Tag: elephant in the brain

For reference on why / how I do this, check out Random Facts 1.

Below is Random Facts 2. Should all be copied verbatim unless otherwise noted, and all mistakes mine!

RANDOM FACTS 2

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Jordan Peterson:
-Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are.
-Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result?
-When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them. No grudge after victory.
-“No tree can grow to Heaven,” adds the ever-terrifying Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst extraordinaire, “unless its roots reach down to Hell.”
-But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas. An idea has an aim. It wants something. It posits a value structure.
-Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate. You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know, if you only would.
-If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganized and chaotic.

The genius of Craigslist is in its governance system. It is its lightweight governance system that allows 21 people to administer 300 sites in 35 countries. I believe that the basis of competition in web services will shift from the data to the system that manages the acquisition, and use of that data. The governance system that yields the most utility for the largest number of users with the least overhead will ultimately manage the largest communities with the most valuable data.

Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.

You could argue Buddha himself was not Buddhist, was a yogi, an experimentalist
to meditate each morning is a radical act of love, take that time, take care of yourself

My heart moved through deep and silent water. No-one, and nothing, could really hurt me. No-one, and nothing, could make me very happy. I was tough, which is probably the saddest thing you can say about a man.

“Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.”

Neither can you assume that someone will do what you’ve decided is right. You’ve decided it from your unique knowledge and interpretations; he acts from his knowledge and his interpretations.

NYT, How to survive your 40s (link)
-But the number 40 still has symbolic resonance. Jesus fasted for 40 days. Muhammad was 40 when the archangel Gabriel appeared to him. The Israelites wandered the desert for 40 years
-The seminal journey of the 40s is from “everyone hates me” to “they don’t really care.”
-At 40, we’re no longer preparing for an imagined future life. Our real lives are, indisputably, happening right now. We’ve arrived at what Immanuel Kant called the “Ding an sich” — the thing itself.

Book: Elephant in the Brain
-Wittgenstein famously argued that it’s impossible to define, in unambiguous terms, what constitutes a “game”
-We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross purposes.
-We don’t laugh continuously throughout a play session, only when there’s something potentially unpleasant to react to.
-what laughter illustrates is precisely the fact that our norms and other social boundaries aren’t etched in stone with black-and-white precision, but ebb and shift through shades of gray, depending on context.
-Ellen Dissanayake’s characterization of art as anything “made special,” that is, not for some functional or practical purpose but for human attention and enjoyment.
-Anonymous donation, for example, is extremely rare. Only around 1 percent of donations to public charities are anonymous.
-They walk seven times counterclockwise around the Kaaba—the black, cube-shaped building at the center of the world’s largest mosque. (See Figure 5.) They also shave their heads; run back and forth between two hills; stand vigil from noon until sunset; drink water from the Zamzam well; camp overnight on the plain of Muzdalifa; sacrifice a lamb, goat, cow, or camel; and cast stones at three pillars in a symbolic stoning of the devil.
-Compared to their secular counterparts, religious people tend to smoke less, 16 donate and volunteer more, 17 have more social connections, 18 get and stay married more, 19 and have more kids. 20 They also live longer, 21 earn more money, 22 experience less depression, 23 and report greater happiness and fulfillment in their lives.
-Our species, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, is wired to form social bonds when we move in lockstep with each other. This can mean marching together, singing or chanting in unison, clapping hands to a beat, or even just wearing the same clothes.
-As the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote about sexual love: “It is the ultimate goal of almost all human effort… . It knows how to slip its love-notes and ringlets even into ministerial portfolios and philosophical manuscripts”
-John Gatto said what many teachers surely recognize, but few are willing to state so baldly. “Schools and schooling,” he said, “are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders”

Ariel & Will Durant — The Lessons of History
-People like to think they are a little special. Without this bit of vanity, we might find it harder to push forward. In a way, delusion is a motivator.
-By and large, the poor have the same impulses as the rich, but with less opportunity or skill to implement them.
–Morals are the way society exhorts behavior from its members.
-There is no example in history of a society maintaining moral life among the masses without religion as a force for binding people together.
-The most valuable talents and skills are confined to a few people, which means the most valuable wealth is confined to a few as well. This pattern shows up again and again.
-Do not feel depressed that life may only have meaning insofar as man puts into it. It is remarkable that we can put any meaning into life at all.
-Cooperation is the ultimate form of competition.
-What’s more—and this is where things might start to get uncomfortable—there’s a very real sense in which we are the Press Secretaries within our minds.

Hit Makers by Derek Thompson
* The mainstream does not exist. Culture is cults, all the way down.
* people crave fresh voices telling them familiar stories, because they enjoy the thrill of discovery but ultimately gravitate to the comfort of fluency.
* Caillebotte made it a principle to buy “especially those works of his friends which seemed particularly unsaleable,”
* appear that humans are born with what the professor of philosophy of art Denis Dutton calls a “pervasive Pleistocene taste in landscape.”
* Even governance is showbiz: One third of the White House staff works in some aspect of public relations to promote the president and his policies
* The most significant neophilic group in the consumer economy is probably teenagers. Young people are “far more receptive to advanced designs,” Loewy wrote, because they have the smallest stake in the status quo.
* But in all cases, the hero is the synthesis of his friends. The thinking Spock and the feeling McCoy are two halves of Captain Kirk. The brilliant Hermione and the sensitive Ron balance out Harry Potter. Luke Skywalker combines Han’s bravery and Leia’s conscience
* Clothing, once a ritual, is now the definitive fashion. First names, once a tradition, now follow the hype cycle of fashion lines. Communication, too, is now coming to resemble the hallmarks of a fashion, where choices emerge and preferences change, sometimes with seeming arbitrariness, as people discover new, more convenient, and more fun ways to say hello.
* But what is coolness, anyway? In sociology, it is sometimes defined as a positive rebellion.
* “The best jokes are so specific that they feel private,” he told me. “It’s that surprise, I think, that people like—that I shared something that felt almost too small and personal for anybody else to know.”
* Publicly, people often talk about issues. Privately, they talk about schedules. Publicly, they deploy strategic emotions. Privately, they tend to share small troubles. Publicly, they want to be interesting. Privately, they want to be understood.
*

During those interviews, U.S. consumers overwhelmingly told the company that they wanted to watch foreign originals with English subtitles. However, the folks at Netflix weren’t so sure that was true, so they streamed a dubbed version of the French show “Marseille” to a subset of its viewers by default. Those who got the dubbed streams were more likely to finish the series than those who watched it with subtitles.

Overall, of the 1,231 cultures in the Ethnographic Atlas Codebook, 84.6 percent are classified as polygynous [one man many women], 15.1 percent as monogamous, and 0.3 percent as polyandrous [one woman many men].

Man is the lowest-cost, 150lb, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system that can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.

Eckhart Tolls, A New Earth
* Complaining is one of the ego’s favorite strategies for strengthening itself. Every complaint is a little story the mind makes up that you completely believe in.
* When you complain, by implication you are right and the person or situation you complain about or react against is wrong.
* In the service of the Truth, religious teachings represent signposts or maps left behind by awakened humans to assist you in spiritual awakening, that is to say, in becoming free of identification with form.

Dennis Hof on the Bunny Ranch:
* And I felt strangely free in Nevada; I don’t know how else to explain it, except to say that in Nevada I could be my true self. If I wanted to fuck three times a day and more, I did. And the more I fucked, the better I felt. I wasn’t worried about the Meaning of Life anymore. I knew what it was.
* Maybe Ron was right. Maybe thinking was overrated. Maybe the trick was to become your own persona, the fake version you’d created for the public, and forget about the Real You.
*

Knaussgard, My struggle
* What was it that Rilke wrote? That music raised him out of himself, and never returned him to where it had found him, but to a deeper place, somewhere in the unfinished.
* I had assumed it was part of my life as an adult that I had succeeded in muting all the overtones and undertones of my character, which at first had been explosive, and I would therefore live the rest of my life in peace and tranquillity, and solve any cohabitation problems with irony, sarcasm, and the sulky silence I had honed to perfection after the three lengthy relationships I’d had.
* How I loved drinking. I barely had half a glass before my brain would start toying with the thought of really going for it this time. Just sit there knocking them back. But should I?
*

You don’t love yourself enough. Or you’d love your nature too, and what it demands of you. People who love what they do wear themselves down doing it, they even forget to wash or eat. Do you have less respect for your own nature than the engraver does for engraving, the dancer for the dance, the miser for money or the social climber for status? When they’re really possessed by what they do, they’d rather stop eating and sleeping than give up practicing their arts.

Studies proved that when they gave chimps money (and they learned they could trade money for food eg grapes), the first thing the male chimps did was pay female chimps for sex

Michael Joyce in close-up person, like eating supper or riding in a courtesy car, looks slighter and younger than he does on-court. From close up he looks his age, which to me is basically a fetus. He’s about 5′ 9″ and 160; he’s muscular but quietly so, without much definition. He likes to wear old T-shirts and a backwards cap. His hairline is receding in a subtle young-man way that makes his forehead look a little high. I forget whether he wore an earring. Michael Joyce’s interests outside tennis consist mostly of big-budget movies and genre novels of the commercial paperback sort that one reads on planes. In other words, he really has no interests outside tennis.

History of Money
* The trouble with paper money is that it rewards the minority that can manipulate money and makes fools of the generation that has worked and saved. — ADAM SMITH
* John Kenneth Galbraith observed that “if the history of commercial banking belongs to the Italians and of central banking to the British, that of paper money issued by a government belongs indubitably to the Americans.”

By 1860 auction prices suggested that the collective value of American slaves was $4bn at a time when the federal government’s annual budget was around $69m. That explains both why southern slaveowners, many of whom had borrowed against their slaves as collateral, would never give up the practice, and why a financial settlement of the issue was out of the question

Attention Merchants
* French philosopher Jacques Ellul halfway through the twentieth century: to succeed, propaganda must be total. The propagandist must utilize all of the technical means and media available in his time—movies, posters, meetings, door-to-door canvassing in one century, social media in another,
* Jacques Ellul argued that it is only the disconnected—rural dwellers or the urban poor—who are truly immune to propaganda, while intellectuals, who read everything, insist on having opinions, and think themselves immune to propaganda are, in fact, easy to manipulate.

As this chart shows, energy consumption per capita and GDP (gross domestic product, a measure of growth) are in near-perfect correlation: rising energy consumption per person is the foundation of economic expansion

Eckhart Tolle, Power of Now
* the past gives you an identity and the future holds the promise of salvation, of fulfillment in whatever form. Both are illusions.
* Learn to use time in the practical aspects of your life we may call this “clock time” but immediately return to present-moment awareness when those practical matters have been dealt with. In this way, there will be no build-up of “psychological time,” which is identification with the past and continuous compulsive projection into the future.
* Give your fullest attention to whatever the moment presents. This implies that you also completely accept what is, because you cannot give your full attention to something and at the same time resist it.
* You may think that you need more time to understand the past or become free of it, in other words, that the future will eventually free you of the past. This is a delusion. Only the present can free you of the past. More time cannot free you of time.
* Attention is the key to transformation and full attention also implies acceptance.
* The root of this physical urge is a spiritual one: the longing for an end to duality, a return to the state of wholeness. Sexual union is the closest you can get to this state on the physical level. This is why it is the most deeply satisfying experience the physical realm can offer.
* The greatest catalyst for change in a relationship is complete acceptance of your partner as he or she is, without needing to judge or change them in any way.
* If you are consistently or at least predominantly present in your relationship, this will be the greatest challenge for your partner. They will not be able to tolerate your presence for very long and stay unconscious.
* As a general rule, the major obstacle for men tends to be the thinking mind, and the major obstacle for women the pain-body
* As long as part of your sense of self is invested in your emotional pain, you will unconsciously resist or sabotage every attempt that you make to heal that pain.
* Or perhaps your very success became empty and meaningless and so turned out to be failure. Failure lies concealed in every success, and success in every failure.
* A Buddhist monk once told me: “All I have learned in the twenty years that I have been a monk I can sum up in one sentence: All that arises passes away. This I know.”
* You keep your unhappiness alive by giving it time. That is its lifeblood. Remove time through intense present-moment awareness and it dies.
* The mind always adheres to the known. The unknown is dangerous because it has no control over it. Thats why the mind dislikes and ignores the present moment. Present-moment awareness creates a gap not only in the stream of mind but also in the past-future continuum.
* The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness.
* The pain that you create now is always some form of nonacceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is.
* Nothing ever happened in the past; it happened in the Now. Nothing will ever happen in the future; it will happen in the Now.
* The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind. Once you have understood the basic dysfunction, there isnt really much else that you need to learn or understand.
*

Everybody Lies
* The economists quickly homed in on one key factor: the politics of a given area. If an area is generally liberal, as Philadelphia and Detroit are, the dominant newspaper there tends to be liberal. If an area is more conservative, as are Billings and Amarillo, Texas, the dominant paper there tends to be conservative. In other words, the evidence strongly suggests that newspapers are inclined to give their readers what they want.
* Among the top PornHub searches by women is a genre of pornography that, I warn you, will disturb many readers: sex featuring violence against women. Fully 25 percent of female searches for straight porn emphasize the pain and/ or humiliation of the woman—“ painful anal crying,” “public disgrace,” and “extreme brutal gangbang,” for example. Five percent look for nonconsensual sex—“ rape” or “forced” sex—even though these videos are banned on PornHub. And search rates for all these terms are at least twice as common among women as among men
* These economists studied beer and soft drink ads run during the Super Bowl, while also utilizing the increased ad exposures in the cities of teams that qualify. They found a 2.5-to-1 return on investment. As expensive as these Super Bowl ads are, our results and theirs suggest they are so effective in upping demand that companies are actually dramatically underpaying for them.
* The next Kinsey, I strongly suspect, will be a data scientist. The next Foucault will be a data scientist. The next Freud will be a data scientist. The next Marx will be a data scientist. The next Salk might very well be a data scientist.
*

Thomas Moore
-We talk about people, places, and houses that have soul. Soul is the unreachable depth, felt vitality, and full presence of a person or even a thing. A person with soul gives you the feeling that he has really lived and has a strong personality.
-You may also discover, as I did, that so-called secular literature and art complete your spiritual education. You won’t know what religion is until you read Emerson and Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Beckett and Anne Sexton, D. H. Lawrence, Wordsworth, and W. B. Yeats.
-Sitting in his small space vehicle on his way back during the 1971 Apollo 14 mission, Mitchell suddenly had an awe-inspiring view of his “blue jewel-like home planet.” Looking at it, he said he had a “glimpse of divinity.” […] Later he would write: “The sensation was altogether foreign. Somehow I felt tuned in to something much larger than myself, something much larger than the planet in the window. Something incomprehensibly big.”

the only societies long-lived enough to perform significant colonization of the Galaxy are precisely those least likely to engage in aggressive galactic imperialism. (Sagan & Newman, 1983)

Yuval Harari, Homo Deus
* Even the welfare system was originally planned in the interest of the nation rather than of needy individuals. When Otto von Bismarck pioneered state pensions and social security in late nineteenth-century Germany, his chief aim was to ensure the loyalty of the citizens rather than to increase their well-being.
* An economy built on everlasting growth needs endless projects – just like the quests for immortality, bliss and divinity.
* Grass is nowadays the most widespread crop in the USA after maize and wheat, and the lawn industry (plants, manure, mowers, sprinklers, gardeners) accounts for billions of dollars every year.
* You want to know how super-intelligent cyborgs might treat ordinary flesh-and-blood humans? Better start by investigating how humans treat their less intelligent animal cousins. It’s not a perfect analogy, of course, but it is the best archetype we can actually observe rather than just imagine.
* Altogether about 200,000 wild wolves still roam the earth, but there are more than 400 million domesticated dogs. The world contains 40,000 lions compared to 600 million house cats; 900,000 African buffalo versus 1.5 billion domesticated cows; 50 million penguins and 20 billion chickens.
* Hinduism, for example, has sanctified cows and forbidden eating beef, but has also provided the ultimate justification for the dairy industry, alleging that cows are generous creatures that positively yearn to share their milk with humankind.
* Sapiens often use visual marks such as a turban, a beard or a business suit to signal ‘you can trust me, I believe in the same story as you’.
* If the Sumerian gods remind us of present-day company brands, so the living-god pharaoh can be compared to modern personal brands such as Elvis Presley, Madonna or Justin Bieber.
* writing also made it easier for humans to believe in the existence of such fictional entities, because it habituated people to experiencing reality through the mediation of abstract symbols.
* Religion is interested above all in order. It aims to create and maintain the social structure. Science is interested above all in power. Through research, it aims to acquire the power to cure diseases, fight wars and produce food.
* Medieval pundits could determine with absolute certainty that it is wrong to murder and steal, and that the purpose of human life is to do God’s bidding, because scriptures said so. Scientists cannot deliver such ethical judgements. No amount of data and no mathematical wizardry can prove that it is wrong to murder. Yet human societies cannot survive without such value judgements.
* Crucially, the heroes did not undergo any significant process of inner change. Achilles, Arthur, Roland and Lancelot were fearless warriors with a chivalric world view before they set out on their adventures, and they remained fearless warriors with the same world view at the end.
* Though Toyota or Argentina has neither a body nor a mind, they are subject to international laws, they can own land and money, and they can sue and be sued in court. We might soon grant similar status to algorithms.
* Since we do not know how the job market would look in 2030 or 2040, already today we have no idea what to teach our kids. Most of what they currently learn at school will probably be irrelevant by the time they are forty.
* Amazingly, the algorithm needed a set of only ten Likes in order to outperform the predictions of work colleagues. It needed seventy Likes to outperform friends, 150 Likes to outperform family members and 300 Likes to outperform spouses.
* medicine is undergoing a tremendous conceptual revolution. Twentieth-century medicine aimed to heal the sick. Twenty-first-century medicine is increasingly aiming to upgrade the healthy.
* As the Austrian economics guru Friedrich Hayek explained, ‘In a system in which the knowledge of the relevant facts is dispersed among many people, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different people.’ According to this view the stock exchange is the fastest and most efficient data-processing system humankind has so far created.
* In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view.
*

In seven years, the camera industry had flipped. The film cameras went from residing on our desks, to a sale on Craigslist, to a landfill. Kodak, a company who reached a peak market value of $30 billion in 1997, declared bankruptcy in 2012. An insurmountable giant was gone.
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That was fast. But industries can turn even faster: In 2007, Nokia had 50% of the mobile phone market, and its market cap reached $150 billion. But that was also the year Apple introduced the first smartphone. By the summer of 2012, Nokia’s market share had dipped below 5%, and its market cap fell to just $6 billion.

Never fill in recovery questions with real answers. This data is almost always publicly available. Instead use a randomly generated answer that is stored in your password manager (don’t forget to store what question the answer pertains to).

Bezos
* There are many advantages to a customer-centric approach, but here’s the big one: customers are always beautifully, wonderfully dissatisfied, even when they report being happy and business is great. Even when they don’t yet know it, customers want something better, and your desire to delight customers will drive you to invent on their behalf.
* most decisions should probably be made with somewhere around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.
*

2015 Harvard Medical School report called “Get Healthy, Get a Dog”, which found that people who have dogs in their lives are healthier overall. Not only are they more physically active, but they’ve also been seen to have better cardiovascular health, lower blood pressure and cholesterol and lower levels of stress.

Li Ka Shing interview
* “whatever industry I get into I buy books about that industry”
* very proud of almost no turnover of senior management
* runs his watch 30 minutes faster – because anywhere in HK, he can be there in 30 minutes (!)
* Life philosophy in two sentences:
1. Always be industrious
2. The virtuous welcome onerous duties

The Sovereign Individual
* The lamb and the lion keep a delicate balance, interacting at the margin. If lions were suddenly more swift, they would catch prey that now escape. If lambs suddenly grew wings, lions would starve. The capacity to utilize and defend against violence is the crucial variable that alters life at the margin.
* The Church was the main source for preserving and transmitting technical knowledge and information. The Church sponsored universities and provided the minimal education that medieval society enjoyed. The Church also provided a mechanism for reproducing books and manuscripts,
* Farming created stationary capital on an extensive scale, raising the payoff from violence and dramatically increasing the challenge of protecting assets. Farming made both crime and government paying propositions for the first time.
* People had minded less giving their money to the Church when there was no other outlet for it. But when they suddenly saw the chance to make one hundred times their capital financing a spice voyage to the East, or get a lesser, but still promising sum of 40 percent per annum financing a battalion for the king, they understandably sought the grace of God where their own interests lay.
* Suppose the phone company sent a bill for $50,000 for a call to London, just because you happened to conclude a deal worth $125,000 during a conversation. Neither you nor any other customer in his right mind would pay it. But that is exactly the basis upon which income taxes are assessed in every democratic welfare state.
* Most democracies run chronic deficits. This is a fiscal policy characteristic of control by employees. Governments seem notably resistant to reducing the costs of their operations.
* A delicate etiquette shrouded straightforward analysis of labor relations during the industrial period. One of its pretenses was the idea that factory jobs, particularly in the middle of the twentieth century, were skilled work. This was untrue. Most factory jobs could have been performed by almost anyone capable of showing up on time. They required little or no training, not even the ability to read or write. As recently as the 1980s, large fractions of the General Motors workforce were either illiterate, innumerate, or both. Until the 1990s, the typical assembly-line worker at GM received only one day of orientation before taking his place on the assembly line. A job you can learn in a single day is not skilled work.
* governments have never established stable monopolies of coercion over the open sea. Think about it. No government’s laws have ever exclusively applied there. This is a matter of the utmost importance in understanding how the organization of violence and protection will evolve as the economy migrates into cyberspace, which has no physical existence at all.
* Paper money is a distinctly industrial product. It would have been impractical before the printing press to duplicate receipts or certificates that became paper currency.
* This new digital form of money is destined to play a pivotal role in cybercommerce. It will consist of encrypted sequences of multihundred-digit prime numbers. Unique, anonymous, and verifiable, this money will accommodate the largest transactions. It will also be divisible into the tiniest fraction of value. It will be tradable at a keystroke in a multitrillion-dollar wholesale market without borders.
* As documented by Professor Roy W. Jastrom in his book The Golden Constant, gold has maintained its purchasing power, with minor fluctuations, for as far back as reliable price records are available, to 1560 in the case of England.
* ‘If the world operates as one big market, every employee will compete with every person anywhere in the world who is capable of doing the same job. There are lots of them and many of them are hungry.” ANDREW S. GROVE, PRESIDENT, INTEL
* the true obstacle to development in backward countries has been the one factor of production that could not be easily borrowed or imported from abroad, namely government.
* We also suspect that nationstates with a single major metropolis will remain coherent longer than those with several big cities, which imply multiple centers of interest with their various hinterlands.
* Every human on earth could be packed into Texas, with each family living in its own detached house with a yard, and still have some of Texas left over.
* New survival strategies for persons of lower intelligence will evolve, involving greater concentration on development of leisure skills, sports abilities, and crime, as well as service to the growing numbers of Sovereign Individuals as income inequality within jurisdictions rises.
* Shaw and Wong focus on five identification devices used by modern nationstates to mobilize their populations against out-groups. These are: 1. a common language 2. a shared homeland 3. similar phenotypic characteristics 4. a shared religious heritage and 5. the belief of common descent
* As Tudge elaborates in describing the “extreme generalness” of human beings: “We are the animal equivalent of the Turing machine: the universal device that can be turned to any task.”
* By eliminating the beneficial impact of competition in challenging underachievers to conform to productive norms, the welfare state has helped to create legions of dysfunctional, paranoid, and poorly acculturated people, the social equivalent of a powder keg.
* A system that routinely submits control over the largest, most deadly enterprises on earth to the winner of popularity contests between charismatic demagogues is bound to suffer for it in the long run.
* Like most elites, the cognitive elite tend to be a bit above themselves, are rather arrogant, and think they can set their own standards. They are alienated from society as a result.
* In science, three thousand years completely changed what human knowledge is; in morality, we may actually have fallen back. The average psychotherapist probably gives the patient less good moral advice on how to lead his life than the average Jew would have received from his teacher in the period of Moses.
* The morality of the Information Age applauds efficiency, and recognizes the advantage of resources being dedicated to their highest-value uses. In other words, the morality of the Information Age will be the morality of the market.
* Because incomes for the very rich will rise faster than for others in advanced economies, an area of growing demand will be services and products that cater to the needs of the very rich.

It turns out that one thing that makes swarms so outstanding in efficiency is their diversity. People come from all walks of life, and once they realize they have a full mandate to work for the swarm in the ways that they can, they will just do so.

Whereas self-control involves the ability to resist temptations and control impulses in the short-term, grit emphasizes perseverance in the pursuit of long-term goals. As Duckworth and colleagues (2009) write, “An individual high in self-control but moderate in grit may, for example, effectively control his or her temper, stick to his or her diet, and resist the urge to surf the Internet at work—yet switch careers annually.”

When a person does not identify himself with the body tell me, what troubles could touch him?
One who sees himself as everything is fit to be guardian of the world
One who loves himself as everyone is fit to be teacher of the world

By the early 1950s, as AA membership reached 100,000, Wilson began to step back from his invention. Deeply depressed and an incorrigible chain smoker, he would go on to experiment with LSD before dying from emphysema in 1971.

One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about.
—
It was when her hands started to tremble during this part of the cooking procedure that she’d first known she liked this more than anyone can like anything and still live.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road
-we leaned on each other with fingers waving and yelled and talked excitedly, and I was beginning to get the bug like Dean. He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him.
-I pictured myself in a Denver bar that night, with all the gang, and in their eyes I would be strange and ragged and like the Prophet who has walked across the land to bring the dark Word, and the only Word I had was “Wow!”
-A pain stabbed my heart, as it did every time I saw a girl I loved who was going the opposite direction in this too-big world.

Tolstoy, A Confession of Faith
-Faith still remained to me as irrational as it was before, but I could not but admit that it alone gives mankind a reply to the questions of life, and that consequently it makes life possible.
-The scientists of our times have decided that religion is unnecessary and that science will replace or already has replaced it; and yet, now as before, no human society or rational man ever has lived or can live without religion.
-while the reasoning of religious people is always simple, uncomplicated, and truthful, the mental activity of irreligious people becomes especially subtle, complicated, and untruthful. I will take the commonest example, A man is addicted to depravity; that is, is unchaste, unfaithful to his wife, or else lives immorally being unmarried. If he is a religious man he knows this is wrong, and the whole force of his reason is directed toward finding a way to free himself from his vice: avoiding association with adulterers, increasing his labors, arranging a rigorous life, not allowing himself to look on women as objects of lust, and so forth. And this is all very simple and can be understood by every one. But if the depraved man is irreligious, he immediately invents all sorts of reasons why it is very good to love women. And here begin all kinds of most intricate, cunning, and refined considerations, about the affinity of souls, about beauty, about free love, etc.,—which the more they are developed the more they obscure the question and conceal what is essential.