to popular belief, Leonardo was not an individual artist working like a mad genius in his workshop. Instead, he would devise a painting and his assistants worked on it with him to make multiple copies. Sometimes they were duplicates. Other times, though, they were identical in message but differed in form.
- Leonardo thought through sketching. It's a process called "componimento inculto" - an uncultivated composition that helps work out ideas through an intuitive process.
- "America" is named so after Amerigo Vespucci, cousin of Agostino Vespucci, who landed in Brazil with Columbus during his third voyage and correctly surmised they had graced a new continent. #idea 
- Leonardo magically transformed "complexity into elegance" through his anatomical drawings. Similarly, great writers are able to magically transform complex subjects, ideas, and philosophies into a beautiful elegance.

<Subscribe />

## Quotes
- His curiosity was pure, personal, and delightfully obsessive.
- Yes, he was a genius: wildly imaginative, passionately curious, and creative across multiple disciplines. His genius was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation.
- Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.
- I [Isaacson] did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.
- Like so many writers and artists, da Vinci grew up feeling a part of the world but also detached. 
- Florence's festive culture was spiced by the ability to inspire those with creative minds to combine ideas from disparate disciplines.
- There was harmony in proportions, and math was nature's brushstroke.
- "Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body."
- "Pleasure and pain are represented as twins, because there is never one without the other." - Leonardo
- Leonardo's *Vitruvian Man* embodies a moment when art and science combined to allow mortal minds to probe timeless questions about who we are and how we fit into the grand order of the universe.
- Ideas are often generated in physical gathering places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. 
- da Vinci's "uncanny abilities to engage in a dialogue between experience and theory made him a prime example of how acute observations, fanatic curiosity, experimental testing, a willingness to question dogma, and the ability to discern patterns across disciplines can lead to great leaps in human understanding."
- "His curiosity, like that of Einstein, often was about phenomena that most people over the age of ten no longer puzzle about."
- "If you wish to have a sound knowledge of the forms of objects, begin with the details of them, and do not go on to the second step until you have the first well fixed in memory."
- "As with his study of the flight of birds, Leonardo went from seeking knowledge that could be of practical use and began seeking knowledge for its own sake, out of pure curiosity and joy."
- "Leonardo wove an argument that was integral to understanding his genius: that true creativity involves the ability to combine observation with imagination, thereby blurring the border between reality and fantasy."
- "Men of loft genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form." - da Vinci
- "We should put aside our romantic image of the artist alone in his studio creating works of genius. Instead, Leonardo's studio was like a shop in which he devised a painting and his assistants worked with him to make multiple copies."
- On being so obsessed with something else: "In truth, his mathematical experiments have absorbed his thoughts so entirely that he cannot bear the sight of a paintbrush."
- "Sometimes fantasies are paths to realities."
- "Although at times he was irresolute and willing to abandon tasks, his powerful curiosity tended to overcome any hesitations when it came to exploring nature's wonders."
- Leonardo: "Though human ingenuity make make various inventions it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous."
- "Leonardo wanted to accumulate knowledge for his own sake and for his own personal joy, rather than out of a desire to make a public name for himself as a scholar or to be part of the progress of history." Perhaps that is what made his knowledge and curiosity so "out-of-this-world-like"
- "There is something nice about leaving a little to our imagination. As he knew, the outlines of reality are inherently blurry, leaving a hint of uncertainty that we should embrace. The best way to approach his life is the way he approached the world: filled with a sense of curiosity and an appreciation for its infinite wonders."

## Stories
- An example of his relentless perfectionism can be seen be examining *St. Jerome in the Wilderness.* This painting was done in two phases: the first being in 1480 when he started and the second being in 1510. Under infared analysis of the painting, there were dual neck muscles and other parts added in 1510 that were not part of the original drawing. The muscles and parts added seem to align with the anatomical discoveries da Vinci was making through his autopsys. 
- When da Vinci wanted to paint something, he would think about what type of social setting and emotion the piece would represent. When he determined the answer, he would go to places that held that type of emotion and observed people's faces, manners, and dresses, and gestures. Then, "he noted it in a little book which he was always carrying in his belt."
- One notebook page from about 1490 was deemed Leonardo's "theme sheet." It had various drawings, doodles, and sketches of many of the different interests that da Vinci thought of or wanted to think of. (p. 109)
- da Vinci predicted the scientific method, writing, "Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects."
- p.438 - Great story about being open minded and willing to change his mind. He thought that springs of the earth, just like blood in the body, is somehow pumped from lower areas to higher. How else could water get up into mountain springs? He was convinced of that explanation, but eventually abandoned it. He realized the water there is from evaporation getting soaked into clouds and then raining. 
- Many of Leonardo's paintings were lost or never finished, so there is a lot of mystery and allure around them. For one painting in particular, *Saint Anne* there were three or versions that were circulated. As historians tried to understand which came first to help paint a timeline of his life, they assumed Leonardo began one version of *Saint Anne* in 1501, then changed his mind and drew it a different way. He then changed his mind again to paint something that closely resembled the original sketch from 1501. This was the consensus until, in 2005, a note by Agostino Vespucci was found in a book by Cicero that he was reading. The passage in the book said something along the lines of a painter perfect the head and bust of Venus. Vespucci's comment in the margin was "So Leonardo da Vinci does in all his paintings, such as the head of Lisa del Giocondo, and Anne Mother of the Virgin." From this, we are able to assume he had begun working on the *Mona Lisa* and the final painting of *Saint Anne* in 1503. 
- Michaelangelo and Leonardo were rivals. However, people commissioned Leonardo for one style of work and Michaelangelo for another. This is why its important to create things in a style that suits you and not follow the crowd. Eventually, someone will see the need for your style.

Leonardo da Vinci

From a 1955 article written by von Neumann titled, "[Can We Survive Technology?](http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~kite/doc/von_Neumann_1955.pdf)"

> What safeguard remains? Apparently only day-to-day --- or perhaps year-to-year --- opportunistic measures, along sequence of small, correct decisions. And this is not surprising. After all, the crisis is due to the rapidity of progress, to the probable further acceleration thereof, and to the reaching of certain critical relationships. Specifically, the effects that we are now beginning to produce are of the same order of magnitude as that of "the great globe itself." Indeed, they affect the earth as an entity. Hence further acceleration can no longer be absorbed as in the past by an extension of the area of operations. Under present conditions it is unreasonable to expect a novel cure-all. For progress there is no cure. Any attempt to find automatically safe channels for the present explosive variety of progress must lead to frustration. The only safety possible is relative, and it lies in an intelligent exercise of day-to-day judgment [...]
>
> The one solid fact is that the difficulties are due to an evolution that, while useful and constructive, is also dangerous. Can we produce the required adjustments with the necessary speed? The most hopeful answer is that the human species has been subjected to similar tests before and seems to have a congenital ability to come through, after varying amounts of trouble. To ask in advance for a complete recipe would be unreasonable. We can specify only the human qualities required:\
> patience, flexibility, intelligence.

This sounds an awful lot like what AI Alignment has been trying to do. Granted, as [Scott Alexander notes in a book review](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/book-review-the-man-from-the-future?utm_medium=email) of von Neumann's biography:

> This sounds suspiciously like the smartest man in the world admitting he's not sure what to do.

John von Neumann on how to safely progress with technology

People who spend their time debating others online are throwing their precious hours of human existence into a pit they'll never retrieve them from. It's the most useless act someone can partake in, even more so than playing video games or watching *Rick and Morty*.

No one is going to change their mind on abortion, gun-control, or any other hot button topic because of a response written by User07373 on FaceBook or Twitter. I'm sorry, but it's just not going to happen.

Sadly, the same thing can be said about real life interactions as well, though just not as strongly. If you have a 1% chance of winning someone over online from a debate, you might have a 7% chance of winning someone over in real-life. It's not much, but it's honest work I guess.

The reason it's so hard to win people over is because the issues are so complex and nothing is black and white. Another reason, though, is that most people approach complex debates in a horrible way. Ribbonfarm, a popular blog on the "constructions in magical thinking", [writes this](https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2014/06/25/portals-and-flags/):

> The point of complex debates is not to prove your side right and the other wrong. Smart people make this mistake most often, and end up losing before they ever get started. The point of complex debate is always seduction: winning-over rather than winning. You do this not through logic or even novel insight, but by demonstrating a more fertile way of thinking. One that promises to throw up an indefinitely extended stream of surprises within an ever-widening scope.

In other words, someone doesn't win a debate by having an absurd amount of evidence and reason, but rather painting a beautiful picture of a new way of thinking. Or as Ribbonfarm puts it, "turning it into a portal to a hidden universe of thought."

The opposite action to opening a portal is planting a flag, which most people do so on top of a pile of circumstantial evidence, weak reasoning, and ever-complicating opinions and facts.

So how does one start to paint this ever-beautiful picture? By letting go of winning:

> All it takes is giving up the desire to “win” and the innate openness to experience that allows you to signal a readiness for adventure without even being conscious of it.

The scary thing with this approach is that it requires someone to give up power and control. That becomes the real thing you're "debating against."

jqyrj

On Ribbonfarm's Portal and Flags

On Christmas Day of last year, one of the most pivotal moments for space exploration was launched: the James Webb Space Telescope.

Its mission is to orbit nearly [1 million miles away from Earth](https://webbtelescope.org/contents/media/images/4201-Image) and literally look back in time (more on how that's possible in the next paragraph) to understand how our solar system has developed and whether or not there is life on other planets. I was a bit confused about the claims "look back in time" so did some research on how that's possible. Here's a brief illustration:

The Moon is about 239,000 miles away from Earth, which means it takes 1.3 seconds for the light to get from the moon to earth. Therefore, [when you look at the moon](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/how-does-webb-see-back-in-time?filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0), you're looking 1.3 seconds back in time (Yeah, you're a wizard Harry).

The distances between objects in space are so vast, that we measure them in terms of how many years it will take light to travel to get there. The nearest star is over four-light years away, so when you see that star, you're seeing it for what it was four years ago.

The Virgo Cluster of galaxies (galaxies at the center of the Virgo constellation) is about 60 million-light years away from the Milky Way. Therefore, the light we see from that galaxy is from around the end of the dinosaur age.

But that's not all. As the universe expands, light gets stretched into longer and longer wavelengths, beyond the point which we can see -- this is called [infrared light](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/how-can-webb-study-the-early-universe?itemsPerPage=50&filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0). Hubble can see some infrared light, but The Webb observes infrared light exclusively. This allows Webb to see much older galaxies than Hubble, because their light has been stretched beyond that of Hubble's ability to see.

If Hubble showed us a galaxy at the toddler stage, Webb can show us it at a newborn stage, and that is how Hubble will "look back in time" to see how the universe and other galaxies have expanded.

So, Webb will show us planets like an actual movie, but billions of years ago? Well, not exactly.

The Spectra
-----------

Webb looks at planets through [their spectra](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/how-will-webb-study-exoplanets?filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0) -- the wavelengths they emit, absorb, transmit, or reflect -- through a technique called [Spectroscopy](https://webbtelescope.org/resource-gallery/articles/pagecontent/filter-articles/spectroscopy-101--introduction?filterUUID=a776e097-0c60-421c-baec-1d8ad049bfb0). Scientists use that method to determine what things are made of, how hot they are, how dense they are, and how fast they are moving in space.

Since different materials give off and interact with different colors of light in different ways depending on what the materials are made of, scientists can use what they know about other planets' spectra in our solar system to determine the composition of the planets Webb captures.

Webb will first observe the star [exoplanets](https://webbtelescope.org/glossary.html#h3-CK-6dcd0136-ce7a-4e4b-802c-d9a49fbbb4d0) (a planet that orbits a star outside of our solar system) are orbiting and gather its spectra. Then, Webb will wait until the planet it wants to observe passes in front of the star it's orbiting and measure the spectra again. At this point, the exoplanet will then be backlit, like an eclipse on earth, so the planet will absorb some of the light emitted from the star, making its spectra differ from the spectra Webb originally captured.

Researchers will then compare the two data sets: the data originally collected about the star and the data collected while the planet blocked the star to see which type of light was absorbed by the planet and which wasn't. Finally, they will use the data from the two spectras and compare it with data about how certain molecules absorb light. When they put it all together, they are able to determine which molecules are present on the exoplanet.

For example, we know what Jupiter's Spectra looks like and we know what Jupiter is made out of. So we can use its spectra and compare it with spectra from the exoplanet and say, "Oh wow, this looks a lot like Jupiter's so there must be a lot of Hydrogen and Helium on that planet." (Just an example, not actual data)

And that is some of the basics of how this very big, very expensive, and very cool piece of technology will explore the most distant universes and look back in time. It can't be long until we understand just exactly how the universe came to be and answer that crucial question we've all been wondering: does the chicken or the egg come first?


75pymvx4ilpijmw5 1656337309

How the James Webb Space Telescope Will Look Back in Time

Sitting around a campfire listening to stories passed on from generations brings with it a feeling of wonder and joy for the adventures told from long ago.

Each one of these stories is special on its own and they could never be told in a *bad* way.

But you reach another level of captivation when someone who is a great storyteller holds the talking stick and their vocal cords rumble.

Each word lingers in your mind as you anticipate the next set of syllables, waiting to laugh, to cry, and to love. It's a whole new experience.

This is how I felt reading [*What Do You Care What Other People Think? Further Adventures of a Curious Character*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004OA6KIS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1) by Richard Feynman. I have a deep admiration for Feynman's beliefs on life, knowledge, and science, but that admiration went deeper still as I followed the stories of his life told by the man himself.

## Feynman, You Sexist Pig!

Shortly after giving lectures at CalTech, Feynman was accused of being anti-women because of two stories he told to illustrate different points in his *Feynman Lectures on Physics*. In response to the letter he received, Feynman wrote, "Don't bug me man!" and sent it off.

About a year later, he was in San Francisco receiving an award he was given from writing those books, but not all was well. A group of protesters were in front of the lecture hall giving out flyers with black, large letters titled, "FEYNMAN SEXIST PIG!"

As he started his talk, he addressed the protestor's:

> I'm sorry that my short answer to your letter brought you here unnecessarily. There are more serious places to direct one's attention towards improving the status of women in physics than these relatively trivial mistakes–if that's what you want to call them–in a textbook. But perhaps, after all, it's good that you came. For women do indeed suffer from prejudice and discrimination in physics, and your presence here today serves to remind us of these difficulties and the need to remedy them.

> Even though the American Association Physics Teachers has given me an award for teaching, I must confess I don't know how to teach. Therefore, I have nothing to say about teaching. Instead, I would like to talk about something that will be especially interesting to the women in the audience: I would like to talk about the structure of the proton. 

Handled with grace and care.

## Infinite numbers

Richard Feynman was an "uncle" to several of his physicist's kids. One such nephew was Henry Bethe, son of Hans Bethe who was a 1967 Nobel Prize winner. After the passing of Feynman, Henry sent a letter to Feynman's wife retelling a magnificent story that illustrates Feynman's playful attitude and ability to simplify the complex. Henry recalls:

Dick [Feynman] turned to me and said, "Did you know that there are twice as many numbers as numbers?"

"No there are not!" Henry quipped back.

But Feynman wouldn't give up, insisting that Henry name a number.

> "One million" A big number to start.
> 
> "Two million."
>
>
>"Twenty-seven."
>
>"Fifty-four."
>
>I named about ten more numbers and each time Dick names the number twice as big. Light dawned.
>
> "I see; so there are three times as many numbers as numbers"
>
"Prove it," said Uncle Dick. He named a number. I named one three times as big. He tried another. I did it again. Again.
He named a number too complicated for me to multiply in my head. "Three times that," I said.
>
> "So, is there a biggest number?" he asked.
>
> "No." I replied. "Because for every number, there is one twice as big, one three times as big. There is even one a million times as big"
>
> "Right, and that concept of increase without limit, of no biggest number, is called 'infinity'."

## Running around

After the space shuttle *Challenger* exploded, Feynman got a call asking to be apart of a committee to investigate the accident. When he heard the job would be in Washington, Feynman had an immediate hesitancy to accept the role. His biggest question was–"*how am I going to get out of this?*"

Luckily, though, he didn't make that decision on his own. He called on numerous colleagues and mentors for advice, but the one that was most helpful came from his dear wife:

> "Look I said." "Anybody could do it. They can get somebody else."

> "No," said Gweneth. "If you don't do it, there will be twelve people, all in a group, going around from place to place together. But if you join the commission, there will be eleven people–all in a group, going around from place to place together–while the twelfth one runs around all over the place, checking all kinds of unusual things. There probably won't be anything, but if there is, you'll find it." She said, "There isn't anyone else who can do that like you can."
>
> Being very immodest, I believed her.


Feynman-1

Adventures of a Curious Richard Feynman

## Impressions
I was inspired to buy this book after [hearing the author's conversation on *Armchair Expert*](https://armchairexpertpod.com/pods/steve-brusatte). His enthusiasm for dinosaurs and the mysteries of earth 66 million years ago was contagious. I was hoping for a creatively written book about dinosaurs that helped me learn a lot about their origin. I wasn't disappointed with that notion in mind, but I also wasn't thrilled with the book. At the end, I still felt there was a lot of information missing about how dinosaurs were created, but perhaps that because *no one actually knows.* Either way, I think Brusatte is a good writer and is able to mix academic knowledge with engaging writing, but I was hoping for more academic knowledge and less engaging writing. That said, it was a fun book and I'd recommend it to anyone wanting to learn a bit about dinosaurs, their evolutionary processes, and what the hell happened to all those magnificent creatures.

## Notes
- 252 million years ago, the Permian period of the world ended with a massive mass extinction underneath Siberia. It wiped out 90% of the living things in the world and lasted for a few million years. 
- Body fossils, the most popular type, are when parts of the actual animal or plant become fossilized. Trace fossils are when a footprint, bite mark, or something of the like become fossilized. These are valuable because they show how the animal interacted with the environment around them.
- Dinosaurs lived through three periods of geological history: the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, which are together known as the Mesozoic Era. 
- The earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. Around 1.8 billion years ago is when we start getting our first complex organisms. They finally started to emerge onto land about 390 million years ago. 
- One of the first species to evolve after the end-Permian extinction were the archosaurs. From them, two lineages branch off:
	- First, pseudosuchians, later gave rise to crocodiles
	- Second, the avemetatarsalia developed into pterosaurs, dinosaurs, and the birds we now see today. This group is called the bird-line archosaurs. 
- True dinosaurs first entered the picture around 240 and 230 million years ago. The hesitation in accuracy is because its difficult to radiometric date
- The dinosaurs grew up on a one-continent, one-ocean world. Pangea and Panthalassa.
- The high carbon dioxide in the Late Triassic period started a chain reaction: huge fluctuations in temperature, wildfires and humid spells. This made it very difficult for plants to establish themselves in an ever-changing world. Consequently, plant-eating dinosaurs had a difficult time establishing themselves as well, even 20 million years after they first arrived on the scene. 
- Convergence - When different types of animals end up resembling each other because of similarities in lifestyle and environment.
- Morphological disparity - A type of comparison done to analyze diversity based on features of anatomy. A bird is more diverse than a jellyfish because birds have a much more complicated system than jellyfish, who are basically just sacks of goo, do. This technique is so effective because so many functions of biology, diet, behavior, growth, and metabolism, are all governed by anatomy. 
- Some 30 million years after dinosaurs first came about, they still hadn't had world domination like we think of it. They were being outmanned and outgunned by their crocodile-like adversaries, pseudosuchians.
- At the very end of the Triassic, some 201 million years ago, Pangea, after 40 million years of slow tugging and drifts, finally cracked. This caused magma and lava from underneath the earth's surface to erupt in a massive volcano, the end-Triassic eruptions. In the end, some three million square miles of central Pangea were drowned in lava.
- The end-Triassic eruptions were the best thing that could have happened for dinosaurs. Afterwards, they became more diverse and more adaptive and bigger - outnumbering now the previous crocodile-like pseudosuchians. (Not sure why though, - yet at least.)
- Most 3D models of dinosaurs today are created using photogrammetry. They're able to take pictures of fossils, import them into a computer program and let it build out a skeletal model. From there, you can add organs, muscles, and skin and create a life-like dinosaur, complete with the ability to make it move. Pretty crazy.
- The key to brontosaurs massive size:
	- 1.) Their neck - it allowed them to reach high above the trees, higher than any other plant eating dino. It also allowed them to camp in one spot and gobble up plants from all around, expanding very little energy while doing so.
	- 2. The rate at which they grew was very fast
	- 3. Their lungs were different from all other lungs and it was much more efficient.
		- [Unidirectional lung](http://www.fernbank.edu/birding/respiration.htm#:~:text=Unidirectional%20flow%20means%20that%20air,and%20out%20of%20the%20lungs.)
	- 4. Their bones were hollow, filled with air sacs much like honeycombs and not solid bone.
- [Niche partitioning](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sciences/niche-partitioning#:~:text=The%20term%20niche%20partitioning%20refers,Advances%20in%20Ecological%20Research%2C%202016) - When coexisting species avoid competing with each other be behaving or feeding in slightly different ways.
- Tyrannosaurs are actually a group of dinosaurs that are all similar to the T. Rex and are who the T. Rex evolved from. They started to take shape around the middle Jurassic, when sauropods and other dinosaurs were making their big debut. The first ones were very small.
- *Kileskus* was the first tyrannosaur we know of. It was around more than 100 million years before T. Rex. 
- T. Rex finally rose to the top of the food chain at the dawn of the Campanian subinterval of the latest Cretaceous period. We're not sure why. There is a theory that volcanic ash and poisonous gas spewed up and made the planet toxic for a while, killing off a bunch of species (that's fact) but we don't know if that helped the T. Rex takeover or it's just a mere coincidence. 
- T. Rex lived about 69 to 66 million years ago and thrived in Western North America - which was covered in forest-y coastal plains.
-  Encephalization quotient - A measure of the relative size of the brain compared to the size of the body. Bigger animals will have bigger brains because their bodies are naturally bigger, but that doesn't mean they are smarter.
- Rex had large olfactory bulbs - the lobes at the front of the brain that control the smell. This led to their very keen sense of smell.
- Birds are dinosaurs - just like theropods and sauropods, birds are just another one of the many branches from the dinosaur family tree.
- Natural selection works by favoring certain heritable traits that aid in surviving longer. If a group of offspring all have slightly different colors and one is darker and that helps them camouflage better, and the trait is inheritable, they will pass that on.
	- If a population is somehow divided enough and each subset goes its own way, evolving its own features until the two groups are so different that they can no longer mate with one another, then they have developed into a new species. 
- It's no doubt birds evolved from theropods. But they didn't evolve wings to fly at first. Most likely, they evolved to show off and get mates, like the tails of peacocks. Since bigger wings were more impressive, wings kept getting bigger and bigger relative to the size of the body. Eventually, the wings got big enough to support the bird's body in the air.
- The food they ate and their size had a lot to do with why dinos died and why some mammals and reptiles went on to live after the Cambrian explosion.
- The asteroid/comet hit right on the edge of the Yucatan Peninsula.

51cIOKrSi3L

The Rise and Fall of Dinosaurs by Steven Brusatte

User [TurnTrout](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2GxhAyn9aHqukap2S/looking-back-on-my-alignment-phd) posted their reflection on attaining a PhD in the *LessWrong* community recently. I've been debating going back to school for a Masters and PhD but can't determine the fundamental benefits other than a structured learning environment, peer group, and a bit of a social flex. I don't think those are the right reasons to go back to school, but maybe they are?

The post was brilliant and well-written. [I implore you to read the whole thing](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2GxhAyn9aHqukap2S/looking-back-on-my-alignment-phd). The most concrete advice was towards the end, where they outlined habits they had wished to practice more regularly. I thought the habits were practical even outside of academia and, if practiced more regularly by more people, would make for better conversations.

### Distinguish between observation and inference

TurnTrout says:

> When people speak to you, mark their arguments as _observations_ or as _inferences_. Keep the types _separate_. I've gained _so much_ from this simple practice.

I like the idea here, but I'd change "inference" to "opinion."

This echoes something I tweeted about last week about the importance of Twitter and other "thinking out loud" tools being seen as a laboratory for testing conjectures and not a battleground for opinions. When an influential person tweets, inevitably they don't account for all of the nuance. It's impossible to do so with 280 characters.  Also inevitably, everyone starts attacking the user for not mentioning their specific, niche life story that this tweet wouldn't apply to. It's annoying.

It would do well for people online to differentiate between an observation made about the world and an inference into how that world actually works.

This would be good for dinner conversations with family, especially those with opposing political views. I ask risky questions to people with protected opinions all the time because I want to understand what they think and how they see the world. I love running thought experiments. With the topic of abortion being front and center now, instead of arguing over whether the government should be involved or this view vs. that view, I'll pitch a thought experiment outlining a situation and then request we go through the experiment as if abortion were legal and if abortion weren't legal.  What's the right thing to do? How would someone be feeling in that situation?

The benefit of this is that it allows you to run through some fringe scenario that would probably never happen. Since the problem is exaggerated, the solutions are exaggerated. Often, it illuminates one path as better than another because of how it plays out in the exaggerated situation.

To get to that point, though, one must be comfortable entertaining observations and questions. The group must understand that these scenarios aren't opinions, they're just questions to be explored. If we want to progress intellectually with hot-button issues, we must be able to set aside opinions and explore observations and questions. The first step to doing so is being able to differentiate the two in the first place.

### Be concrete

TurnTrout says:

> -   If a friend comes to me for advice and says "I'm terrible at dating, I just feel so shy!", I _could_ say "You're really fun to be around, you're probably just in your head too much", and then _they_ could say "Agh, maybe, but it's just so frustrating." Wouldn't that just be such a useful conversation for them? That'll _definitely_ solve their awkwardness!
    -   Alternatively, if I _ask for an example_, we can both analyze an event which _actually happened_. Perhaps they say, "I met a girl named Alice at the party, but I somehow ran out of things to say, and it got quiet, and we found excuses to part ways." Then I can help my friend introspect and figure out why they didn't have anything to say, which _is in fact a question with a real answer_.

Vague scenarios and questions help no one. I see/hear this a lot when someone is uncomfortable asking for advice on the specific scenario they're dealing with. So instead, they ask a vague question that doesn't make complete sense. This isn't helpful–for either the advice-giver or the advice-asker.

The more you can think through a scenario that *actually happened*, the better your thought processes and learning patterns will be from those situations.

Be concrete.

alfons-morales-YLSwjSy7stw-unsplash

2 habits for a better intellectual life

In February, I read [*Einstein* by Walter Isaacson](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/albert-einstein) and had my world absolutely rocked as I learned about Special and General Relativity. No concept of absolute time? Space and time are linked? Clocks slow down in motion? Gravity is just curved space-time? I saw the world in a whole new way.

That experience was the first time I could remember having a "viewquake." In the words of Robin Hanson who coined the term, a viewquake is an "insight that dramatically changes one's worldview, making one see the world in a new way."

![Viewquakes-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/1mKhdxfCjTHQzdv8DyfKan/5517bc3417c6c2122898c5140d335a57/Viewquakes-01.png)

I heard about this term for the first time on [his appearance on the *Lex Fridman Podcast*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBZP4rLk6bk). After about four hours of trying to comprehend grabby aliens, the hard steps of Earth, and AI revolutions, I finally came to a point in the interview where I wasn't completely lost. The idea of a "viewquake" was in itself, a viewquake for me.

Our knowledge is defined by our language. The more words you have to describe concepts and theories, the more tangible they become. This is why many creators have certain terms they've essentially created a monopoly on:

Tiago Forte - Building a Second Brain
David Perell - Personal Monopoly
James Clear - Atomic Habits
Ryan Holiday - Daily Stoic

It allows readers to segment their business-thesis into a neat box and package it in a way that's comprehensible to others. A long thesis about how habits form turns into one digestible phrase: atomic habits. This makes it easier to learn, easier to implement, and easier to remember. **Language expansion is a key factor in knowledge expansion.**

This explains why learning the term "viewquake" was a viewquake itself. I was able to expand the theories I've learned recently that have changed how I look at the world into a neat box. This lets me re-package the ideas in a much easier way. That repackaging leads to more natural conversations because the complicated language needed to describe the earth-shattering realities of relativity were no longer needed. Instead of fumbling my way through space-time conversations with someone about Einstein's theories, I could instead use a certain term that explains why I loved the book (and Einstein's ideas) so much: **It gave me more viewquakes per word than any book I've read so far.** 

Another example of a viewquake mentioned by Hanson in the interview has to do with politics. He said a political viewquake is when one understands that most politicians aren't trying to actually make their city or state a better place. Instead, they're just being loyal to their allies (read: political parties).

This explains why we hear so often in the news, "A red state will never vote for X." Or, "That left senator will never vote for Y, he needs to get re-elected this year."


Viewquakes-01

On Viewquakes

Kevin Kelly, who arguably has written one of the most influential essays regarding the internet and the creator economy, "[1,000 True Fans](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/)", published "103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known" on his 70th birthday. In the simple article, he gives practical advice, philosophical quips, and everything in between. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it when it came out. So much so, I printed it out and annotated bits I loved and wanted to go deeper on.

To my luck, *Freakonomics* published an interview with him asking about that specific essay. Kelly was able to provide more context on his answers and share a few stories. The following comes from that interview.

---

One of the pieces of advice observe, very factually, that "ninety percent of everything, is crap." Kelly goes on to encourage the reader to, if they find something they don't like, just try finding the ten percent that is actually good. But how to find that ten percent was left as a mystery, until now. Stephen Dubner, the host of *Freakonomics* asked him for his advice on finding the "'non-crap' 10 percent":

> I have to say, this one I’m talking to myself because I often get very impatient. So, the only bit of advice for me is to keep returning to it with as much grace and open-mindedness as possible because nine times out of ten you’re going to be very disappointed. So why are you going to go back the tenth time? Of course, life is limited. We can’t try all the stuff that we don’t like. But when I have a chance and it’s not too difficult, I’ll give things a second or third or fourth chance. And occasionally, I do change my mind and it’s like, “Wow, I’m glad that I pursued that because I didn’t see it in the beginning.”

![KK 2](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6Dlvh9t1OYyyGdcu3zj99p/c7bc5ef7918a136aa7515df610ebefd9/KK_2.png)

Dubner [cited research](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/03/30/open-season-2) that showed when people approach the ages of 30 or 40, they typically are set in the ways of the food they eat and the things they do. Trying new things just isn't much of an idea as you get older. Fortunately, Kelly had some simple advice to staying more fluid as one ages:

> Don’t sit in the same chair every night. I deliberately try not to do that at the table, to make sure I don’t get into these ruts. And I ask my kids to make me a playlist for birthday presents. Give me all the music you’re listening to as a way to hear new things and see if I can get into it. When you go out to eat, order your favorite thing, and then order something you’ve never ordered before. I think it has to be a very deliberate thing. It doesn’t really come easy.

Another bit of advice has to do with the appreciation of luck: "Ask anyone you admire, their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone." Kelly expanded on his reasoning for including this:

> I have very little patience with particularly successful people who don’t acknowledge the luck. And if I have gained any knowledge or wisdom over time, it is my increasing realization and admittance that I am the product of luck. There is just no way around it. But having said that, I think you can still choose luck. I have to say this very carefully, in the sense that there are people who are luckier than others, and it’s not because of how they were born. I think there are probably different species of luck. The little bit I’ve read about luck is that people who have decided that they’re lucky are luckier. And so lucky people are expecting to be lucky, and that expectation is self-fulfilling. It’s kind of like that increasing returns — it’s because I have been lucky, I expect to be lucky, and therefore I am going to be luckier. In the same way, if you decide that you’re an unlucky person, you’re not going to be lucky. And that’s also been proven.

![KK3 -01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/3qE9UddGwZIb4lmfGcov35/0ecae2091ef8adb9a52593890a1db2db/KK3_-01.png)

One of the more practical pieces of advice refers to why your parents probably walked so slowly through museums or monuments, when you just wanted to get to the ice cream: "Always read the plaque next to the monument." His answer to this one seemed personal. It was like he really cared about it because he had learned so much from reading plaques and wants others to experience that joy:

> I was hiking in the Cotswolds just this week, and there was a plaque about a nuclear bunker that we’d walked past and had no idea what it was, or that it was even there. And then there was a plaque for a site that turned out to be a burial mound that they believe is older than the pyramids. There’s always a story about something. And it’s not evident or obvious, and it will always enrich your lives. And there’s a courtesy in the plaque saying, “Hey, I’m pretty interesting. You just spend one minute here, and I’ll tell you. I’ll let you in on the secret.” And then you do it and you say, “Thank you, plaque. That was amazing. I’m so glad you stood there all that time.”

Clearly, Kelly is a thoughtful guy and seems to spend more time than the rest thinking–about life, about living, and about everything in between. Actively *thinking* about the problems were facing–not panicking to solve them–will do us all well. This is what Kelly has to say about spending time in reflection and thinking:

> I think you kind of almost veered onto Alfred Whitehead’s [definition](https://www.gutenberg.org/files/41568/41568-pdf.pdf) of civilization, which was that civilization advanced to the degree which we didn’t have to think about other things. So instead of having to think about where am I going to get enough food to eat, we could think about some other things because we have a system called civilization that provides all the food that we need and more. So I think what I would see over time is us switching where we spend time with our attention and our thinking, up the Maslow hierarchy, away from basic things about survival and shelter, maybe away from just generic things about having a job and being occupied to higher level things of self-realization in the larger sense of not just our own individual self-realization, but where we’re going as a society, as a collective species.
> 
> And we have collectively a very difficult assignment, which is, who do we want to be as humans? What do we want humans to be? And one of the reasons why I’m really keen on artificial intelligence is that we’re going to use A.I. to help us answer this question of what do we want humans to be. Because we’re going to be giving them lots of things that we thought we were about and realizing they can do that. And I think this larger identity problem of not just who am I as an individual, but who am I as a human, is where we’ll spend more time. And as we go on, I think this kind of identity crisis, not just on an individual level, but as a collective level, becomes more and more of the conversation.

His article that spawned this interview is a delight to read and I think more people should attempt to publish something similar. I have a doc called "My Life Thesis," where I record principles I want to live by. Most of them I hear from someone on a podcast or read about in a book, but some I've deduced myself–it's quite a lovely experience when this happens.

This type of essay is important because it's likely you have some bits of advice you live by, whether you do so consciously or not. Extracting the pure insight of those bits of advice into one or two sentences helps solidify the lesson and make it more tangible. You likely have much more insight in that little head of yours than you think you do. How much more interesting would the world be if we shared it all?

Kevin Kelly's 103 Bits of Advice, Expanded

There's been two articles I've seen recently on the difference between people who ask for what they want (ask culture) vs. people who drop subtle hints at what they want (guess culture). I'm not afraid to admit I fall in the latter group. Does this mean some emotional aspect of my social life is immature or not developed enough?

Some say I'm "easy going" or very "go with the flow" and I'd agree with both of those statements. But it's not because I have a big soft spot in my heart and I want to be selfless. Rather, it comes from a deep sense of insecurity of not wanting to inconvenience other people. Most of my approach with groups of people, especially groups of people I don't know well, is to ensure other people aren't inconvenienced.

The reason I do that is simple: I know I can handle being inconvenienced. If I really want to go somewhere on a vacation and am unable to make it by the end, sure it's a bit sad, but life's still great. I just keep on keepin' on. Others are different. Some people really value seeing certain areas when they're in a new city and would be crushed to not see that thing. Sadness comes first followed me resentment at the people/reasons why they weren't able to see that thing. It's just much easier if I inconvenience myself because I know I can handle it. Is that egotistical? Maybe. A bit stupid? Probably? But does it make sense? In my head, yes.

Part of managing other people's inconvenience's has instilled in me a habit of practicing "guess culture." Guess/Ask Culture is an interesting social phenomenon originally reported on by *The Atlantic*, but [recently covered by *Maybe Baby* in an essay](https://haleynahman.substack.com/p/102-no-worries-if-not?s=r). A user named Andrea Donderi posted the following response to someone asking how to get out out of hosting someone at their house for a vacation:

![https bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com public images dc134bc8-3047-49db-ace8-fd9df306696d 1522x872](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/cZUhFNTPGlnfhPCO5Onp9/9a65a5216a4153c441e51fb28879826d/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_dc134bc8-3047-49db-ace8-fd9df306696d_.webp)

The ideas are really amazing and surprisingly not very well known. I will say here and now that I am an addicted guesser. I rarely, if ever, put a direct ask into words except to my wife or my best friends. If I get a burger from a restaurant that has mustard on it even though I specifically asked for no mustard, I will not say a thing. I will scrape the mustard off with a knife and enjoy it the best that I can. But if the waiter catches me scrapping off the mustard and asks, "Would you like us to remake it?" I will respond with something along the lines of "If you don't mind." Not a hard yes. Not a direct answer. But yet another "subtle hint" hoping they catch on. I know that I do this. I'm not ashamed, but also not saying it's the right thing to do.

Obviously that isn't a very deep example and having my meal made wrong is not the worst thing that could happen to me. But those actions play out in other scenarios. If I want a raise, I'm much more likely to bring up the cost of living with my boss, how everything is getting so expensive, or how long I've been at the company for–just hoping they take the bait.

**This is one of the least effective ways to communicate.** It's so hard to get anything done this way! Perhaps this has caused part of the decline in work happiness. It's not because the bosses are awful, but that employees are unable to communicate what they need to effectively get their job done. This leads to resentment, contempt, and eventually, quitting.

[*Bookbear Express* shared some helpful tips](https://ava.substack.com/p/be-an-asker) on how to leave guessing behind and become an asker:

> Here are my general rules for asking:
> 
> -   If it’s very easy for the other person to say no (zero cost to them) and you’ll probably never see them again, ask whatever you want (politely)
>     
> -   If it’s something like asking someone to hang out, I think it’s okay to ask two times if the person is unresponsive/gives a neutral response. After that, cut your losses.
>     
> -   If you really, _really_ want to press your case, I would say something like, “Letting you know that I really do want to meet up, and may follow up occasionally to see if you feel the same way. Is that okay?” Do not abuse this (for example, checking in once again after eight months is probably fine, and if they still seem uninterested just drop it).
>     
> -   Never get upset at someone for saying no. You don’t “deserve” an answer. The truth is, people who don’t know you don’t owe anything to you, and even people who know you really well are free to prioritize themselves (though you may want to rethink the relationship if they don’t seem to care about you, obviously).


https bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com public images dc134bc8-3047-49db-ace8-fd9df306696d 1522x872

On Being an Inconvenienced Guesser

The following passage comes from *What Do You Care What Other People Think?* by Richard Feynman. It's a collection of stories from his life and curious adventures.

> We had the *Encyclopedia Britannica* at home. When I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the *Britannica.* We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the *Tyrannosaurus Rex*, and it would say something like, "This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across."
> 
> My father would stop reading and say, "Now, let's see what that meant. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here" (We were on the second floor.) "But his head would be too wide to fit into the window." Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality.
> 
> I learned from my father to translate: everything I read to try and figure out what it really means, what it's really saying.

The most important step to learning is to understand what it truly means. Make learning a reality! If you're reading about the scientific revolution, make a timeline with all the dates of discoveries or lives of influential scientists to see which lives overlapped. You could even try mapping where each discovery took place. Any tangible action that makes learning abstract concepts into something tangible will bode better for your knowledge (and subsequently everyone else!)

Make learning a reality

I.
"Names don't constitute knowledge", the great professor and physicist Richard Feynman declared in an [interview in 1973](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI).

I know that A2 + B2  is equal to C2, that equation is called the Pythagorean Theorem, and it was named after Pythagorus. But I couldn't tell you why it works or how it works. I may be able to cobble together enough words to make a somewhat decent description, but I'll look like a fool trying to explain it to someone who has never heard of Geometry before. **I have the knowledge of it, not the understanding.**

That's not the only thing I'm lacking knowledge about. I've read 200+ books in the last few years and could probably summarize off the top of my head about 15 of them. The rest I may be able to recognize the title and paint a broad picture of the author's ideas, but that's about it. **I've read the books, but I don't understand the books.**

II.
This type of person, someone who has a lot of knowledge but no understanding, is what the blog [More to That]( https://moretothat.com/knowledge-is-not-understanding/) has penned as a "Dumb-Smart Person." A Dumb-Smart Person (DSP) is someone who has acquired loads of textbook knowledge, but doesn't know how to handle a situation that isn't pre-defined by something they've learned. They *know* the information, but don't *understand* it. What little information they do know, they're unable to adequately recognize when it's not in the context they've learned it in.

This is what I call context-dependent knowledge and it's a lot more common than you think.

Take for example Kyle here.

![Street Life - Standing](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/1rkFpWaMMGlLpo4LCcS997/e147a15845d8845f82f70cbd2a636583/Street_Life_-_Standing.png)

Kyle is a studious college senior who loves to read biographies of businesses and entrepreneurs. He's getting a degree in business, but it's not scratching the itch as much as he would like. He needs real examples, not case studies.

He had just finished reading Benjamin Franklin's biography and was struck by a well-known story about Ben Franklin asking a foe to borrow one of his books. The foe accepted and upon returning the book, the foe engaged in a friendly conversation with Benjamin. The foe was now a friend. Kyle thought this was incredible. Dealing with conflict has always been awkward, but this was a simple strategy that he could add to his toolkit to deploy when the time comes. Kyle noted the story in his "second brain" and moved on to the next read.

III.
Awhile later, he was put in a situation where the book tactic would be of great use. During one of his classes, students were assigned a group project. He happened to be paired with Lex, another brilliant but not-so-kind and arrogant student. Kyle knew this was his opportunity to apply the learning from Ben Franklin's life.

"Okay," Kyle thought, "If I ask him to borrow a book, he's going to have to lend it to me, right? Then I'll read it and when I give it back to him, I'll tell him my favorite points and ask what his were. Genius."

Operation Ben Franklin was a go.

"Hey Lex, I know you like reading Angela Duckworth's work. Could I borrow *Grit*? I've heard great things and would love to read it."

"You can just get it from the library..." Lex claps back.

"Oh, right. Sorry thanks." Kyle mumbles out, embarrassed. *Well that didn't work*, he thinks to himself. *What went wrong?*

What went wrong?! You used a strategy that worked in 1750 where books were scarce and hard to get. You didn't understand the deeper knowledge of that strategy. You were stuck in context-dependent learning and failed to apply the *knowledge* from that situation into a modern-day environment. You got cocky with your "second brain" only to realize you may not be as smart as you think.

Kyle is a dumb-smart person who fell prey to context-dependent knowledge–only being able to apply the learning of something if it's in the exact same context in which you've learned it.

This has happened to me countless times on my journey to learn programming. Watching a tutorial and following along step-by-step gives me some knowledge of how certain programming languages work, but if I don't understand *how* it works or *why* it works the way that it does, I won't know what methods to use in what situations when I'm trying to build things on my own out in the wild. I have to work really hard at applying methods and concepts outside of the specific use case the tutorial taught me. 

If I learn how to use the useEffect() hook from React one way, I'll fail to recognize how to use it when it's called for in a different context. Programming knowledge is *very* context-dependent. I've found that practicing on your own is the only way to overcome that obstacle and get out of tutorial hell.

IV.
We can picture a Dumb-Smart person's journey through knowledge and understanding as two mountains. The Mountain of Knowledge on one side and the The Peak of Understanding on the other.
![1-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4gSCFCZFewIm6hqNh2Zlfy/27fb6f8cee3e52d746559072b0d91eb3/1-01.png)

Splitting the gap between the two is the Trough of Failures–an essential part of moving from The Mountain of Knowledge to the Peak of Understanding.
![2-01](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/2B5fH7Jbv8x3BaRZdR7S8V/9a10a385c753c290739e052d15c64702/2-01.png)
A dumb-smart person fails to recognize the gap between the two, assuming it's one big mountain that they've successfully conquered.

"Finally," they think. "I made it."

Man oh man do we have news for you.

V.

To get to the Peak of Understanding, one must do two things:

First, recognize there's a gap there at all. An arrogant, ego-filled academic will never reach the Peak of Knowledge if they think they are already there.

Second, they must trek through the Trough of Failures. They do this by taking their knowledge, applying it in certain situations, and seeing where it fits and where it doesn't. This is often accompanied by endless amounts of failures because that's how we learn.

With each application of knowledge, we get closer and closer to reaching the Peak of Understanding, until, finally, we've made it and can communicate the concept or idea in a simple way.

It sounds simple. And honestly it really is. The biggest obstacle I've seen (and faced myself) is having the desire to make the jump from one side to the other in the first place. Ever since we started learning in school, we were awarded with memorizing knowledge:

- What's the powerhouse of the cell?
- Who led the Revolutionary War?
- What year did Christopher Columbus set sail to the New World?

We were never taught, nor had the use case for, a deeper understanding of any concepts. As long as we could memorize some key vocabulary terms, things turned out quite alright.

And this doesn't change as life goes on. Signaling your knowledge is the second-most important thing to signal in human society, not too far behind wealth. If you can sprout off a few facts about World War 2 and entertain a dinner table with crazy Greek mythologies, people will assume you're intelligent (Unless you're annoying while doing that. And it's very easy to be annoying in that situation.

People who have knowledge may get remembered, but those who seek to understand will never truly die.

Mountain of Knowledge and peak of Understanding-01-01

The Mountain of Knowledge (And Why Dumb Smart People Never Escape It)

"Do unconscious reminders of God influence people's willingness to comply with norms of impersonal fairness?", Joseph Henrich asks in chapter 4 of his book, [*The WEIRDest People in the World*](https://www.amazon.com/WEIRDest-People-World-Psychologically-Particularly-ebook/dp/B07RZFCPMD).

Turns out, they do.

[In a study conducted in Canada](https://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~ara/Manuscripts/Shariff_Norenzayan.pdf), to answer this very question, participants were given two tasks: First, to unscramble a series of words and make them into a coherent sentence. Afterward, they were asked to allocate $10 between themselves and a stranger. For the first part of the study, groups were unknowingly given either a set of 10 sentences that had God-related terms in them while a control group had sentences that were not God-related. An example given by Henrich in the book and cited in the academic paper reporting the study is this:

> Try creating a sentence from these words:
> 
> divine dessert the was =
> 
> (answer: the dessert was divine)

After completing the assignment, they were tasked with dividing $10 between themselves and a stranger. In the control group, the one with *no* God-related terms, participants only gave $2.60 to the stranger on average. The most common amount given in this group was $0.00. 40% of the participants in this group chose to not give any to the stranger.

In the experimental group, those who completed the task *with* God-related terms, gave, on average, $4.60 to the stranger. The most common amount allocated here was $5. Also, the percentage of people who chose to give nothing to the stranger fell from 40% to 12%.

It seems being reminded of God does have some influence over how people behave.

II.

Psychologists call this effect, *priming.* It explains the act of intentionally or unintentionally changing your behavior based on words, behaviors, or the environment. When you "prime" the bulb before mowing the lawn, you pump gas into the fuel line to ensure the engine starts easier. When someone "primes" you for an action, they do *something* that makes it easier for you to commit that action.

It's obvious the God-prime is real, as it has [been replicated by numerous studies](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=god-priming+studies&hl=en&as_sdt=0&as_vis=1&oi=scholart). What I want to know is **what else we're being primed to do.**

III.

One simple example of priming can be found at the movie theatre (RIP). Right before the movie starts and the lights dim, you're usually shown a high-def version of Coke being poured on ice with realistic sound effects that is followed by popcorn popping and maybe some MNM's jumping around on screen. The movie theatre is priming you to go buy Coke, popcorn, and some candy.

Seeing others faces is an example of priming as well. If you spend time with someone who is constantly happy, smiling, and joyful, you yourself are much more likely to be happy, smiling, and joyful.

A silly example, though very explanative, was something I once saw on TV when I was young, perhaps on Drake and Josh? One character asked another:

"How do you spell fork?" And then they were asked to say it, and then spell it again, and then say it one more time in rapid succession. They were then asked what people eat soup with. The character, being primed by the word fork, naturally said "Fork!" Like I said, silly, but effective at explaining an example of priming.

I'm sure there are many more examples in everyday life of being primed to do something that aren't obvious, I just can't seem to think of anymore right now. But as I've written previously on this blog, it's important to have language to describe certain aspects of life because your worldview is only as big as your language. I'm excited to see what other examples of priming I come across after thinking and writing about this–a classic [Baader-Meinhof phenomenon](https://lighthouse.mq.edu.au/article/july-2020/What-is-the-Baader-Meinhof-Phenomenon).

akira-hojo- 86u Y0oAaM-unsplash

God-primes and Social Behavior

## Takeaways
-   Writing is the art of using the English language in a way that will achieve the most strength and least clutter.
-   Must constantly ask yourself, 'What am I trying to say?' and say that.
-   School has taught us to use fancy words, jargon, and long transition phrases. Basically anything you learned in school about how to write, do the opposite. People want to know what you're saying in the least amount of words possible.
-   Get rid of every word that doesn't need to be there.
-   **Clutter is the language people speak when they're too scared to say what they mean.**
-   Never use, "I think," "I want to note," "I believe," etc. We know you think it, you're writing it.
-   When you're re-reading your rough draft, try bracketing the words that aren't doing anything. If the sentence still makes sense, ditch those words in the final draft.
-   Style can't be taught or learned, but don't force yourself to sound fancy.
-   Writing is all about sounding personal, but if you want to stay out of the first person, use "I" in the rough draft and replace them in the final draft.
-   There is no audience, you're writing for yourself.
-   If you find something amusing, add it. If you want to go on a tangent, do it. Again, writing is all about sounding personal. Someone has probably written something the way you have, but not with your style, examples, or tangents.
-   Cliche phrases, metaphors, etc., **are to never be used. It's lazy writing.**
-   Use _Websters Dictionary, Second College Edition,_ _Websters Dictionary of Synonyms,_ and _Rogets Thesaurus_ to make sure the word you chose actually means what you said it does. You can save a lot of space simply by using the right word.
-   Use new words if they fill a good need and help you express something you otherwise couldn't. If they don't, never use them again.
-   Separate usage from jargon.
-   Before WWII, people wanted novels and stories. But after Pearl Harbor, people just wanted to know what the hell was going on. They wanted facts, quotes, numbers, etc.
-   Before you start writing, be sure to choose which tone you want to use.
-   Ask yourself:
    -   How will I address the reader?
    -   What tense will I use?
    -   What style do I want to write in?
-   Every piece of non-fiction should leave the reader with one, just one, provocative thought he didn't have before he read the piece.
-   Try to give an extra twist to the last sentence in each paragraph. For example:

    > *I've often wondered what goes into a hot dog. Now I wish I didn't.

    My trouble began when the Department of Agriculture published...– In other words, can a chickenfurter find happiness in the land of the frank?*

-   Always collect more material than you think you will use and don't lead the reader get away. Make sure each sentence begs the reader to read the next.
-   If you've explained the facts and made the point you want to make, just stop.
-   Pick something crazy or a quote that's funny to surprise the readers with as the last sentence to your piece.
-   If a place comes to you easy, don't use it. It's most likely a cliche.
-   Eliminate every fact that is a known attribute. You don't need to use a simile to explain how hot and dry Death Valley was, people know that.
-   Distill the important information from the immaterial.

**Verbs**
-   Use short words. Of the 701 words in Lincoln's inaugural address, 505 are one syllable.

**Adverbs**
-   Most adverbs are unnecessary.
-   Don't write, "The radio blared loudly." Blared means it was loud.

**Adjectives**
-   Most are also unnecessary. "Brown dirt." Duh, dirt is brown.

**Qualifiers**
-   Don't use "sort of," "kind of," "a little," etc.
-   Tell the reader as early as you can that you're switching gears.
-   Use "but," "yet," "nevertheless," at the beginning of the sentence to replace what the reader was about to do.
-   Despite what you were taught in school, **you can start a sentence with "but."**
-   Newspaper paragraphs shouldn't have more than 2-3 sentences.
-   **The quickest fix to any sentence is to get rid of it.**

### Science and Technical Writing
-   If you're struggling trying to come up with simple writing, write about how something works. This is great practice for ordering your thoughts sequentially.
-   Imagine technical writing to be like an upside-down pyramid. Start with the first fact the reader must know to understand something and follow that pattern.

### Business and Professional Writing
-   Say what you want to say. Don't murk it up with big words trying to sound "professional."
-   The way to warm up almost any institution is to locate the missing "I" in the memos, reports, documents, writings, and so on.

## Quotes
- "The man who runs away from his craft because he lacks inspiration is a fool."
- "Ultimately, the product that any writer has to sell is not his subject, but himself."
- "The secret of good writing is to strip every sentence to its cleanest components."
- "A clear sentence is no accident."
- "Writing improves with the direct ratio to the number of things we can keep out that shouldn't be there" (I recognize the irony of this.)
- "Clutter is the official language used by corporations to hide its mistakes."
- "Leaders who bob and weave [with their words], don't inspire confidence."
- "Surprise is one of the most refreshing commodities in writing."
- "Beauty as we understand it, and as we admire it in nature, is never arbitrary."
- "A simple style is the result of hard work and hard thinking; A muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a person too dumb or too lazy to organize his thoughts."


615xBpUV9VL

On Writing Well by William Zinsser

I have a love/hate relationship with new ideas.

In a spark of brilliance one day, I tweeted "Your inputs effect your outputs. Want better ideas? Consumer better things."

I was then reminded of an article Nat Eliason wrote called, "[How to Improve Idea Flow](https://www.nateliason.com/blog/improving-idea-flow)", where he talked about auditing your consumption channels.

If you look at my Instagram feed, Youtube homepage, the people I follow on Twitter, or the podcasts I listen to, they are all talking about the same thing. Most people I follow on Twitter are talking about building in public, note-taking, or startups. All the podcasts I listen to are about building businesses or interviews with the same 7 - 10 people on different podcasts, and the people I subscribe to on Youtube are all under the same filmmaking/technology niche.

No wonder I wasn't coming up with new ideas, I was in a vat of the same 10 - 15, getting thrown around with different words being used to describe them. **You can't come up with new ideas if you spend time thinking about the same ones.**

My hunch is most people struggle with this problem as well. People who are marketers follow the same 5-10 marketers and use their strategies, people who like to build e-commerce businesses follow the same few giants and try what they did. Science fiction geeks read the same books and watch the same tv shows over and over again - **everyone is stuck learning what they've already learned.**

So, what do we do? As Nat puts in his article, start auditing your inputs. Only follow one (maybe two) people in each niche you're interested in. Then, start stealing.

How to Steal New Ideas
----------------------

In *Steal Like an Artist*, Austin Kleon gives some actionable steps on how to and why you should steal ideas from different domains and repurpose them. Nothing is original.

### Collect Good Ideas, No Matter the Domain

When you rely on a narrow set of inputs to influence your ideas, you're wearing a mental straitjacket. Your cognitive range of motion is very limited. In the words of Charlie Munger, "All the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one little academic department."

People who are world class thinkers are silo-free thinkers, avoiding the habit of looking at life through one lens. This is why you need to develop liquid knowledge. Knowledge that easily flows from one topic to the next.

Another way to look at collecting ideas from different domains is through lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is a term that was coined in the 1960s and defined the reimagining of information in new contexts. By drawing together seemingly irrelevant concepts or domains, you can create new uses for old ideas.

My favorite example of this is when people read history books or biographies to learn how to lead. **Most problems in the world are new problems that can be solved with old solutions**, so reading history can be a great way to learn effective communication, or help you come up with a go-to-market strategy.

One thing I've started doing recently is listening to Dan Carlin's [Hardcore History Podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/72qiPaoDRf8HkGKEChvG5q?si=oEjKy5xjRGGST1X4p7DfzQ). They are four hour long podcast episode that Carline unpacks famous historical events and applies his unconventional thinking to past circumstances.

A few other podcasts with varying themes are [Revisionist History](https://open.spotify.com/show/2LOJaYKijiwNefCvzczyib?si=GfoiHe-SRYa80jZTB6-2ng) with Malcom Gladwell or [Hidden Brain](https://open.spotify.com/show/20Gf4IAauFrfj7RBkjcWxh?si=Yy8w5ovaTqu64exeXsdGuQ) from NPR.

Creativity and innovation arise at the intersection of ideas. **Don't miss a great idea because you're on the wrong block**.

### Steal the Thinking, Not the Content

One of the best ways to recreate ideas and come up with "original" thoughts is to understand the thought process of someone you admire.

As I mentioned earlier, I admire Shane Parish and Anne-Laure. So, I might do some digging on how they are able to synthesize the information from sources to come up with new ideas. If I can get a grasp on *how* they think, not just what they think, I might be able to emulate my own idea around a certain topic. Emulation is when imitation goes one step further and you create your own ideas with stolen concepts.

James Clear does this quite often in his articles. In the footnotes section, he will add his sources, but sometimes will comment, "Hat tip to person x for inspiring this article", [he did it here](https://jamesclear.com/shoshin). I opened the article he mentioned to see how similar the two articles are and they sort of have the same title and basic information about Shoshin, but Clear has added relevant examples that his reader would like and stories that are personal to him. This is a great example of how to steal the thinking but not the content.

### Forget the Good Stuff, Add the Great Stuff

In this age of information overload and abundance, **no one wants a 5,000 word mediocre article.**

What someone does want is for you to drastically change their worldview in 500 words or less - that's true talent.

So when you get ready to write that article, film that video, or record that podcast, only add the great stuff. The stuff that you think no one's heard before. That story you thought was fascinating, or that one liner that rocked your world when you penned it.

Less, but better.

New Ideas Suck

Some of the kindest people in the world often have no reason to be. They've faced horrible circumstances, tough situations, and unreal pain in their life that have reshaped their worldview and, very unexpectedly, made them kinder.

Like most virtues in life, there is a Latin phrase for this. *Dulcius Ex Asperis, sweeter after difficulty.*

In our case, *people* have become sweeter after difficulty. But that saying applies to much more than just people.

Victories won, projects completed, and relationships nurtured through difficulties are much sweeter than those that form without any obstacles. Other than the relationships, I'm not sure why this is. Relationships are sweeter after difficulty because the psychological effect of experiencing hardship with someone else brings two people together. But when a project is difficult and has a lot of obstacles, it too is much sweeter to complete and send off into the world compared to one that was more of a walk in the park. I wonder why that is.

It's important to have language for the experiences and emotions we feel because **our world is only as big as the language we have to describe it.** That's why it's important to learn, or at least be aware of, obscure Latin phrases and famous quotes that have been around for generations. They communicate something in a way no one has been able to communicate before, expanding our world one Latin phrase at a time.

Dulcius Ex Asperis

- Was there an objective reality that existed whether or not we could ever observe it?
- Were there laws that restored strict causality to phenomena that seemed inherently random?
- Was everything in the universe predetermined?
- When do political parties start being a bad idea?
- Why don't we want the government controlling the internet but we're okay with them controlling our education system?
- How is it that outcomes can be likely and not happen and outcomes can be unlikely and still happen?
- Is a democracy possible in the information age? Or has social media and technology changed the way humans function in a "democracy" and policy hasn't caught up yet?
- Where do jokes come from?
- How many people do I admire that are actually miserable?
- Which people know what the right answers are, but no one listens to because they either 1. Don't look the part 2. Don't act like the part 3. Don't talk like the part?
- Is there really a difference between a more-disciplined person and a less-disciplined person, or do they just experience their temptations in different ways?
- Why isn't anyone building something like the Statue of Liberty, The Eiffel Tower, or The Great Bridge anymore? The coolest thing in recent years may be modern looking skyscrapers.
- How is it some things existed in the past but there's no record of them in the present (online)?
- There are a certain set of questions/problems that every person is faced with: how to choose a spouse, how to pick a career (and when to leave the one you're in), how to deal with difficult family members, how to deal with losing someone you love, how to enjoy life outside of work, and many more. Why is there no *Thesis on Life* or an almanack that answers these questions? Tim Ferris's *Tribe of Mentors* is the closest thing I'm aware of and it's still a long way of. This would be a really, really fun project to work on.


emily-morter-8xAA0f9yQnE-unsplash

Some Questions

At 20 years old, Ben Franklin realized most of his life up to that point had just kinda happened to him.

So, he wrote a personal handbook that would guide his every action. This put him on a launch pad to being a great businessman, politician, and more.

This is what it said:

1. Be frugal

> It is necessary for me to be extremely frugal for some time, till I have paid what I owe.

2. Always be truthful

> To endeavor to speak truth in every instance; to give nobody expectations that are not likely to be answered, but aim at sincerity in every word and action — the most amiable excellence in a rational being.

3. Work hard and be patient

> To apply myself industriously to whatever business I take in hand, and not divert my mind from my business by any foolish project of growing suddenly rich; for industry and patience are the surest means of plenty.

4. Forgive quickly and don't hold grudges

> I resolve to speak ill of no man whatever, not even in a matter of truth; but rather by some means excuse the faults I hear charged upon others, and upon proper occasions speak all the good I know of everybody.

Plan for Future Conduct

![instinct](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/eXvVTc0qpIj9FDTraO2s4/2f0271c769fab15857ea1b75f9b11ed4/instinct.png)

**I.**
Trying to change the behavior of someone who acts off instinct by persuading them with logic and reason is a formula destined for failure. You cannot combat intuition or "feeling" through data, logical conclusions, or experimental studies. The two are in direct opposition to one another.

Scott Alexander, on his [Astral Codex Ten blog](https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/contra-dynomight-on-sexy-in-laws?s=r), has described these two driving forces as "built in micro-managing instincts" and "human reason." In an effort to explain the two, he illustrates the all too common story of a daughter wanting to marry someone she's "in love with" while her parents wish for her to marry someone else, usually someone who has a prestigious profession. The daughter is acting on instinct. For whatever reason, she believes this guy is a good life partner for her. He could be funny, handsome, or smart, but whatever it is, she's basing her decision on an instinct. The parents, who want their daughter to have a good husband that will support her, be a good father, and give them incredible grandchildren, are acting on reason. They know this other guy has a more prestigious profession than the current love affair, which means more money and a stable life, which leads to healthy offspring. It makes the most logical sense for the daughter to pick the guy behind door number two. Often, though, she goes with her instinct and not rationality. Is this the better decision? Or just how most people decide and it seems to be working out, so people keep doing it?

That is a perfect example of the dichotomy between human intuition and human reason, which makes me ask, which is better? Or, is there not a better way and the best possible route is to combine the two–using instincts to guide your initial options and logic to do your due diligence?

**II.**
Intuition, or "gut-feeling" as it is casually called, is part of the automatic part of your brain that processes information. [*Psychology Today*](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/intuition) gives the example of "highway hypnosis," which is what happens when you leave your house in the morning and arrive at work fifteen minutes later but you don't have a conscious thought about the drive there. The automatic part of your brain took over and did what it does best, rely on past situations (your drive every single day to work) to formulate and create the best outcome. In this case, it's your arriving to work safe and sound.

A paper on [intuition and insight](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5020639/) explains that intuition is a "non-analytical thought process that results in certain behavior that is not based on an exclusively deliberate and stepwise search for a solution." You just know when you know. The interesting thing about intuition, as described in academic fields, is that most people agree intuition is formed by your brain scanning and organizing events in your long term memory that are similar to the one at hand. But in our case, of the daughter using intuition to pick her life partner, her brain doesn't *have* any long-term memories to scan that can illuminate a path forward. She's never picked a life partner before. Maybe she's read about certain traits that are admirable in books, seen them in movies, or heard about through close friends or more peer-based family, but certainly not in her own life. So, does this mean some aspects of intuition are innately given to us, such as how to pick a life partner, while others are learned experiences? That makes sense.

Most sources explain intuition as the choice your brain thinks is the best which is deduced by examining past experiences and events stored in your long-term memory. To me, it seems that intuition is a personal form of analytical human reason. You aren't actively going through past situations in your life and comparing how they turned out to what you want to happen now, your brain is. But if a third party, in our case the parents, actively went through past situations in your life or their life and compared how they turned out to what they want to happen now, that would be called *human reasoning*, the other decision-making tactic I'm exploring in this essay.

So can intuition be described as passive-personal reasoning? I think so. Instead of personal intuition and third-party reason being two separate methods of thinking, they could be the *same* method of thinking, but one is unconscious and personal while the other is conscious and impersonal.

**III.**
If the two forms of insight are essentially the same, passive-personal reasoning and active-impersonal reasoning, why do they lead to different outcomes?

Dynomight, [in the post that started the Astral Codex Star article](https://dynomight.net/hotness/), wonders the same thing:

> After all, _why_ do you want to marry someone hot? Evolution made you that way because hotness is a proxy for good genetics. Your genes want you to reproduce with someone hot so that you will produce lots of kids (who will have lots of kids). Your parents care who you marry because evolution tuned them to _help_ you reproduce your genes (which are also their genes).
> 
> So… that seems confusing. Don’t you and your parents have the same priorities? Why would you give such different weights to different characteristics of who you breed with?

They propose two theories:

**First, strategic conflict.**  Maybe the daughter and the parents actually *don't* want the same thing:

>Your parents share an equal number of genes with all their grandchildren. But you share twice as many genes with your kids as with your nieces and nephews.
>
>If you marry a doctor, maybe they’ll help your niece with tuition or convince her to major in pre-med instead of comparative Sanskrit opera studies. But if you marry someone with amazing genes, your niece will get none of them.

If the daughter marries an amazing doctor or lawyer, the families value on the social hierarchy will elevate. This is good news for the parents in two ways. First, they are proud their daughter married someone prestigious. Second, they now have the benefit of a higher social hierarchy passed on to *all* their grandchildren. If the daughter married some handsome hunk who was worthless, a few of their grandkids may look good but the rest of their grandkids (and their family tree) don't really get anything out of that deal. How rude.

**The second theory** is that perhaps the parents, as they have aged, just changed what they focused on. Sure, the conflict mentioned above may be there on some unconscious level, but that's not why they differ from their daughter's mate selection.

**IV.**
As we come to the conclusion of this essay, are we able to tell which insight-seeking practice is better than the other? No. But I am able to conclude, with some hesitation, that intuition and third-party human reasoning are two sides of the same coin and that intrigues me. Perhaps the best way to go forward with big decisions is to use both strategies: passive-intuition to determine your choices and find a path forward and then calling on reason to do your due diligence. If you stumble upon something that is an apparent red flag, you now know which choice *not* to go with and can determine your options once again.

Let's say the daughter, Cheyanne, loves Kyle. They've spent the last five years together and there's a massive soft spot for Kyle in Cheyanne's heart. They've graduated high school together, moved in with one another, and are experiencing important life moments together. But, Kyle is a loser. Cheyanne ends up paying the bills because Kyle can't get a job and on the rare chances he does get a job, he gets fired not long after for showing up late, yelling at customers, and has been caught stealing more than once.

Since Cheyanne *loves* Kyle, he is an obvious long-term mate option. Her intuition says he's going to change and once he does, he'll make a great father/husband. As they get closer and closer to tying the knot, the feelings of love and admiration subside and Cheyanne starts to deal with the very real, "Oh my gosh, is this going to be my life?" feelings. Now, she starts down the road of human reason. Once she does, she sees it is lined with red flags and caution signs, nudging her closer and closer to make the decision all her friend's have been persuading her to do from the start.

Is this how that situation would *really* play out? I'm not sure, but that's what I imagine a combination of passive-personal reasoning and active-personal reasoning would look like, but I don't *really* know the answer.

I'm okay with not knowing the answer. I think it's a hard question to find an answer to. But I'm proud of the ideas and rabbit holes I explored because I'm wanting to write about things [*as I'm learning about them*](https://twitter.com/mollyfmielke/status/1526977870605721600?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw), and not with a hindsight bias. I'm closer to understanding human intuition vs. human reasoning now than I was when I started writing (and I hope you are too) and I'd say that's a job well done any day of the week.

Farewell.

instinct

Which is better: instinct or reason?

Earlier this week, [Dwarkesh Patel wrote an essay exploring the mystery of the miracle year](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/annus-mirabilis?s=r)– "in which [scientists] make multiple, seemingly independent breakthroughs in the span of a single year or two" ([source](https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/annus-mirabilis?s=r)). Patel posits some potential explanations for the miracle year phenomenon including Selection Bias, right problem at the right time, and the amount of freedom the geniuses had at the time.

He concludes the piece saying:

> I still don’t think I fully understand why these miracle years keep showing up in the lives of great scientists, except that it has something to do with them being young, concentrating intensely on the right problems, and remaining open to fresh perspectives.

The conclusion is a bit underwhelming, though it makes sense because these miracle years truly are a mystery and [a lot of smart people have been thinking about them for a long time.](https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1515380200573390850?s=20&t=1HUm6zlftoazLiG2v7hdrQ)  But that conclusion can also be quite disappointing if you (1) aren't young and (2) don't feel like you're concentrating intensely on the right problems. Or if you're like me and don't even know what the right problems are.

So instead of focusing on the miracle *year*, I wanted to focus on the *prior years* and the second prior conclusion, **how do you know what problems to focus intently on?**

## Finding the Right Problems
As Patel notes, Einstein's miracle year was in 1905. In the span of four short months, Einstein wrote four papers that answered a lot of seemingly unanswerable questions in physics. He lays out his plan in a letter to Conrad Habicht:

> ...I promise you four papers in return. The first deals with radiation and the energy properties of light and is very revolutionary, as you will see if you send me your work first. The second paper is a determination of the true size of atoms...The third proves that bodies on the order of magnitude 1/1000 mm, suspended in liquids, must already perform an observable random motion that is produced by thermal motion. Such movement of suspended bodies had actually been observed by physiologists who call it Brownian molecular motion. The fourth paper is only a rough draft at this point, and is an electrodynamics of moving bodies which employs a modification of the theory of space and time.[^1]

The first paper, eventually titled "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", described how "light comes not just in waves but tiny packets."[^1]

The choice to uncover the light quanta phenomenon wasn't random. It was a deliberate choice to pursue answers to, at the time, unanswerable questions. This is our first hint at what can lead up to the making of a miracle year.

One of the main questions in physics at the turn of the 20th Century had to do with what the world is made of and how it reacts to things. Is the universe made of particles? Or is it a continuous field like gravity and electromagnetic fields are?

Einstein, in his 1905 paper, took those questions, combined them with the fundamental work of Max Planck and Phillip Lenard that had recently surfaced and created his first revolutionary breakthrough: light quanta.

If you were to continue studying Einstein's miracle year, you would see that formula for creating breakthroughs throughout his life. Unanswerable questions + recent discoveries x time to think about the solutions = revolutionary breakthrough.

![formula for breakthroughs](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6ct3tvtp6FIiqvvcfI9kQg/70a7635e930f5b36967230c203ce7b22/Untitled-2.png)

It was his deep knowledge of physics and the mysteries that had yet to be answered combined with his insatiable desire to know what was currently being worked on and ample time to think about the problem that were factors that lead to his miracle year. The explanations Patel gives in his essay for this could be seen as Right Problem Right Time. I'd argue that's the most beneficial factor (and hardest to create) that lead to Einstein's 1905 success. 

## Right Problem, Wrong Time
If you've studied the inventions of history or read *How We Got to Now* by Steven Johnson, you'd see over and over again the countless ideas and inventions that were created 10, 15, or 20 years too soon to really take off.

20 years before Edison created his phonograph, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville patented a machine that recorded sound. He was obsessed with shorthand writing and happened to study biology as a hobby. After he learned how ears capture vibrations in the air, he wondered if a machine could capture sound in the same way and record what it heard. His machine looked very much like Edison's original phonograph (picture below) but his device had one problem: it had no way of playing the recorded sound back. In his mind, this wasn't needed. Much like stenographers write in symbols interpreted by people, he assumed people would be able to interpret the etchings of his phonoautograph. Evidently that was not the case.

![FMxLriXVUAIRx71](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4v3u5Pt3FZIweSAebgJ5u7/79b42323b7c65984c21c34e184ce8e51/FMxLriXVUAIRx71.png)

This is one example, of many more, of someone working on the right problem at the wrong time. If Einstein had been born 50 years earlier, he wouldn't have had Maxwell's equations to question nor would he have Planck's work to get him started on light quanta. But he wasn't, and to say, "Everything just has to work out in the right time" is another disappointing answer to the creation (or recreation) of more miracle years. And to that, we go back to Einstein.

## On Curiosity
If the miracle year phenomenon can't be solved and is indeed just that, a phenomenon, we need to ask what we can do to increase the likelihood of that phenomenon taking place. As mentioned previously, Einstein's formula for groundbreaking insights is:

![formula for breakthroughs](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/6ct3tvtp6FIiqvvcfI9kQg/70a7635e930f5b36967230c203ce7b22/Untitled-2.png)
And that formula is rooted in one thing: **curiosity.**

Walter Isaacson writing in his biography *Einstein: His Life and Universe* says this about his sense of wonder and curiosity at life:

> Throughout his life, Einstein never lost his sense of wonder at the magic of nature's phenomena. He retained the ability to hold two thoughts in his mind simultaneously, to be puzzled when they conflicted, and to marvel when he could smell an underlying unity. 'People like you and me never grow old,' he wrote an old friend, 'We never cease to stand like curious children before the great mystery into which we were born.'

Einstein's ability to question the mysterious evidence at play in the world, without a doubt, lead to his miracle year. But he didn't just wonder about the big, gaping holes in physics. He wondered about the mundane things as well. Isaacson writes later:

> Curiosity, in Einstein's case, came not just from a desire to question the mysterious. More important, it came from a childlike sense of marvel that propelled him to question the familiar, those concepts that, as he once said, 'the ordinary adult never bothers his head about.'

## What this means for your miracle year

So if you're wondering how to increase the likelihood of your miracle year, I implore you to do three things.

1. Look at the unanswered questions in your field. Collect a list of all of the things that work "just because they do" and look at it constantly. Try, as hard as you can, to wonder about the answers and not get discouraged if you're not making progress. It took Einstein over 10 years to form his theory of special relativity since he first began thinking about it.

	If you're in a field like software, what are the problems or bugs that are so difficult to fix, people have adapted to their annoyances?

	Study history and learn how your field or passion got to where it is. Understand some of the earliest problems that were solved at some point. How did the solutions come about? 

2. Continue reading the latest sources and studies that are being conducted in your field. It's important to know the breakthrough experiments as they're happening. If you're in software, stay up-to-date on the latest technologies and trends. Don't get too wrapped up in them that you are switching every few months, but have a general idea of the possibilities each new trend, study, or experiment brings.
3. Finally, embrace your curiosity. Continue reading wide and reading deep. Don't ever think "That's not applicable to what I'm doing." It is. It could be if you think big enough. When you combine ideas from separate fields, that's when innovation really happens.

	Wonder about the little things. Be okay with not knowing the answer to a question, but don't settle for there not being an answer. Continue embracing life's curiosities and see where the path takes you. Don't be afraid to veer off the traditional path and make your own. In fact, this is probably the best thing you can do.

---

1. Isaacson, Walter. *Einstein: His Life and Universe*


milad-fakurian-nY14Fs8pxT8-unsplash

How to Increase the Chances of Becoming a Genius

### [The Kind of Smarts You Don't Find in Young People](https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/03/older-workers-silicon-valley-business/623880/), The Atlantic

One of the main frustrations between the young people and older people in the workplace, that I've observed at least, is the dichotomy between trying new things/innovating and sticking to what has always been done. Young people, fresh out of college and with a lot of new ideas wants to try new things. People who are more experienced preach the benefits of "sticking to the method." Interestingly, most of the discourse I've seen on hiring explains the values of hiring young because of their skills for innovation. But this article from *The Atlantic* argues most companies don't just need more innovation, they also need more wisdom.

 > Researchers had long noted that some skills—analysis and innovation, for example—tend to rise quickly very early in life and then fall through one’s 30s and 40s. Meanwhile, one’s knack for combining complex ideas, understanding what they mean, and relating them to others rises throughout middle age and can stay high well into old age.

---

### [Create For Just One Hour Each Day](https://moretothat.com/create-for-just-one-hour-each-day/), More to That 

> So the key is to continue cultivating the patience required to show up each day, knowing that the fruits of your labor will arrive long after you’ve sown the seeds.

---

### [One Parenting Decision That Really Matters](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/parenting-decisions-dont-trust-your-gut-book-excerpt/629734/), Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, The Atlantic

I'm not close to the life stage of having kids, more just *thinking* about when and how I want to have kids. I've always wondered, as a parent, what *really* affects your kids life? I don't think it's academics or extra curricular. I've always hypothesizes that it's the friends your kids makes. The people who your kid spends time with really matters. This article doesn't prove that, but your could argue for that potentially. I really liked this one.

> In fact, putting together the different numbers, I have estimated that some 25 percent—and possibly more—of the overall effects of a parent are driven by where that parent raises their child. In other words, this one parenting decision has much more impact than many thousands of others.

---

### [New Ways to Measure Science](https://www.wired.com/2012/01/new-ways-to-measure-science/), Samuel Arbesman, *Wired*

The idea of measuring one's contribution to science or academics by the amount of academic papers published has never made sense to me. But honestly, most things in this world don't. That's why I was excited to see Arbesman argue for a different metric. Helpfulness. Or, as Jason Priem has coined, "altmetrics."

Links: Week of 04-08-22

Below is a bit of a political ramble as I'm trying to understand the political system (and Americans in general) more and more. I've been doing a lot of thinking about this lately and am trying to come to terms with a philosophy. Below is what I think are the roots of something important. I'm scared to hit publish on this because I'm not sure what the response will be. If you disagree, agree, or have thoughts, [I'd love to hear them](https://twitter.com/daltonmabery). Just please keep them rational and kind.

---

## Political, what?
The last presidential election was the first one I was old enough to vote for. Before then, I wasn't much of a political person, and I'm still not, but I did want to educate myself a bit more on political parties and some common ideas before pledging my very important vote.

As I studied more and more, I could not understand the idea of a political parties. I find it very troublesome when anyone outsources their linking to someone else. Political parties, on the most basic level, seem to be exactly that. Someone has a few beliefs about something, looks at which party identifies with those beliefs the closest, and then assumes that identity. The practical next steps of this scenario is that the person who adopted this party based on a few things they actually believed now assumes they believe everything that party stands for, whether or not they've done the intellectual research to take a stand on that specific topic or not.

This kills any nuance in political conversations, and therefore ruins those fun family dinners around the holidays when people from opposing parties are forced to eat from the same turkey. And that's what bothers me. Someone on the left thinks everyone on the right are evil and someone on the right thinks everyone on the left are crazy. There is no nuance in political discussions.

The only ads I see during election season are bashing the opposer and not promoting the policies and ideas of the candidate the advertisement was made for. So now, instead of being influenced by what someone plans to do in office, people are influenced by whichever story they believe the most about the opposite person. This is not a good thing.

The biggest problem that I see nowadays is the lack of important, structured debate on important issues. When a culture lacks the ability to have mature conversations about hot-button topics, the only road that lies ahead leads to stupidity with a dash of ignorance.

I'm not arguing for one side or the other. I think people who are radical on both sides of the political spectrum are important to have in the American democracy, as long those people can keep an open mind, admit when they're wrong, and be honest about the fact that no one really knows the best path forward. We're all just taking bets and hoping we're in a better place in 100 years than we were 100 years ago. If we knew what the right answer is, I don't think we'd be arguing.

Political Parties. Interesting...

## Impressions
I’ve been wanting to read this book for quite some time now. The title got me hooked because one of the main questions I seek to answer in life is, “How did we get here?” And “Where are we going?” This book did a pretty good job of shedding some light on that topic, but not as much as I’d hoped it would. It talked a lot about the people who made discoveries and the drama between them more so than it did about actual information about “nearly everything.” The stories about the people who made certain discoveries were important and interesting, just not what I was expecting. It was also about 100 pages too long. Nonetheless, I learned some interesting things.

## Insights
- Before the universe began, there was nothing. There was no space outside the singularity, the really small dot of matter composed of material that was about to bang, and there was no time. So there was no "where" and there was no "before".
- The first remittance of the Big Bang was discovered, unknowingly, in 1965 by two scientists. At the time, they didn't know what they were hearing, but it was in fact light that had travelled across the universe and stretched so much it was now microwaves.
- Inflation Theory - Proposed by Alan Guth, this theory says moments after the Bang, the universe inflated from something you can hold in your hand to something that was the size of Earth today. This explains the ripples and eddies in our world.
- Most star systems are double-starred, which makes our single starred system (the sun) a slight oddity.
- If a supernova were to form within 10 light years of the earth, we'd be goners. But we don't have to worry about that happening. For a true supernova to form from a collapsed star, the star has to be ten to twenty times the size of the sun to begin with and the closest thing we have to that is 50 light years away, called Betelgeuse.
- Isaac Newton was wild. Very neurotic and kinda crazy, but he was brilliant. His masterwork, *Principia*, described the mathematical principles of natural philosophy and at the heart of it was his three laws of nature. This made Newton instantly famous. He was the first person to really create a universal law of sorts, that being gravity. 
- By the late 18th Century, scientists knew the shape, size, and weight of the earth thanks to some precise measurements by a variety of scientists using a variety of techniques. They did not know, however, how old the earth was.
- How fast galaxies are moving away from us is called their recessional velocity.
- The word molecule comes from the Latin word for "little mass." Atoms make up everything, but most scientists talk about atoms in terms of molecules instead of atoms themselves. Molecules are two or more atoms working together in a stable way. If you have two Hydrogen atoms and then through on an Oxygen atom, you get a water molecule.
- Ernst Mach was the name behind the speed of sound - Mach 1. 
- Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle - An electron is a particle but a particle that can be described in terms of waves. The uncertainty around the theory is that we can know the path an electron takes as it moves through a space or we can know where it is at a given instant but we cannot know both.
- Two forces keep atoms together - strong nuclear force and weak nuclear force. The strong force binds atoms together and allows the protons to stay in the nucleus. It's strong, but doesn't have a wide range of effect. This is why elements with big, crowded nuclei are so unstable. The force can't hold on to the protons in the nucleus, so some escape and then you get a new element.
- Hadrons, a collective term to describe protons, neutrons, and other particles governed by strong nuclear force are made up of quarks - rhymes with larks. Richard Feynman wanted to call these partons, but was overruled. Quarks are sub-divided into sub categories - up, down, strange, charm, top, and bottom-which are refered to as their "flavors." These are even further divided into red, green, and blue.
- A Mars sized object slammed into Earth to create the Moon out of debris. This was very good for us, since the moon helps earth so much. But if it happened in 1986 or last Wednesday, we wouldn't be so pleased about it.
- The elements of chemistry are very strange... Oxygen and hydrogen are two of the most combustible elements in the world, but put them together and they make water. A similar thing happens with Sodium and Chlorine. Chlorine is a harsh chemical useful for cleaning and sodium is explosive. Smash them together and you get sodium chloride, or what most people call salt.
- When elements don't occur naturally on Earth, they become extremely toxic to us. Plutonium is a good example.
- Temperature is really just a measure of the activity of molecules. 
- Storm clouds can contain enough energy for four days of power for the US. These clouds can contain updrafts and downdrafts and are often side by side, which is why pilots don't like to fly through them. The lighter particles tend to become positively charged, the heavier particles become negatively charged and stay at the base of the cloud. The negative particles want to race towards the positively charged earth - creating lightning.
- Overcast clouds are formed when moisture-bearing updrafts lack the oomph to break through a level of more stable air above, and instead spread out, like smoke hitting a ceiling.
- Darwin originally proposed that all organisms competed for resources, and the ones that had some innate advantage would prosper. That advantage would be passed on to the offspring. This is how species evolved. He first explained this is "Descent with modification."

## Quotes
- [One cannot] predict future events exactly if one cannot even measure the present state of the universe precisely.
- Every living thing is an elaboration on a single original plan. As humans, we are mere increments–each of us a musty archive of adjustments, adaptations, modifications, and providential tinkerings stretching back 3.8billion years.
- "Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, in often astonishingly large numbers.
- "It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously."
- "We really are at the beginning of it all [life.] The trick, of course, is to make sure we never find the end. And that, almost certainly, will require a good deal more than lucky breaks."

## Stories/Studies
- One of the most unlucky scientists, Guillaume Le Gentil (p. 54)
- Mary Anning found a strange 17 foot long sea monster fossil which is now known as ichtyosaurus embedded in the English Channel. For the next 35 years, she collected and sold fossils to tourists. It's long been held that she coined the original tongue twister, "She sells sea shells by the sea shore."
- Sometime in the 1950s, during the mass production phase of lead, a lot of studies were conducted to see the effects of lead. The problem was that most studies were funded by lead producers. In one such case, a doctor who had no training in chemical pathology conducted a study where they gave lead samples to volunteers in increasing doses. After, they tested their urine and feces for lead samples. But what the doctor didn't know was that lead isn't produced as a waste product. Rather it gets absorbed by the blood and bones - which is why it was so dangerous. It makes me think, shouldn't the fact that there was no lead being produced in waste send of a warning light?

# Questions
- If the earth formed from the Big Bang, where did the oceans come from - and how were the oceans already so deep compared to land?Was it just one big grand canyon like thing before someone turned the hose on and filled it with water?
	- “We have identified a vast reservoir of Earth-like water in the outer reaches of the solar system,” said Darek Lis, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California, and lead author of the study. “Water was crucial for the development of life as we know it. We not only want to understand how Earth’s water was delivered, but also if this process could work in other planetary systems.”
	- https://www.nasa.gov/feature/comet-provides-new-clues-to-origins-of-earth-s-oceans
- What was the Reign of Terror in Paris and why was Marie Antoniette beheaded?
- If the universe is expanding, where is it expanding to? Or expanding in?


81oEGeRXNtL

A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Most books nowadays have one main thesis that the book is arguing for with a lot of supporting ideas and observations.

*Atomic Habits* thesis is that tiny changes make a big impact. The rest of the book explains how tiny changes make a big impact and then gives a few frameworks for helping the reader make the tiny changes that they want to make in their life.

Most finance books end up with the thesis that you should spend less than you make and also that it's a good idea to invest money in index funds. The rest of the book usually gives strategies for spending less than you make, explains how to budget, and maybe talks a little bit about debt.

This information, the leftover bits in books, podcasts, or essays is what I call "intellectual scraps." They are the leftover bits of ideas that the author touched on here or there with a few throwaways sentences, but never revisited. These intellectual scraps are gold mines for finding fresh ideas to write and think about.

A good way to spot intellectual scraps is to take note of whenever you think, "Man, I wish they talked/wrote more about that in their podcast/book."

Gather intellectual scraps to shape ideas of your own

Leonardo da Vinci on "creative procrastination:"

> Men of loft genius sometimes accomplish the most when they work the least, for their minds are occupied with their ideas and the perfection of their conceptions, to which they afterwards give form.

Creative procrastination

At [Farnam Street](https://fs.blog/), one of my main responsibilities is working on The Knowledge Project podcast and [YouTube channel](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLtTf_uKt0Itd0NG7txrwXA). We publish a new episode every week.

This week is a conversation with David Sinclair. Dr. Sinclair is a professor of genetics and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard Medical School. Here's a highlight from the conversation between Shane and him:

> 80% of our longevity and our health in the future is in our own hands. Only 20% is genetic, which we cannot yet do much about. Some of these changes are very simple. 

[Listen here](https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/david-sinclair/).

New podcast with David Sinclair

My wife has pulmonary fibrosis, so we spend a lot of time in doctor's offices and hospitals. It's always a joy for me to observe and compare how one nurse handles certain situations than another. Personality shines through everything you do.

One thing that we've struggled with is the lack of documentation of how certain things work. Specifically, the notes left in the chart from each visit that other nurses and doctors consult at the following appointments.

We were in the hospital for a few days in a row one time and my wife was getting an antibiotic through an IV. One morning, she was getting the IV and it started to burn. So, the attending nurse turned the flow rate down a little bit. That seemed to solve the problem. Yet, that nurse didn't document in the chart this rate change.

Later that same night, when the nurses started the antibiotic once more, it started to burn again. We told them the nurse earlier in the day slowed the flow rate and that helped. But, lo and behold, they checked the chart and didn't see any documentation of the rate change. So, they had no idea what number to go down to or why that may have solved the problem. Instead, they stopped the flow of the antibiotic. This meant we had to wait for the head nurse to come in and guide us on the next steps.

I suspect this happens in every company and on every team. But it's a great illustration that explains the importance of documenting what you do.

Documenting what you do

The coolest thing about the internet is the vast amounts of niche knowledge available in an instant.

Some knowledge can come from people's personal blogs who work a very unique job and also share that online. But the amount of people who have a unique job is quite small and the subset of people who write about what they do is even smaller still – so this type of blog is few and far between.

Another good way to find niche secrets online is to follow the footnotes. Traditional media companies sometimes write about what's going on in the world and will link to an original source. That original source likely contains much more fascinating insights than the piece that is synthesizing what they say. Try reading the original piece. This is also a good habit to get into because you learn how to shape ideas for yourself instead of relying on someone else to tell you what to think.

When you discover a niche secret, combine that with something you already know, remix a story from history, and you now have a new idea, complete with an illustration to use as an example that you discovered and synthesized all alone. How cool! 

The value of niche secrets

"You're a different person when you're around your family," my wife commented to me one day on the way home from my parent's house. She went on to explain that I'm actually funny (which hurt a bit, not going to lie), am much more willing to eject a thought or opinion into the conversation than I am with others, and that I just seem more relaxed.

All of that is true. I enjoy spending time with my family and would say I'm more open to ejecting into the conversation, which got me thinking about a long-held debate in psychology, *do circumstances determine someone's behavior, or is it their character?* This is often referred to as the situation vs. person debate.

You probably won't be acting the same way at a funeral as you would on a Friday night in a bar. If you do, you probably lack some social awareness. But even someone who does act the same in those situations could reason that circumstances *don't* effect their behavior and they are solely reliant on their person to do so. I often hear from people like this that they're "not going to change who I am," or, "I'm just being 100% me." Which I understand and admire the confidence, but being 100% you can't be used as an excuse to make other people feel uncomfortable. That's just called being a jerk.

For evidence to the circumstance argument, we can look to the [Stanford Prison Experiment](https://www.prisonexp.org/). If you're unfamiliar, the goal of the experiment was to test how situational variables influenced the behaviors of 1). people with authority and 2). people who were "lesser than." Volunteer college students were split into two groups - one group were the guards and the other were the prisoners. The "jail" was a Stanford basement that contained makeshift cells. The experiment is widely controversial and started a world-wide conversation about ethics and morality when experimenting on human subjects. The experiment was supposed to last two weeks, but ended on the sixth day due to the wild behaviors and psychological abuse directed toward the prisoners from the guards. It's safe to say the situation influenced the guards behavior.

We can also look at the [Stanley Milgrim experiment](https://www.simplypsychology.org/milgram.html), which was conducted to see how far people would go for an authoritative figure giving them instructions that was clearly inflicting pain on someone, but it too reveals how certain people's behaviors can change given the circumstances.

My hypothesis is that people's behavior can be based on any given range. With flexible and fun on one side and upset and angry on the other. Some people have very wide ranges and some people have very small ranges, but the range is fixed. What moves the current operating range to one side or another is the circumstance. So if they have a wide range of behaviors and are in a fun environment, they are going to be fun and flexible. If they are in a sad situation, the situation gauge will shift toward the other end and they will become sad. So, **the situation determine's your behavior but the behaviors that are able to be shown in any given situation are based on personality.**

It's a classic "both/and" resolution. What do you think?

Personality creates behaviors. Circumstances reveal them.

In 1955, Professor Richard Feynman gave [one of the most famous talks on the importance of science](https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1575/1/Science.pdf). In his address, he listed three ways science is of important value and gave a strong encouragement (and a stark warning) to the future generations of scientists.

![Richard Feynman](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5alWsn7w7eZkXSoQKFlnQO/db79387ebaf7e17255a304e82c450e1b/1_h0m81hmIfZzPLFTG1pPAeg.jpeg)

## Science allows us to make things

> The first way in which science is of value is familiar to everyone. It is that scientific knowledge enables us to do all kinds of things and to make all kinds of things.

Though most would argue science is mainly good, science in and of itself doesn't promote doing good or bad. It's left to the interpretation of mistake-prone humans to use science in any given way. Naturally, this opens up the door for bad things to be done. But if we want to continue improving, we must be okay with taking that risk.

In his lecture, Feynman tells a story of visiting a Buddhist temple and being told something he never forgot. The man in charge gifted them with a Buddhist proverb:

> To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.

Similarly, science can open the gate to heaven or the gate to hell. "So it is evident that," Feynman expresses, "in spite of the fact that science could produce enormous horror in the world, it is of value because it *can* produce *something*."

## Science is an avenue for intellectual enjoyment
The second reason science is of value is the imagination it sparks in people from reading about it, writing about it, and working on it.

> We have been led to imagine all sorts of things infinitely more marvelous than the imaginings of poets and dreamers of the past. It shows that the imagination of nature is far, far greater than the imagination of man.

Have you ever considered the the bizarre curiosities in the world? If we put aside  the "where did life come from?" question, there are still many things we don't know about the world. And the things we do now, we wonder how long they've been happening and what purpose they serve!

Perhaps this could be called the *Paradox of Knowledge*. As Feynman alludes to in his lecture, the more things we discover about the world, the more mysterious it seems. Knowledge about the world is like Hydra. For each piece we discover and cross off the list, two more pieces appear. But what's great about humanity, is that these mysteries never deter those with the lab coats. "With pleasure and confidence," Feynman exclaims, "we turn over each new stone to find unimagined strangeness leading on to more wonderful questions and mysteries–certainly a grand adventure!"

One of the disappointing things about culture when it gets involved with science,  is that it seems only interested in the use case for a remarkable idea and fails to appreciate the idea in and of itself. I see this happening today with the advancements in AI. [When Dalle-2 was showcased on Twitter recently](https://twitter.com/sama/status/1511724264629678084), the beautiful artwork that was produced based only on a small sentence description was amazing. But it didn't stop the pessimists from saying the all-too-common, "So what?"

Does it matter? Who knows what this could be used for, but let's enjoy the technical advancements right now and see what possibilities it opens up as other technology advances.

## Science makes people comfortable with doubt and uncertainty

> When a scientist doesn't know an answer to a problem, he is ignorant. When he has a hunch as to what the result is, he is uncertain. And when he is pretty darn sure of what the result is going to be, he is in some doubt... in order to progress, we must recognize the ignorance and leave room for doubt.

Science is a network of people who have ideas and theories. Most people are unsure about their ideas, some people are nearly sure, but none, as Feynman notes, are *absolutely* certain. This is possibly the greatest value of science–it encourages the idea of uncertainty. It ensures people know its okay to be confused and puzzled about something. In fact, not knowing the answer to something is a great place to be because it means you're on the edge of cutting off one head of the hydra only to discover two more.

Marc Andreessen shared a screenshot from an article recently explaining the rationale behind banning certain "misinformation" online. Though he didn't link the source, the screenshot is scary.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="und" dir="ltr">👨‍🍳💋 <a href="https://t.co/n02xsC6ZQx">pic.twitter.com/n02xsC6ZQx</a></p>&mdash; Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) <a href="https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1517687662282387456?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 23, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

If we were to ban ideas that "contradict the scientific consensus" in 1543, (Well, [they tried then](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicolaus_Copernicus#Controversy)) we'd still believe the Earth was at the center of the universe. If we did so in 1905, we might still believe [the ether](https://www.britannica.com/science/ether-theoretical-substance) is real and would never have discovered the theories of General and Special Relativity.

Banning information that goes against the grain is the opposite of one of the most fundamental pillars of science: doubt. Interestingly, Feynman addresses this exact issue:

> It is our responsibility to leave the men of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant; if we suppress all discussion, all criticism, saying, "This is it, boys, man is saved!" and thus doom man for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.

If we want to solve a problem that we have never before solved, we need to be open to solutions and ideas that we've yet to try. To do that, we must encourage doubt and uncertainty to run rampant in scientific fields, and in fact our own life as well, as we try to discover more mysteries of the universe.

## Our responsibility as scientists
Feynman concludes his lecture with a heartfelt encouragement to scientists:

> It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress and great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress that is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom, to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

It's our responsibility as people in 2022 to do the same.

Richard Feynman

The Value of Science 67 Years Later

From [this article](https://www.ancient-origins.net/history/sumerians-looked-heavens-they-invented-system-time-and-we-still-use-it-today-007341).

> Many ancient civilizations had a rough approximation of the passage of time. Obviously, a day began when the sun rose and night began when the sun set. Somewhat less obvious was the passage of weeks, months, and years; however, these too had been approximated by ancient peoples. A month was the length of time of one complete lunar cycle, whereas a week was the length of time for one phase of the lunar cycle. A year could be estimated based on the changing seasons and relative position of the sun. Once the zenith of the sun was determined, scholars could count the number of sunrises/sunsets that passed until it reached its zenith again. In this manner, the ancient Egyptians, Mayans, and Babylonians, among others, determined that the year had 360 days.

The passage of time

From [Joel Chan](https://oasislab.pubpub.org/user/joel-chan), this process for synthesizing notes is the best I've seen. It's a bit academic in nature, but with a careful read can be easily understood and you could have a new process for note-taking. I know I do.

### The process goes like this

1. Begin with a set of question notes and papers
	- Every paper or source is read with these questions in mind.
2. Create observation notes
	- Observation notes have the potential to inform one or more questions that you started with.
	- Each observation note is grounded in at least one quote or context from a source and then directly linked to a question note.
3. Develop synthesis
	- What does the literature have to say about the questions of interest?
	2. Synthesis notes also get explicitly linked to relevant question note.
4. Compose and combine synthesis notes and questions of interest into arguments and theories. 
	- If done well, this process will reveal even more questions. That's okay. Go back to the question phase.

### Example images
![Screen Shot 2022-04-19 at 8.00.34 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/2nV6nLutnSSWXP96mdir7M/cd971a904ffe8df6ea464e5953468815/Screen_Shot_2022-04-19_at_8.00.34_PM.png)

![Screen Shot 2022-04-19 at 8.00.53 PM](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/5QAMRJ9q04QPwe2eBbRyYK/11ee69b4e4ee736d3b169f8e2c447c0f/Screen_Shot_2022-04-19_at_8.00.53_PM.png)

I reccomend you read the entire article. [Do so here](https://oasislab.pubpub.org/pub/54t0y9mk/release/3).

The best system I've read for synthesizing knowledge

Oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and carbon are some of the fundamental elements for creating life. Without either of these, life will have a very hard time existing (if it can even get off the ground at all).

But there are other elements required to sustain life. Iron is needed to create hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that moves oxygen and carbon dioxide around in your body. Cobalt is one of the elements that B12 binds to in the body. Potassium and a small amount of sodium are used in controlling the nerves. Without them, it would be hard for your brain to send signals to your body and vice versa.

As you can see, the elements needed for creating life and the elements needed for sustaining life are not the same. So it is with most other ventures in the world.

The employees who took a company from 0-1 are not likely the same employees that are needed to take the company from 1-10.

The push you need to get a project started requires a lot of motivation and some excitement. But it requires careful planning and execution of that plan to finish the project. The one off motivation burts don't do well for achieving long term goals.

This is one of the many ways the real-world mimics the forces that control it. This is why it’s important to have a brief understanding of how things in the world work. It helps you identify patterns and rules you may otherwise miss.


You can't go there by doing that

In *[Psychology of Money](https://www.amazon.com/Psychology-Money-Timeless-lessons-happiness-ebook/dp/B084HJSJJ2/ref=sr_1_1?gclid=CjwKCAjw9e6SBhB2EiwA5myr9jXY7bzuqPqcpT1ilW3gPPA_BWbFdOvNKch9NdwRFotGg7292dGeDhoCfAgQAvD_BwE&hvadid=241638696189&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9032520&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=12203680808315375271&hvtargid=kwd-816731825&hydadcr=21903_10171041&keywords=the+psychology+of+money&qid=1650221492&sr=8-1)* by [Morgan Housel](https://twitter.com/morganhousel), he writes about the idea of living with a margin of safety or room for error. It's a common idea, but an uncommon practice. In the book, Housel explains living with room for error means having more cash on hand than you think may be necessary to wither the unexpected storms that life brings.

The difficulty, though, is knowing how much room to give yourself. Living with too much room for error in the context of personal finances means you'd be losing out on some returns from stocks or other illiquid investments. Not enough room for error means you could be wiped out completely if something terrible happens. So living with room for error is a good thing, but knowing exactly how much room to live with is difficult.

Harland and Wolff, a shipbuilding company, had a practice for all of their vessel's maiden voyages. *[National Geographic](https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-Titanic-Editors/dp/1547854006)* explains, they sent men, called the Guarantee Group, aboard the ship who were experts in skills like "plumbing, electrical systems, carpentry, and machine fitting." Essentially, if anything went wrong, they were there to fix it. Harland and Wolff were living with room for error.

One of the most famous Harland and Wolff creations was the *Titanic*, so indeed, the Guarantee Group was aboard the vessel at the time of its sinking. Still, there was no stopping the ship's inevitable doom. Harland and Wolff's room for error wasn't quite enough.

So it goes with things in life.


Sometimes your room for error, isn't enough

I learned this was a real science today while reading *Leonardo da Vinci* by Walter Isaacson.[ Britannica describes physiognomy as](https://www.britannica.com/topic/physiognomy-divination):

> The study of the systematic correspondence of psychological characteristics to facial features or body structure.

Put simply, judging people's character or competence by how they look. It's quite a crude practice indeed, but nonetheless was important enough at some point in time to have a term created out of it.

The earliest work on physiognomy was attributed to Aristotle. It contained six chapters to:

> The consideration of the method of study, the general signs of character, the particular appearances characteristic of the dispositions, of strength and weakness, of genius and stupidity, and so on. Then he examined the characters derived from the different features, and from colour, hair, body, limbs, gait, and voice. While discussing noses, for example, he says that those with thick, bulbous ends belong to persons who are insensitive, swinish; sharp-tipped noses belong to the irascible, those easily provoked, like dogs; rounded, large, obtuse noses to the magnanimous, the lionlike; slender, hooked noses to the eaglelike; and so on.

On Physiognomy

Let me break a social norm: **You don't have to be life-long friends with every person you become acquainted with.** In fact, it's probably best you don't. Doing so could lead to 100 "friendships" with no depth. No one can carry the emotional burden of that many people on their shoulders.

## Here's what usually happens:

Craig meets Darrel while they are both working as interns at a local accounting firm. They're young, fresh out of college, and in a similar life stage. Naturally, they bond over their shared experiences, eat few meals together, grab drinks, and maybe take a vacation or two with each other. Eventually, they become best friends.

After their two-year stint as interns, they're ready for something new. They want a job with more pay and more status. Nothing wrong with that, right?

So Craig gets a job on the East Coast and Darrel heads South. The goodbye is sad. They've shared laughs and memories together and now all that is coming to an end. They say they'll stay connected, and they probably do for a few months after the move but eventually, entropy sets in and their relationship dwindles. The final stage of this once strong relationship are casual swipe ups of 🔥  or 😂 on Instagram. Maybe the occasional, "I miss you."

This experience is all too common. But is that a bad thing? For some reason, society has deemed it to be.

The bitter best friend that got replaced at college or felt "forgotten" about is a popular storyline for Hollywood. And for some reason we have empathy for them. "How could they!" We think. "They shared so many memories together." But perhaps this is just the circle of life and we need to learn that. Not every person you're acquainted with at some point in life will become a life-long friend. Some will just be season-long friends. It doesn't diminish the memories, make them less of a person, or somehow mean the relationship was wrong. It was probably exactly what you needed at the time and now that you (and your season-long friend) are in a different place in life, it's time to part ways and head South, without the feeling of guilt or betrayal riding shotgun.

## The Best Season-Long Friendship
If you've never seen Good Will Hunting, I implore you to drop everything right now and watch it. Good luck holding back the tears. But if you haven't that's okay.

A sub-plot in the movie is between two best friends, Will Hunting (Matt Damon) and Chuckie Sullivan (Ben Affleck). Will is a cocky genius who hasn't amounted to much in life other than getting in fights and hanging out with the boys. Chuckie is the average blue collar worker who works on his car on weekends and goes to the bar at night. Will and Chuckie have a routine. Chuckie picks up the boys in his car, drives to Will's house, and they go out on the town. This happens everyday. But the plot of the movie follows Will's nurturing of his genius and encouragement to make something out of his life, which is a speech Chuckie finally gives to Will after he's tired of seeing him throw his gifts down the drain:

<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Xv7eeMikM_w?start=72" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

*(You can watch the video or read the script below)*

**Will:** "What am I going to get out of here for? I'm gonna live here the rest of my life you know? Be neighbors. We'll have kids, take them to little league together up Folley Field."

**Chuckie sighs and replies:** "Look you're my best friend so don't take this the wrong way, but, in 20 years, if you're still living here, coming over to my house and watching the Patriots game and still working construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. That's not a threat, that's a fact. I'll fuckin' kill ya."

**Will, bewildered:** "What are you talking about?"

**Chuckie:** "Look. You've got something none of us have–" 

**Will cuts him off**: "Oh c'mon, why is it always this. I mean *I fuckin' owe it to myself to do this or that*. Wha- What if I don't want to."

**Chuckie:** "Nah, nah, nah, nah, fuck you. You don't owe it to yourself. You owe it to me. 'Cause tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I'll be 50.  And I'll still be doing this shit (construction). And that's alright. That's fine. But you're sittin' on a winning lottery ticket...

Every day I come by your house and I pick you up. And we go out and we have a few drinks and a few laughs and its great. You know what the best part of my day is? For about ten seconds from when I pull up to the curb to when I get to your door, 'cause I think maybe I'll get up there and I'll knock on the door and you won't be there. No goodbye. No see ya later. No nothing. You just left. I don't know much, but I know that."

---

The movie continues. Will has a breakthrough with his therapist, played by Robin Williams, and finally realizes what life is all about. He sets off to California to go see about a girl.

The camera cuts to Chuckie parking on the curb like he's done so many times before. He takes a quick jaunt up to Will's patio and knocks.

...

Nothing.

He looks through the dirty window inside and finds sheets folded neatly on the bed. His face turns from confusion to understanding. A slight grin begins to show on Chuckie's face followed by tears. He takes a 180 degree turn and slowly walks back to the infamous curb and shrugs to the boys in the car. Confused, he says "He's not there." But we all know what he's thinking.

"That son of a bitch left. No good bye. No see ya later. No nothing. He cashed in his winning lottery ticket."

Chuckie is the best kind of season-long friend. We learned from Will what matters most in life. We learned from Chuckie how to be a great friend and make those things matter.

**There's nothing wrong with a season-long friendship**. Sometimes, they have more impact on your life than anyone ever could.

---

This is the final scene, where Chuckie realizes will had left. I cried while watching it for this piece and I'll probably cry every time I watch it again. It's great.

<iframe width="100%" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/49TeSoo4Sx8" title="YouTube video player" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Damon-Stiller-Good-Will-Hunting

Season-Long Friendships

Did a brief dive on time this morning and read some interesting article on whether or not time exists. One interesting point one of the articles made was that we know what chairs and tables are made out of–particles–but we don't know what time is made out of. Surely it doesn't just exist? Is it made out of space, like Einstein's General Theory of Relativity posits? Maybe.

 - [Does time exist?](https://phys.org/news/2022-04-physicists-philosophers.html)
 - [Is time real?](https://phys.org/news/2022-04-physicists-philosophers.html)
 - [What if time was tiny sections?](https://www.space.com/loop-quantum-gravity-space-time-quantized)
 - [Astronomer's discover an exocomet orbiting another star.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ukrainian-astronomers-discover-exocomets-around-another-star/)
 - [Where did water come from on Earth?](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/comet-provides-new-clues-to-origins-of-earth-s-oceans)

Thursday's Assorted Links

As he was standing in the musty Mississippi courtroom, arguing for what he believed in, he got a brilliant idea. Instead of arguing for the benefits of alcohol while hoping (and maybe praying) no one on the defense brought up all of the negative effects of alcohol, he would address the effects directly. This took the defense's argument right from their hands, just like a little kid in a candy shop.

"Mr. Sweat", the judge begins, "Do you have anything to add?"

"I do your honor, and please, call me 'Soggy'."  _(His real name was Noah Sweat Jr., but he acquired the nickname for potentially obvious reasons.)_

Our man continued,

My friends, I had not intended to discuss this controversial subject at this particular time. However, I want you to know that I do not shun controversy. On the contrary, I will take a stand on any issue at any time, regardless of how fraught with controversy it might be. You have asked me how I feel about  [whiskey](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whiskey). All right, here is how I feel about whiskey:

> If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge,
> the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys
> the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread
> from the mouths of little children; if you mean the evil drink that
> topples the Christian man and woman from the pinnacle of righteous,
> gracious living into the bottomless pit of degradation, and despair,
> and shame and helplessness, and hopelessness, then certainly I am
> against it.
> 
> 
> 
> But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the
> philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get
> together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips,
> and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas
> cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the
> old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning; if you mean the
> drink which enables a man to magnify his joy, and his happiness, and
> to forget, if only for a little while, life's great tragedies, and
> heartaches, and sorrows; if you mean that drink, the sale of which
> pours into our treasuries untold millions of dollars, which are used
> to provide tender care for our little crippled children, our blind,
> our deaf, our dumb, our pitiful aged and infirm; to build highways and
> hospitals and schools, then certainly I am for it.
> 
> 
> 
> This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise.

## The position depends on the audience

That dramatic introduction was my attempt at a narrative (How'd I do?) explaining the beginning of a rather fascinating fallacy known as "If by whiskey..."

Sweat, the character whom we observed in the musty Mississippi court room, was an American judge and state representative, famous for the former speech he gave in 1952 about whiskey. What made it so unique was that he wasn't arguing for one side or the other. Instead, he came down on both sides of the argument but took a different position depending on the audiences reaction.

Naturally, "If by whiskey..." arguments are used whenever the speakers position depends on the listener's opinion. It's a great way to take a position on something without really taking a position.

Another way to think about this is the  [Russel Conjugation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation).

## Russel Conjugation
The Russel Conjugation, or sometimes called the Emotive Conjugation is when someone uses different words to describe something depending on the feelings they want to invoke in the listener.

This is something most people do without ever realizing they are doing it. This happens because all words convey two meanings. The first is the factual information the word conveys. We all know what a dog is because the word "dog" describes it. The second meaning words coney are their intended  _emotional_  response. "Dog" is a kind, loving animal. "Mutt" is a dumb, unwanted creature. "Sleeping around" vs. "Having lots of sex." "Getting drunk" vs. "Having a few too many." "Murdering babies" vs. "Pro Choice."

By using a select choice of words instead of another, a speaker is able to create emotional responses to what they're saying. They can invoke love and sadness or fear and anger by describing the same situation based on factual meaning but that carries a different emotional load.

vinicius-amnx-amano-V1zGiNVPumM-unsplash

If, By Whiskey

- [What do the people who wrote history have to say about their own lives](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/04/18/the-people-who-decide-what-becomes-history-richard-cohen-making-history) and how do we know what's true and what's not? 
- [Adam Smith has some competition.](https://www.econlib.org/carl-menger-versus-adam-smith/) Or maybe just a hater?
- [Monkey's can recognize their internal body states.](https://phys.org/news/2022-04-rhesus-monkeys-heartbeat.html) This was thought to be one of the main differentiators between humans and other species.
- [The success of "late-bloomers."](https://commonreader.substack.com/p/i-quit-my-job-to-write-a-book-about?s=w)

Tuesday's Assorted Links

- Do we really have to be afraid of AI taking over the world? [Probably not.](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/A-Thousand-Brains) 
- [Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis](https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/psychology/sapir-whorf-hypothesis)
- [Dating algorithm's can be hacked](https://youtu.be/d6wG_sAdP0U)
- [The universe speaks math.](https://phys.org/news/2022-04-universe-mathematics-scope.html) What if it didn't?
- [Tyler Cowen's "Production Function"](https://perell.com/podcast/tyler-cowen-production-function/)
- [What happened to America in the past 10 years](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/social-media-democracy-trust-babel/629369/) (and why it has been "uniquely stupid")

Monday's Assorted Links

- [Differences between the Moon's far and near sides.](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220408142950.htm)
- [CRISPR reveals a giant breakthrough in sickle cell treatment](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/04/220408103142.htm) and why some patients who have sickle cell don't have symptoms.
- [Is there a connection between sadness and creativity](https://lithub.com/is-there-an-inherent-connection-between-sadness-and-art-making/)?
- [What alien signals would look like if they were sent](https://phys.org/news/2022-04-aliens.html), probably.
- [How the brain grows and shrinks during life.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/your-brain-expands-and-shrinks-over-time-these-charts-show-how/)

Friday's Assorted Links

In James Clear's 3-2-1 Newsletter, he shared a thought that I've been feeling for awhile, but couldn't put to words very well. This happens a lot with James Clear and other great writers. They're able to say what you've been thinking. This is what Clear wrote:

> Powerful combination = Hate being bad at stuff + Willing to look like
> a beginner.
> 
> People who hate being bad at stuff are driven to improve. However, if
> they are unwilling to look like a beginner from time to time, they
> will avoid new challenges and struggle to reinvent themselves.
> 
> Meanwhile, people who are willing to try new things, but lack a thirst
> to improve will settle for mediocre results.
> 
> It's the willingness to look foolish for a short time—but not for a
> long time—that leads to jumps in performance.

This reminded me of an essay I wrote earlier in the year, ["How to Be Great? Be Okay With Being Bad."](https://www.daltonmabery.com/essays/how-to-be-great) If you want to get good at something you're currently bad at, you have to be willing to look like a fool for awhile. If you're afraid to do so, you'll never be open to new challenges. And if you're not open to new challenges, you'll never adopt new skills.

As I wrote in the essay, I want to be really good at golf. My goal is to be much, much better than your average weekend player. The only way I can get better is to go out there and try. I've become much better in the last few months, but when I first started I was embarrassed to go to the driving range and shank balls, duff chips, and miss two foot putts. The paradox in this is that the only way I could get better at not shanking balls, duffing chips, and missing those two foot putts is to practice those things. Sure I can take lessons, and I did, but I still had to put in a lot of time outside of the lessons. And most of that time was spent being embarrassed at my performance and the fact that I looked like a beginner.

**Don't be afraid to look like a fool for a year in order to look like a master in ten.**

Looking like a fool at first leads to mastery at last

1. [Scientist's discover the furthest galaxy to date.](https://phys.org/news/2022-04-scientists-farthest-galaxy.html) (Image below)
![scientists-have-spotte](//images.ctfassets.net/nk2hkdvz2uym/4niAGF5b1EXmhlaozh6PJJ/35bb21b56356dec5e91d84f3dc6b6c53/scientists-have-spotte.jpeg)
3. [Essays so good, they eventually became books](https://josephcwells.com/curations/essays-that-became-books). Save time by reading the essays, get nuance by reading the books.
4. [Why George Orwell hates](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whPnobbck9s) the way you (and most likely a lot of people, specifically academics and people who use big words to sound smart) write.
5. A bit of tension at the Vatican.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">A bit of tension at the Vatican.<br>If the Bishop moves forward, the Queen can take him. <a href="https://t.co/fOsW7cAWkI">pic.twitter.com/fOsW7cAWkI</a></p>&mdash; Whitey McWhiteyface (@OldWelshGit33) <a href="https://twitter.com/OldWelshGit33/status/1511608081637126149?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 6, 2022</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
6. [An essay on Countersignaling](https://www.marketingsociety.com/the-library/counter-signalling-or-signalling-it%E2%80%99s-all-about-status) being so rich you are allowed to act poor.

Thursday Assorted Links

Computers are exceptional at doing really hard complicated things, but struggle at doing simpler things. In other words, tasks that humans think are hard, are easy to teach AI but tasks that humans think are easy are difficult to teach AI.

[Hans Moravec](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Moravec), a faculty member at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon, made this observation in 1988:

> It is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility

Moravec's Paradox

## Links
- [Simple time management advice][1]
- [Tyler Cowen book recommendations][2]
- [What science should do for the average person][3]

## Things I Learned
["If by whiskey..."][4] (or Russell Conjugation) - A tactic used in certain arguments or debates to change the meaning or language used to describe something.

"If by whiskey" caught on from a speech in 1952 on whether or not Mississippi should change their prohibition laws. The lawyer making the speech said "If by whiskey you mean..." and went on to say all of the bad things that whiskey can do. Here's a brief excerpt:

> If when you say whiskey you mean the devil's brew, the poison scourge, the bloody monster, that defiles innocence, dethrones reason, destroys the home, creates misery and poverty, yea, literally takes the bread from the mouths of little children...

If that's what they meant by whiskey, then certainly he opposed it. But, he continued, saying:

> But, if when you say whiskey you mean the oil of conversation, the philosophic wine, the ale that is consumed when good fellows get together, that puts a song in their hearts and laughter on their lips, and the warm glow of contentment in their eyes; if you mean Christmas cheer; if you mean the stimulating drink that puts the spring in the old gentleman's step on a frosty, crispy morning

If that's what they meant by whiskey, then surely it was a good thing to have around.

[1]: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2004/11/time_management.html
[2]: https://mostrecommendedbooks.com/tyler-cowen-books
[3]: https://www.coordinationproblem.org/2021/08/what-a-science-does-or-should-do-is-simply-to-allow-the-average-man-through-professional-specializat.html
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/If-by-whiskey


Wednesday Assorted Thoughts

Tyler Cowen has easily risen to to the top of my "thinkers I like" list. There's probably no one else I know of today that I look at and think, "I want to be exactly like them when I grow up" other than Tyler Cowen. His curisoity and breadth of knowledge is amazing.

Part of that knowledge stems from reading. And reading a lot. Here's some advice:

- > People don’t read enough, and I think as a society we’re under-investing in reading. People feel compelled to finish books they’ve started – that’s just a tax on your reading. Why would you do that to yourself? Imagine a world where any restaurant you tried you had to keep on going there for days or weeks, you’d hardly ever go out to eat.

- > So I advocate reading books in cluster – the author can be the clustering factor, it can be the topic, it can be the historical period – but you really get into a person’s mind if you re-read everything they’ve done within the span of a few weeks or months, and then watch them on YouTube, and just try to think about and write out notes, “What am I going to ask them?” One of the very best ways to read is to have your own podcasy.

- > So the way you read well is just by reading a lot, and by reading a lot your whole life. And then when you go to read actual books you’re like “I know that, I know that, I know that,” and you keep on going, and you read much more quickly. And that’s really the way to read a lot. There are these compounding returns to being obsessed with reading, and starting young, and never stopping.

Read more [reading advice from Tyler Cowen here.](https://www.driverlesscrocodile.com/books-and-recommendations/tyler-cowen-on-reading-fast-reading-well-and-reading-widely/#:~:text=The%20important%20thing%20is%20to,that%20no%2Done%20reads%20quickly.)

Reading advice from Tyler Cowen

> The researchers recently used a fluorescent marker to visualize and track the cell death and digestion process inside a living animal in real time. Using a novel tool, Davidson, a postdoc at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, observed immune cells rushing to gobble up any dead cells near them

From: [Cell death and digestion observed in real time inside a living animal](https://www.pnas.org/post/journal-club/cell-death-and-digestion-observed-real-time-inside-living-animal)

Where Dead Cells in the Body Go

## Impressions
I began reading this book when it came out and stopped about 3/4 of the way through. It just wasn't for me at the time. But it was a delightful read now. Peterson talks about some really interesting ideas in the book that it didn't think were applicable, but apparently they were. At times, the writing was a bit dense and too heady, but that's what you get from an intelligent college professor.

## Actionable Takeaways
1. Nature and the world are not static. Therefore, anything or anyone that acts like it is static will eventually come to ruin. Instead, nature and the environment is dynamic. It begs for a constant tango between the inhabitants of the world as it mutates. Companies, ideas, and people that worked awhile ago aren't going to work today if they keep doing the same thing.
2. Anxiety and depression cannot be treated easily if the person has unpredictable daily routines. The system in the body that regulates those emotions and feelings are closely linked to the circadian rhythm. Ensuring you're sleep habits are regular can be a great place to start.
3. Life is a constant battle fighting to maintain order, but learning how to thrive in chaos. 
4. consciousness can be defined as knowing exactly how and where we can be hurt and why.
5. One of the main differences between man and animal is man's knowledge of what's going on in the world. More specifically, man's desire and ability to cause trouble and pain and suffering for the sake of it. 
6. Everyone has to experience a season of intense suffering, sadness, or loneliness so they know what they know where they don't want to go. This could give your life Meaning (note the capital M.) "I'm on this earth to help myself and anyone who wants to come with me to stay away from X, Y, and Z."
7. Don't be friends with someone whose friendship you wouldn't recommend to your son, daughter, sister, or mother. 
8. Before you help someone, find out why that person is in trouble. It's likely they're in trouble partly because of their actions. Not to judge them, just to know how they ended up in the spot they are.
9. If you are succeeding at everything, it's most likely not because you're so freaking talented at so many different things. Rather, it probably means you're just not doing anything new, difficult, or challenging. Sure, you may be winning. But you're not growing. And what's the point of winning at something if it doesn't make you better? **Victory in the present shouldn't take precedence over trajectory across time.**
11. The fundamental moral goal of a parent or care taker over a child is to not shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience pain or failure, but how to make sure they learn something from their failure so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.
12. There are two general principles of discipline. First, limit the rules. Too many rules makes kids go crazy. Second, use the least amount of force necessary. Don't go straight from 0-100 on the punishment scale. Work your way up and only get to the end if the child isn't cooperating on the previous levels. However, sometimes the highest form is necessary, like when a child is doing something that could quickly lead to something fatal. Then, it's necessary to get the kid to stop immediately, no questions asked.
13. A natural disaster is an act of God - you couldn't have predicted its arrival. But you can do what's necessary to prepare for one. You know, eventually, your car will stop working or need maintenance. It's inevitable. So you can either choose to ignore the warning lights, or maintain a schedule of maintenance and put money aside for the inevitable 4-figure repair cost.
14. Some of the worst people to be around are those who have decided to live life through a single axiom: "The right is bad." "Government is bad." They filter everything through this axiom and believe, truly believe, that everything that happens can be viewed through that. Too much money? The government isn't spending enough. Not enough money? The government is spending too much. Natural disaster? The government wasn't prepared enough (okay this one may be true.)
15. 2 types of people: "Did what I want to happen, happen? No. Therefore I did something wrong and I still have something to learn." "Did what I want to happen, happen? No. Therefore this thing is unfair. Someone else is to blame." 
16. Stubborn refusal to change in the face of error is stupidity. 
17. The purpose of memory is not to remember the past. It's to stop the same bad thing from happening over and over again. If something bad happens, and you know why, you can stop that bad thing from happening again.                                                                     

## Quotes
- "It's not what we don't know what gets us in trouble. It's what we know for sure that just ain't so." -
- "If mother nature wasn't so hell-bent on our destruction, it would be easier for us to exist in simple harmony with her dictates."
- "An idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms." #note-taking #slipbox 
- "When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you're so engrossed in what you're doing you don't notice–it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos."
- "You can't long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are still learning what you need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering." #mastery 
- "It is far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them."
- "If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in act two. Otherwise it has no business being there." #writing #details #quote
- "Those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it."
- "It's easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today's cheap pleasures."
- "Attend to the day but aim at the highest good."
- "If a society does not adequately reward productive, pro-social behavior, insists upon distributing resources in a markedly arbitrary and unfair manner, and allows for theft and exploitation, it will not remain conflict-free for long. If its hierarchies are based only on power, instead of the competence necessary to get important and difficult things done, it will be prone to collapse, as well."
- Someone living a life-lie is attempting to manipulate reality with perception, thought, and action, so that only some narrowly desired and pre-defined outcome is allowed to exist.
- "A naively formulated goal transmutes, with time, into the sinister form of the life-lie."
- If you don't believe in brick walls, you will still be hurt when you run headlong into one. Then you will curse reality itself for producing the wall.

## Questions
- Are you so sure the person crying out to be saved has not decided a thousand times to accept his lot of pointless and worsening suffering, simply because it is easier than shouldering any true responsibility?
- What have I done wrong and what can I do to make things at least a little bit more right?

41kspFBwVxL. SX331 BO1,204,203,200

12 Rules For Life

I've always been curious where popular sayings come from. While they usually have an interesting origin story, most of them also have witty clap-backs.

Here are the second half of some popular sayings:

- Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
- Great minds think alike, though fools seldom differ.
- For the love of money is the root of all evil. 

(Most people say "Money is the root of all evil." Money isn't evil. The love of money is evil.)
- An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
- Jack of all trades, master of none but better than a master of one.
- Birds of a feather flock together until the cat comes.
- The early bird catches the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese.

A lot of people hear these and wrongly assume these were the original and the second half got cut off sometime in the past. That's mostly wrong.

Instead, what probably happened was someone came up with a creative way to shut up the people who kept saying these quips to explain a point.

Naturally, they didn't catch on as well as the first half. But the idea that these are the "full" sayings is incorrect.

Popular sayings

Key Insights
------------

### Books allow you to enter an invisible world

"When you first open a book, you enter a liminal space. You are neither in this world, the world wherein you hold a book, nor in that world (the metaphysical space the words point toward). To some extent this polydimensionality describes the feeling of reading in general--one is in many places at once."

### Not all books can be read the same way

"If books were like roads, some would be made for driving quickly--details are scant, and what details are there appear drab--but the velocity and torque of the narrative is exhilarating. Some books, if seen as roads, would be made for walking--the trajectory of the road mattering far less that the vistas these roads might afford."

This description of books really hit home for me. I think it helps me solidify the fact that not every books can be read the same way, and that's okay! Some books need time to read and absorb the information. Others, you can zip right through without having to think twice about it.

### The Eye-Voice Span

The distance between where ones eyes are looking on a page and where , on the page, one's inner voice is reading.

### Reading is not a series of sequential "nows"

"Past, present, and future are interwoven in each conscious moment--and in the performative reading moment as well. Each fluid interval comprises an admixture of: the memory of things read (past), the experience of consciousness "now" (present), and the anticipation of things to be read (future).

This is evident in how we picture fictional characters. Some books open with the description of characters, like *Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood*. But most of the time, we learn a little about a character at a time and add that to a "picasso-esque" image in our minds of what we think the character looks like, updating it with each bit of information.

### All good books are mysteries

"At heart, all good books are mysteries. Authors withhold information. This information may be revealed over time. This is one reason we bother to turn a book's pages. A book my be a literal mystery, like *Murder on the Orient Express*, or a metaphysical mystery, like *Moby Dick*, or a mystery of purely architectonic kind--a chronoptic mystery, like *The Odyssey*.

### A description can be a rank or purpose (in a book and in life)

If you're reading a mystery novel and a character is introduced with a mustache, as a reader, you draw assumptions about that characters role in the book. Descriptions, therefore, can be a rank and a purpose.

"[Descriptions] tell the readers whether they are dealing with a pawn, a rook or a bishop."

This happens in life too. We draw assumptions about co-workers, strangers, and friends based on their appearance until we get to know them for who they actually are. People who are obsessed with playing "the game of life" will treat bishops and rooks much different than they do pawns, to their [the person who treats people differently based on their assumed "status"] detriment of course.

### A great author is able to 'bear witness' of reality well

"When we remark that a novel is 'finely observed,' we are praising the writer's ability to bear witness. This bearing witness is composed of two acts: the author's initial observation in the real world, and then the translation of that observation into prose. The more 'finely observed' the text, the better we readers recognize the thing or event in question."

### Readers perform their books

"We perform a book--we perform a reading of a book. We perform a book, and we attend the performance. As readers, we are both the conductor of the orchestra, as well as the audience."

### On Imagination

"Imagination is a turning-away from the mind-independent world. Imagination, you could say, is like an "inward eye."

### Words work like keys, unlocking something special in the reader

"Words are effective not because of what they carry in them, but for their latent potential to unlock the accumulated experience of the reader. Words 'contain' meaning, but, more important, words potentiate (increase the power or likelihood of) meaning..."


91p7+P0n5gL

What We See When We Read

Summary
-------

This is an exceptional book on thinking outside the box, innovating when others think to go with the safe route, and the necessity to think from first principles. Plus, there are some interesting behind the scenes stories of successful and failed NASA missions.

Key Takeaways
-------------

To think like a rocket scientist is to look at the world through a different lens. **Rocket scientists imagine the unimaginable and solve the unsolvable.** They transform failures into triumphs and constraints into advantages. They view mishaps as solvable puzzles rather than insurmountable roadblocks. They're moved not by blind conviction but by self-doubt; **their goal is not short-term results but long-term breakthroughs**. They know that the rules aren't set in stone, the default can be altered, and a new path can be forged. ([Location 85](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=85))

Science, as Carl Sagan put it, is "a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."12 ([Location 111](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=111))

Our yearning for certainty leads us to pursue seemingly safe solutions---by looking for our keys under street lamps. ([Location 355](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=355))

Only when we pay attention to the subtle clues---there's something off with the data, the explanation seems cursory or superficial, the observation doesn't quite fit the theory---can the old paradigm give way to the new. ([Location 612](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=612))

"In order to stay calm in a high-stress, high-stakes situation, all you really need is knowledge.... Being forced to confront the prospect of failure head-on---to study it, dissect it, tease apart all its components and consequences---really works."67 ([Location 687](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=687))

**Knowledge turns an uncertain situation into a high-stakes game of peekaboo**. Yes, spaceflight is no laughing matter---there are lives at stake---but astronauts contain uncertainty the same way that infants do: by figuring out who's going to appear on the other end when the hands open up. ([Location 704](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=704))

Ask yourself, What's the worst-case scenario? And how likely is that scenario, given what I know? ([Location 716](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=716))

After you determine what's truly worth being alarmed about, you can take measures to mitigate risks by calling two plays from the rocket-science playbook: redundancies and margins of safety. ([Location 725](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=725))

Think about it: Where are the redundancies in your own life? Where's the emergency brake or the spare tire in your company? How will you deal with the loss of a valuable team member, a critical distributor, or an important client? What will you do if your household loses a source of income? **The system must be designed to continue operating even if a component fails.** ([Location 755](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=755))

Process, by definition, is backward looking. **It was developed in response to yesterday's troubles.** If we treat it like a sacred pact---if we don't question it---process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures. ([Location 895](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=895))

Process was developed in response to yesterday's problems. What worked in the past might not work in the future, so be wary of process. #TI

"To create the company of tomorrow, you must break down the bad habits, silos, and inhibitors that exist today." ([Location 1160](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1160)) #quote

As Einstein said, everything should be made "as simple and as few as possible."36 This principle is known as [[Occam's razor]]. The name, I admit, is unfortunate. It sounds like a cheap late-night horror flick, but it's actually a mental model named after [[William of Ockham]], a fourteenth-century philosopher. The model is often stated as a rule: **The simplest solution to a problem is the correct one.** ([Location 1204](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1204))

**A breakthrough begins with asking a good question, laboring over the answer intensely, and being stuck in idleness for days, weeks, and sometimes years.** Research shows that incubation periods---the time you spend feeling stuck---boosts the ability to solve problems. ([Location 1538](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1538))

You must be patient enough to pursue the whisper and perceptive enough to receive it when it arrives. ([Location 1577](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1577)) #quote

"To create," biologist [[François Jacob]] said, "is to recombine." ([Location 1605](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1605))

Decades later, [[Steve Jobs]] echoed the same sentiment**: "Creativity is just connecting things.** When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it, they just saw something.... [T]hey've had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people."60 ([Location 1606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1606))

[[Combinatory play]] has also produced many breakthrough technologies. Larry Page and Sergey Brin adopted an idea from academia---the frequency of citations to an academic paper indicates its popularity---and applied it to the search engine to create Google. Steve Jobs famously borrowed from calligraphy to create multiple typefaces and proportionally spaced fonts on the Macintosh. Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings was inspired by the subscription model used at his gym: "You could pay $30 or $40 a month and work out as little or as much as you wanted."71 ([Location 1644](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1644))

"If you set your goals ridiculously high and it's a failure, you will fail above everyone else's success," ([Location 1894](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=1894)) #quote

One way to shock your brain and generate wacky ideas is to ask, **What would a science-fiction solution look like?** ([Location 2029](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2029))

Breakthroughs, after all, are reasonable only in hindsight. "The day before a major breakthrough, it is just a crazy idea," says aerospace engineer Burt Rutan, who designed the first privately funded spacecraft to reach space. ([Location 2278](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2278))

Drury knows a secret missed by many business leaders: The low-hanging fruit has already been picked. **You can't beat a stronger competitor by copying them. But you can beat them by doing the opposite of what they're doing.** ([Location 2701](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2701))

To make sure you don't fall in love with a single hypothesis, generate several. When you've got multiple hypotheses, you reduce your attachment to any one of them and make it more difficult to quickly settle on one. With ([Location 2928](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=2928))

When the world around you changes---when the tech bubble bursts or self-driving cars become the norm---**the ability to change with the world confers an extraordinary advantage**. "The successful executive is faster to recognize the bad decisions and adjust," explains Walt Bettinger, the CEO of Charles Schwab, "whereas failing executives often dig in and try to convince people that they were right." ([Location 3080](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3080))

"If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn't make any difference how beautiful your gue**ss is, it doesn't make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is---if it disagrees with experiment, it's wrong.**" ([Location 3210](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3210))

"You think that because you understand 'one' that you must therefore understand 'two' because one and one make two. But you forget that you must also understand 'and.'" ([Location 3277](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3277))

Boone's secret is the same as any self-respecting astronaut: test as you fly. **Train in the same environment you'll experience on race day**---while your competition trains from the comfort of a gym because it happens to be raining outside. ([Location 3422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3422))

**There are two responses to negative feedback from a credible source: Deny it or accept it.** Every great scientist chooses the latter, and Squyres did the same. ([Location 3739](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B07W53SV45&location=3739))


71vwrHN5yRL

Think Like a Rocket Scientist

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

Tipping Points can be caused by the right people, with the right information, in the right context; all we have to do is find those variables.

Two Main Takeaways
------------------

1.  If content isn't sticking or getting through to an audience, don't change the content. Change the way the content is delivered.
2.  Having a clean work space, providing a loving home, being in a nice, clean neighborhood, and enjoying where we work - anything about our environment has a much more dramatic impact than what we think or what we say.

Chapter 1: The Three Rules of Epidemics
---------------------------------------

-   Epidemics are the function of people who transmit infectious agents, the infectious agent itself, and the environment in which the infectious agent is operating
-   The Tipping Point is the moment of Critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point
-   The Law of the Few -
-   One very influential persons hops on a trend, or gets a lot of people sick, starting the epidemic.
-   The Stickiness Factor -
-   There are specific ways of making information memorable. Simple changes can be made to the presentation and how information is structured that make a *huge* difference on the impact of the message
-   The Power of Context -
-   The context in which people incur a stimuli has a massive impact on how that person responds - not necessarily the stimuli itself.
-   *Humans are a lot more sensitive to the environment than we think.*

Chapter 2: The Law of the Few
-----------------------------

-   There are very few people who have enough influence and impact to tip an epidemic. But those who do, start waves in things they pursue.
-   The messenger matters. They're the ones who make something stick

Chapter 3: The Stickiness Factor
--------------------------------

-   Sesame Street started telling stories more and in the stories were lessons taught. They found the more they taught things in narrative form, the more kids remembered the lessons
-   The ideas in Sesame Street were not profound. Instead, the understood how they presented the messages and lessons was what meant a kid remembering the lesson or not. Changing the way information is presented can have a massive impact on how well things stick.
-   There are people out there who can start epidemics, you just have to find them - The Law of the Few. There is also certain ways to package information that makes it irresistible and will move people to action, you just have to find out what that is - The Stickiness Factor

The Power of Context (Part One)
-------------------------------

-   The Broken Window Theory - Criminologist James Q. Wilson and George Kelling; Argued that crime is the result of disorder. Therefore, if broken windows in homes go un repaired for certain lengths of time, people will assume there is no order and crime will be inevitable.
-   Following that rule, epidemics can be tipped by tinkering with the smallest form of environment or context
-   Fundamental Attribution Error - When interpreting other people's behavior, humans overestimate character traits, and underestimate the importance of the situation and context one is in.
-   *The best person in the world could steal money if in the right circumstance and context. On the opposite end, the worst person in the world could change depending on the situation and circumstance they're in.*
-   The immediate context of behavior is more important than the context of your thoughts

The Power of Context (Part Two)
-------------------------------

-   Small, close-knit groups have the power to magnify the epidemic of a potential message or idea.


Thetippingpoint

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

One Sentence Summary
--------------------

At all costs, you must be willing to innovate the way you do business and what your company delivers; "Innovate or Die" mentality.

Two Key Takeaways
-----------------

1.  When you innovate, everything has to change, not just the way you deliver a product
2.  Defining long-term priorities (3 or less), sticking to them, and repeating them often will be a sure sign of a successful and coherent organization.

Chapter 1: Starting at the Bottom
---------------------------------

-   "I didn't have a clear idea of what 'success' meant, no specific vision of being wealthy or powerful, but I was determined not to live a life of disappointment.
-   Having dedicated time to think every day is important. Creating space in each day to allow your thoughts to wander beyond your immediate job responsibilities. "I'm certain I'd be less productive and less creative in my work if I didn't also spend those first few hours away from email and text messages."
-   Learning to embrace new technologies, try every new gadget, and break every stale format is critical to a company today. One must have an "Innovate or Die" mentality.
-   "There's no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested."
-   There's a delicate balance between demanding that your people perform, and not instilling a fear of failure in them. That balance is critical to find.
-   "In your work, in your life, you'll be more respected and trusted by the people around you if you honestly own up to your mistakes."
-   Be decent to people. Treat everyone with empathy and fairness.
-   "Excellence and fairness do not have to be mutually exclusive." You can be an excellent company, and care about the people you work with and serve.

Chapter 2: Betting on the Talent
--------------------------------

-   "True integrity - a sense of knowing who you are and being guided by your own clear sense of right and wrong - is a kind of secret weapon."
-   "One person's unwillingness to give a timely response can cause so much unnecessary strain and inefficiency."
-   The ability to look at things not as a catastrophe, but as a puzzle to be solved, will drastically shift the way your team approaches the problem.
-   "My instinct throughout my career has always been to say yes to every opportunity."

Chapter 3: Know What You Don't Do (And Trust in What You Do)
------------------------------------------------------------

-   "You can't pretend to be someone you're not or to know something you don't."
-   "Managing creative processes start with the understanding that it's not a science - everything is subjective; there is often no right or wrong."
-   "I'd much rather take big risks and sometimes fail than not take risks at all."
-   "If you want innovation - and you should, always - you need to give permission to fail."

Chapter 4: Enter Disney
-----------------------

-   Don't invest resources and time into your company that will give small returns. It's not worth taking up people's time with.
-   When two leaders have a dysfunction relationship, there's no way that the rest of the company beneath them can be functional.
-   "Managing your own time and respecting others' time is one of the most vital things to do as a manager."
-   When finding yourself in a hopeful situation that it'll work out without being able to explain *how* it'll work out, that's when you need ask clarifying questions.

1.  What's the problem I need to solve?
2.  Does this solution make sense?
3.  If I'm feeling some doubt, why?
4.  Am I doing this for sound reasons or am I motivated by something personal?

Chapter 5: Second In Line
-------------------------

-   Don't let ambition to get too far ahead of opportunity
-   Do the job you have well. Be patient. Look for opportunities to pitch in and expand and grow. Make yourself one of the people, through attitude and energy and focus, that your bosses feel they have to turn to when an opportunity arises.
-   "Good leadership isn't about being indispensable; it's about helping others be prepared to possibly step into your shoes - giving them access to your own decison making, identifying the skills they need to develop and helping them improve, and, sometimes being honest enough to tell them why they're not ready for the job.

Chapter 6: Good Things Can Happen
---------------------------------

-   Optimism in a leader, especially in challenging times, is vital
-   "it's about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don't break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

Chapter 7: It's About the Future
--------------------------------

-   Determine Your Priorities. **You only get three**. "Priorities are the few things you're going to spend a lot time and capital on."
-   Communicate your priorities clearly and repeatedly. It's what separates great managers from the rest.
-   The way to get people to admire the company working for you, is to create products they're proud of.
-   Don't let negativity from people you barley know, affect the way you feel about yourself.
-   Don't let blows to the ego populate and stay long in your mind.

Chapter 8: The Power of Respect
-------------------------------

-   "Don't let your ego get in the way of making the best possible decision."
-   "If you approach and engage people with respect and empathy, the seemingly impossible can become real."
-   Be willing to disrupt your companies business model if it will have a positive affect in the long-term.
-   Give people authority. If you trust them to do a job, give them *total* control over that department, the job, and the decisions needed to be made in that field.

Chapter 9: Disney-Pixar And a New Path to the Future
----------------------------------------------------

-   Long-shots aren't usually as long as they seem.
-   Weigh all sides of a decision. Don't let the negatives drown out the positives. Just because they're more negatives, they may not be as dramatic as they few positives.
-   "Nothing is a sure thing, but you need to at the very least be willing to take big risks. You can't have big wins without them."

Chapter 10: Marvel and Massive Risks That Make Perfect Sense
------------------------------------------------------------

-   "Surround yourself with people who are good in addition to being good at what they do."

Chapter 11: Star Wars
---------------------

-   "The worst thing you can do when entering a negotiation is to suggest or promise something because you know the other person wants to hear it, only to have to reverse course later."
-   Don't project anxiety onto your team. It's counterproductive.

Chapter 12: If You Don't Innovate, You Die
------------------------------------------

-   Short-term loses are guaranteed if you shift your business model. It won't look positive, but adjusting course to a long-term change is the best thing you can do for an organization.
-   "Being present for your people - and making sure they know that you're available to them - is so important for the morale and effectiveness of a company."
-   "When you innovate, everything needs to change, not just the way you make or deliver a product."

Chapter 13: No Price On Integrity
---------------------------------

-   "A companies integrity depends on the integrity of its people."

Chapter 14: Core Values
-----------------------

-   "Wherever you are along the path, you're the same person you've always been"


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The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons From 15 Years as CEO of The Walt Disney Company

Summary
-------

Winners never quit is an incorrect statement; they do quit, they just know what to quit and when.

### Two Key Takeaways

1.  When starting a new venture or skill, know when to quit. Have it outlined and don't quit unless you reach that threshold
2.  Sometimes quitting is the best way to reinvent yourself in an organization. Don't mistake being in a cul-de-sac for being in The Dip.

### Part 1: Being the Best in the World is Seriously Underrated

-   MYTH - Winners don't quit
-   TRUTH - Winners do quit. The just quit the right stuff at the right time.
-   *Michael Jordan quit baseball to focus on basketball in high school. Think he regrets doing that?*
-   The reason people end up being the best in the world is they were able to push through the mundane and the boring long enough to become the best.
-   Zipf's Law - The people who are #1 get much more results (money, followers, capital) then number two because the marketplace loves a winner
-   "Just about everything you learned in school is wrong, but the wrongest might very well be this: Being well rounded is the secret to success
-   Strategic quitting is the secret of successful organizations. Reactive quitting and serial quitting just leaves your burnout, frustrated, and like you haven't accomplished anything

#### **Three Types of Curves:**

-   **Curve 1 - The Dip**
-   The low point after the initial excitement of learning a new skill or starting a new project. This could be the paperwork to get certified, the legal stuff to starting a business, etc.
-   Being able to stick through the dip longer, lean into the dip, and make something of it are the people who end up on top.
-   The Dip filters out all the people who weren't motivated. This is why people on the other side of the dip of highly compensated - scarcity. Scarcity creates value.
-   **Curve 2 - The Cul De Sac**
-   Going around and around in a dead end, hoping for a way out
-   Doing the hard things; dealing with the annoying customer for example, is the reason you're not replaceable. Be thankful for the dip.
-   "A woodpecker can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere but stay busy, or he can tap on one tree twenty-thousand times and get dinner" *You decide which woodpecker to be*
-   Simple Rule to Follow - If you can't make it through the dip, don't start.
-   **Curve 3 - The Cliff**

#### **Seven Reasons You Might Fail to Become the Best in The World**

1.  You would run out of time (and quit)
2.  You run out of money (and quit)
3.  You get scared (and quit)
4.  You're not serious about it (and quit)
5.  You lose interest or settle for being mediocre (and quit)
6.  You focus on the short term instead of the long term (and quit when the short term gets too hard)
7.  You pick the wrong thing at which to be the best in the world (because you don't have the talent and quit)

-   There are only two options: (1) Quit or (2) Be Exceptional. Average is for losers
-   The opposite of quitting isn't trying harder. The opposite of quitting is an invigorated new strategy designed to break the problem apart.

### Part 2: If You're Not Going to Get to #1, You Might as Well Quit Now

-   Failing and quitting are not one and the same. Failing happens when there are no other options to pursue your dream, or when you quit so often that you've used up all your time and resources.
-   Instead of, "Winners never quit" mantra, it should be, "Never quit something with great long-term potential just because you can't deal with the stress of the moment."

#### **Three Questions to Ask Before Quitting**

1.  Am I panicking?
2.  Who am I trying to influence?
3.  What sort of measurable progress am I making?

-   The tactics you use in your organization are not the organization. The moment the way you do business is no longer part of winning The Dip - you *must* switch tactics.
-   Write down on a piece of paper when you're willing to quit
-   *If I lose $2,000* i*n one year of operations, I'm out.*
-   Don't enter a market that's too big for you to make a splash in. The pressure will be too high and your message will get lost. Pick a small market and grow from there.


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The Dip by Seth Godin

Summary
-------

A short read, but interesting nonetheless. This book doesn't have a ton of practical insights, but gives some motivation to show what you're doing in public. An interesting argument and helpful for someone like me who is so young and feel like I haven't "accomplished" anything yet.

Key Insights
------------

Nothing is original.

The writer Jonathan Lethem has said that when people call something "original," nine out of ten times they just don't know the references or the original sources involved.

Collecting various good ideas from different forms of culture is an essential skill to writing and having influence.

Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.

Take on the identity of the 'someone' before you actually are the 'someone'

1\. Pretend to be something you're not until you are---fake it until you're successful, until everybody sees you the way you want them to; or 2. Pretend to be making something until you actually make something.

It's not just about taking their style. Understand how they are thinking, understand why they wrote one thing over another.

Wilson Mizner said if you copy from one author, it's plagiarism, but if you copy from many, it's research.

Don't just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don't want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.

If you just mimic the surface of somebody's work without understanding where they are coming from, your work will never be anything more than a knockoff.

Emulation is when imitation goes one step further, breaking through into your own thing.

So: Copy your heroes. Examine where you fall short. What's in there that makes you different? That's what you should amplify and transform into your own work.

If you have an idea for how something "should" be in life, make that thing. Don't sit around complaining or wishing something existed.

The manifesto is this: Draw the art you want to see, start the business you want to run, play the music you want to hear, write the books you want to read, build the products you want to use---do the work you want to see done.

"Complain about the way other people make software by making software."

Being seen and being a creative is about sharing your work as you're going. Don't worry about being an 'overnight success' - enough people will see you when you're there. Start now and show your work.

You don't have to do it. Focus on the wildly important things.

In this age of information abundance and overload, those who get ahead will be the folks who figure out what to leave out, so they can concentrate on what's really important to them.


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