Random facts — things I learned (Dec 15 2023) — “Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems”

Markets have excellent social scalability; they are the original distributed systems, around long before anybody thought to coin that expression. (source)

On the Birth of a Son
BY SU TUNG-PO // ARTHUR WALEY
Families when a child is born
Hope it will turn out intelligent.
I, through intelligence
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope that the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he’ll be happy all his days
And grow into a cabinet minister.

Action is a high road to self confidence and esteem. Where it is open, all energies flow toward it. It comes readily to most people, and its rewards are tangible – Bruce Lee

Cool find — list of scifi ideas organized by authors and books, mentioned on the My First Million pod:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sBkJ8nZwyG_J1v_WLub-5RM4GhLWCf_b7ml8_qNgNsg/edit#gid=568223314

Set a “No-Internet” Day Once a Week – This has been a game-changer for me. On Wednesdays, I don’t allow myself to go on the Internet until 5pm. This means no social media, no email, no news, no nothing. – Ali Abdaal

We fear too much success is abandoning our roots and will leave us alone.
Think: Why do so many celebs have an “entourage?”
The unconscious thing your brain says:
“I cannot expand to my full success because it would cause me to end up all alone, be disloyal to my roots and leave behind people from my past”
-Jesse Pujji

If you believe that the demands of the situation exceed your resources, you will have a threat response. But if you believe you have the resources to succeed, you will have a challenge response. – reading Kelly McGonigal’s GREAT book about the utility of stress

Elon is already more powerful than many heads of state. It’s not hyperbole. The constellation of assets Elon’s amassed represent real societal and resource power. This man has systematically gained command over numerous critical industries in human transportation, communication, space travel, and technology – BacktheBunny

the difference I guess between the guys who are able to be biggest Champions and the ones that are struggling to get to the highest level is the ability to not stay in those emotions for too long so for me it’s relatively short so as soon as I experience it I acknowledge it I maybe you know burst I scream on the court whatever happens but then I’m able to bounce back and reset – Djoker

There is a connection between freedom and self-confidence: When you are kept from expressing your deepest needs and wishes, you lose trust in their validity and in your own judgment. You survive by finding out the rules and following them, thus hiding what you really want. You make it your purpose in life to please others rather than to affirm yourself. – David Richo, How to Be an Adult in Relationships

I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after
backhanding
mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel
in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls.
And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing
to surrender
-Ocean Vuong

Kong: I turned down all performance opportunities and avoided meeting anyone. To prevent friends from locating me, I changed my mobile phone number 21 times. During the darkest three months, my mother would leave my meals on a chair outside my door. When my daughter returned from the United States to visit me, all I could do was look at her through the peephole.
Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up

while a magazine might project a kind of bulletproof perfection–every story the product of an assiduous and painstaking reporting, editing, and fact-checking process–in practice nearly every story you read is an improvised and often deeply unsatisfying last-minute compromise between the publisher, the top editors, the story editor, the fact-checkers, the copy-editors, the art department, and the writer
Something that’s often underrated by people who haven’t worked as journalists is the extent to which newspapers and magazines (and cable channels, etc.) are institutions like any other–which is to say riven with contradiction and internal tension, populated by cross-pressured workers and managers with competing desires and incentives
from Read Max

Great infographic on DEPIN landscape
https://github.com/iotexproject/awesome-depin/blob/main/depin_landscape_oct.jpeg

Selfish people are incapable of loving others, but they’re incapable of loving themselves too

I think we just can’t help the instinct to give meaning to things we don’t understand — Scavenger’s Reign

But today, people are actively deleting content they have created. It is now considered best practice in some circles to automatically delete twitter comments, old reddit comments and to privatize Facebook posts (or even simply delete Facebook). And when they create new content online, it is more often in places where the masses cannot see it.

Nietzsche: Compassion is a psyop designed by the weak to redirect resources from the most deserving to the least.
Napoleon: Logic will lose you wars because sometimes the moment demands imaginative maneuvers that work because they are irrational
Chateaubriand: Beauty is useless if you care for efficiency, but shockingly useful if you care for lovability. Yes, beauty is a wasteful luxury but ultimately the only thing people will protect, and make pilgrimages to.
John Fowles: High IQ is a terrifying gift. The ability to predict the consequences of any action means your will gets lost in a labyrinth of hypotheses. Rule 1: Do not lose the will
from @oldbooksguy

On a journey, ill;
my dream goes wandering
over withered fields.
-Basho.

China has focused on battery-powered electric vehicles. Even after consolidation in the sector, over a hundred firms still produce such cars. A few brands are world-class. Most are cheaper than Western rivals. Chinese firms became dominant through a mixture of subsidies and coercive transfers of foreign technologies, but also hard work and foresight, as they leap-frogged slow-to-change foreign firms

Manny Pacquiao on the power of volume, leading up to a fight he’d spar 36 rounds in a day, every day (!) — so he wasn’t tired at all in a regular 12 round fight: https://www.instagram.com/reel/CzeHP6itCK7/

During a threat response, your emotions will likely include fear, anger, self-doubt, or shame. Because your primary goal is to protect yourself, you become more vigilant to signs that things are going poorly. This can create a vicious cycle in which your heightened attention to what’s going wrong makes you even more fearful and self-doubting.

the brain suffers from severe limitations. We use its massive parallelism (one hundred trillion interneuronal connections operating simultaneously) to quickly recognize subtle patterns. But our thinking is extremely slow: the basic neural transactions are several million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits.

If you wonder what will remain unequivocally human in such a world, it’s simply this quality: ours is the species that inherently seeks to extend its physical and mental reach beyond current limitations. – Kurzweil

Thoreau goodies:
-Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.
-For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man?
-But labor of the hands, even when pursued to the verge of drudgery, is perhaps never the worst form of idleness.

In their zeal to attack believers whose frailties have led them to embrace the supernatural, atheists may neglect the frailty that is an inevitable feature of all our lives. – de Botton

Let me Google how to suffer. That ain’t gonna be in there – David Goggins

Diabetes, glioma, chronic pain, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, and H pylori bottom out around 1 drink per day. Cardiovascular disease bottoms out around 2 drinks per day. Erectile dysfunction stays lowered at up to 3 drinks per day. Depression bottoms out at 0.7 drinks per day.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1731863379902349781.html

Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. […] To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them

When a supernova explodes, the blast wave creates high-energy particles that scatter in every direction; scientists believe there is a minute chance that one of the errant particles, known as a cosmic ray, can hit a computer chip on Earth, flipping a 0 to a 1. The world’s most robust computer systems, at NASA, financial firms, and the like, used special hardware that could tolerate single bit-flips

弘益人间,在世理化
official education motto of South Korea
To broadly benefit the human world

Sizzling Sunlight: Bask in both morning and evening sunlight. Even if it’s cloudy and cold. It’s not just about Vitamin D; it’s about regulating your natural circadian hythms

And if you avoided everyone who treated you unfairly at some point, you’d probably just be alone. You’d better hope they give you the benefit of the doubt for your mistakes, too

I can’t predict the future. But I can spot investor over-reactions. – Ram Ahluwahlia

They weren’t trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be. – Jordan Peterson

Make that phone call you’ve been putting off
Push through when you feel like quitting
Have that uncomfortable conversation
Introduce yourself to that cute guy/girl
Check out that church or faith group
Ask for that promotion or raise
Apply for that new job
Sign up for that class
Start that side hustle
Post that tweet
Take that trip
The world belongs to the bold. Be a seeker, open to change and opportunity.
And most importantly…
Shoot your shot.
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