things that either (1) I feel I have a non-standard (though not necessarily very good) perspective on, or (2) I have the same perspective on as everyone else but I wish to rant and/or copy-paste somebody else's quote about anyway because I feel they've been more relevant to my life than to the average person's. sometimes, with a lot of hard work, an Armchair Sermon can get promoted to a Possibly-Wrong Math Lesson.
I have a basic idea that the world is a mirror, and reflects back to you
what you project out to it -- not in a metaphysical, karmic way, but just
in a natural, positive-feedback-loop sort of way.
Three unique examples I can think of that show this at work:
(1) People often complain "I hate this office, everyone's rude".
But obviously, if you're rude to everyone else, they're not going to be overly kind back.
On the other hand, as soon as people start being rude to you, you're going to be miffed and rude right back.
So the cycle reinforces itself.
(2) A sense of wonder: Approaching the world with cynicism and disiilusionment will tend to make
things feel tiring and pedestrian, making you even more cynical and disillusioned in turn.
But approaching the world with an enthusiastic attitude and sense of wonder
can help inspire deeper thinking and insights. Cf my separate sermon on Sense of Wonder below.
(3) Bad driving: If you're a terrible driver, and make 3 abrupt lane changes with no signal,
you're more likely to encounter others making abrupt lane changes.
(Think of this in the following model: suppose any single lane has probability p
of having someone making an abrupt lane change. By cutting across 3 lanes instantaneously,
you are in "all three at once", so the probability you will encounter
at least one abrupt lane changer is 1-(1-p)**3.)
Moreover, you are more likely to have to take yet another veering last-minute evasive maneuver
to avoid them, since your lack of forethought (you didn't plan out potential alternative paths)
and the speed of your lane change has left you less time to react.
And best of all, your bad driving can force others to drive badly to avoid you,
making you drive badly to avoid them, and thus here too the cycle reinforces itself.
Contrast this to a defensive driver who makes careful lane changes and avoids all this,
making him actually less likely to get the impression that "everyone on the street is a shitty driver".
"Some persons hold that there is a wisdom of the head, and that there is a wisdom of the heart. I have not supposed so; but I mistrust myself now." --Thomas Gradgrind, Hard Times (Charles Dickens)
"I believe you find life such a problem because you think there are good people and bad people. You're wrong, of course. There are, always and only, the bad people, but some of them are on opposite sides." --Guards! Guards! (Terry Pratchett)
Piers Morgan once tried to humiliate a guest he was interviewing on national television by asking whether she "knew Pythagoras's theorem to the nearest 5 decimal places". When she admitted she did not, Piers's co-host challenged whether he himself knew it. He stumbled a bit, but ultimately recited the correct answer: "3.147". Of course, this was only 3 decimal places, only the first two were correct, and this is not Pythagoras's theorem.
"But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there---on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam." --Carl Sagan
Saturn's rings are to me one of the most ineffable and unknowable of nature's awe-inspiringly, dauntingly, even unnervingly silent beauties, and yet they are in most places no thicker than a Malibu condominium is tall. Ironically, the humanness of this scale makes me feel even more puny and insignificant in comparison: out there, suspended in the void (or, depending on how you'd prefer to look at it, hurtling through the storms of the heliosphere), is a razor-thin hoop of ice and dust, orbiting a planet that would float in a bathtub, and yet I will never get to see it in front of me or stand on its core. If it was vast and unthinkable, I'd have a good excuse, but it's not: it's of tractable size, arguably quite thinkable, and yet above I called it "ineffable and unknowable". It almost defeats the way I like to conceive of our insignificance as liberating: I like to tell myself that humanity is such a meaningless blip on the cosmic radar that it doesn't matter what we do, but Saturn's rings argue that it does matter, that our insignificance is a consequence of the limits of our minds and souls, not our physical bodies.
"A rising tide lifts all boats." --John F Kennedy
The text itself is sensationally infamous and its critical review among philosophers and political scientists tends to be a discomfited thumbs-up, so I'm not going to relitigate the consensus. I personally found some parts thought-provoking, but didn't find the overall effect particularly compelling or even coherent. He veers back and forth between smugness and ranting, and a lot of the latter is just him making non-controversial observations in a fiery tone, thereby fooling the reader into giving him credit for shedding some sort of prophetic light on them. His railing against leftism sounds more like whining---"/I/ don't care about racism or sexism or what have you, so therefore anyone who does care about it is psychologically stunted"---especially when he goes on to advocate for what by any reasonable metric amounts to a vividly leftist revolution itself. And peppered throughout the entire work are these innocent-looking concessive hedges---"I'm exaggerating, but you get my point", or "I'm not saying /I/ believe this, I'm just reporting that there are /some people/ who have said that /they/ believe this"---that instantly destroy entire paragraphs of buildup. It's like telling a long joke only to abandon it halfway through the punchline with "It's actually not that funny a joke, but you can see where I was going with it, right?". If you're going to write down the motivation for a decades-long domestic terrorism plot, the least you can do is make it convincing enough to convince yourself. However, as a fellow contrarian and dedicated cynic, the two cents I will add (or maybe, attempt to subtract) are as follows:
Note that neither of my cents addressed the contention that the industrialized economy is destroying pristine nature, and that this is indeed leaving humanity worse off, which is arguably the main idea of the manifesto (even though he spends a deceptively short amount of time directly addressing it).
I made a lot of stupid mistakes as a kid, but now that I'm older I'm making much more advanced and complex ones.
Money. Definitely money. And fancy soaps that smell nice.
First, you get the money. Then, that's it: now you have the money, go have fun.
If you go into a competitive field and get rich, you can tell people honestly that you spent the first few years after undergrad working in poverty alleviation.
It's not fun to be 'rich because you have each other'. It's fun to be rich because you're rich.
"All marriages are arranged if you count destiny." --Jake and Amir
"'Oh!' said the unhappy Bladud, clasping his hands, and mournfully raising his eyes towards the sky, 'would that my wanderings might end here! Would that these grateful tears with which I now mourn hope misplaced, and love despised, might flow in peace for ever!' The wish was heard. It was in the time of the heathen deities, who used occasionally to take people at their words, with a promptness, in some cases, extremely awkward. The ground opened beneath the prince's feet; he sank into the chasm; and instantaneously it closed upon his head for ever, save where his hot tears welled up through the earth, and where they have continued to gush forth ever since." --The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens)
A man who was habitually tardy had just received his last and final warning from his boss, and yet the next morning still managed to depart late from his home. Upon arriving at his workplace, he desperately circled the completely full parking lot, until at last, casting his eyes skyward, he beseeched, "O god! If only you open here a space for me I will give up smoking... I will give up drinking... I will give up anything!" Well, lo and behold, a warm golden beam of sunlight shone down from the heavens, and where it struck the ground, right before his very eyes, a space opened up. At which the man peered skyward once more: "Never mind, I found one." (stolen joke)
Everything happens for a reason. Sometimes, that reason is you're stupid and make bad choices. (stolen joke)
If you don't sin, Jesus died for nothing. (stolen joke)
I was going to ask God for a new bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So instead I stole a new bike, and asked God for forgiveness. (stolen joke)
"You must be subtle, like the basil in this salad. Now, some of you may not realize that there is basil in this salad; that's because it's so subtle." --Chef Paolo, The Suite Life of Zack and Cody
"Show those haters how it's done by hating yourself most." --Cole Sprouse
Technically, everybody is 'free as a bird', because of the existence of flightless birds like penguins and emus.
If your friend drops a self-roast in the group chat, refrain from piling on with additional secondary roasts. He has already climbed onto the barbecue, there is no need to provide backup.
"Light up a loved one's life---across town or across the country---with two or more of these in-sync lamps. When you turn one on with a simple touch of your hand, its mate emits the same ambient glow, no matter where it is and who is on the other end: Parent or grandparent, niece or nephew, or long-distance significant other."
We already have these. They are called cellphones. There is no need for exotic forms of lamp-based communication.
"interviewer: your greatest weakness?
me: interpreting semantics of a question but ignoring the pragmatics.
interviewer: could you give an example?
me: yes, i could."
--Gary Illyes (@methode)
"Me: I'm an expert at identifying birds
Her: OK, what about those ones flying over that tree?
Me: Yup, they're all birds" --Andy Ryan (@ItsAndyRyan)
"I say 'IDK' a lot but lowkey, I be knowing." --Bill Nye Tho
I always feel it's safe to ignore it. If it were really important, they would have put it in big print.
Before you do something dumb, ask your friends for advice, and they will all tell you not to do it. Then when you go ahead and do it anyway, it will feel like a measured, carefully-considered decision, which rests much easier on the mind.
You just have to show them that it's not that bad... it's not bad at all, it's pretty much just neutral. In fact it's kinda good. Really good, even.
I would argue that if you endanger someone's life and then subsequently un-endanger it, you still ought to get some credit for the second part.
"Most cutting thing you can say is 'who's this clown?' because it implies they're a) a clown & b) not even one of the better-known clowns." --Cohen is a Ghost (@skullmandible)
Scented candles are nice when you're sad because everything's the same as it was before but now it's brighter and warmer and smells like flowers.
"'What I mean is, if you can show a person logical proof that essentially he's got nothing to cry about, he'll stop crying.
That seems clear. Don't you think he'd stop crying?'
'That would make life too easy,' Raskolnikov replied."
--Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
Philosophy is for people who like to sit around talking about their feelings. Economics is for people who like to sit around talking about other people's feelings. Physics is for people who like to sit around but aren't familiar with the concept of feelings.
(When I was a college sophomore, I wrote this florid rant in response to being denied permission to take a certain course pass/fail. At that time, to me, the denial was "extraordinarily irritating", and as a result this remains one of my finest rants ever. In retrospect, I can't really know whether I was right or not, but I still feel I made a compelling case. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. Two sidenotes: (1) The prose is a bit purple in some places, but I left the rant unedited to preserve its authenticity; and (2) I mentioned the tax thing as an example of one way two people have been willing to sacrifice some of their own happiness for the happiness of others, but I personally think that government wastefulness makes high taxes ineffective tools for social reform.)
A while back, I wrote an article attempting to valiantly defend economics against claims that it was a bad discipline. At the time, I was an enthusiastic Ec concentrator, simultaneously confused by the charges leveled against what I proudly considered my 'academic world', and eager to vindicate it.
Today, I want to amend that statement: whereas economics may not be a bad discipline, many economists are bad people. I admit beforehand that in this rant I will paint in broad strokes; nevertheless, I will do so using pigments found right at home at 1805 Cambridge St. I hope that I can thereby illustrate concisely what I'm convinced must be at the heart of the popular claim that economics is bad: people conflate economics with economists. The first isn't bad, but the second can easily seem to be, because so many of them confuse obnoxiousness for cleverness. They imagine themselves to be acting cleverly by dint of sheer superiority of critical reasoning, when in truth they are often just acting obnoxiously by dint of being obnoxious.
Take, for example, my extraordinarily irritating experience last semester with switching Ec from my concentration to my secondary field. At that time, I was taking Ec970, which is generally restricted to concentrators and on a mandatory letter-graded basis. However, given that I was already enrolled in the course and wouldn't be allowed to drop it (it was nearly the end of the semester), I requested that Ec970 count toward secondary credit for me. This was a pretty sensible request, I thought: they couldn't exactly have kicked me out at that point, so why not give me credit for it? Yet, I was denied, because Ec970 is for concentration credit only. So I followed up: since I was no longer a concentrator and therefore couldn't get credit for Ec970, perhaps I could take it Pass/Fail? Then I wouldn't need to sink so much time into it every week anymore. That request, too, was quickly denied, because Ec970 is a core concentration requirement and you can't take core concentration requirements Pass/Fail.
So, essentially, what I was told was that (a) I couldn't count Ec970 for credit, since I wasn't a concentrator; but also (b) I couldn't take it Pass/Fail, since I was a concentrator.
This seemed absurd, so I appealed to the DUS, and received this emailed justification: "I have thought about this and discussed with my colleagues; I am afraid we have to decline your request... The reason is consistency across students: if we grant exceptions, it creates a demand for more exceptions." Now, the DUS obviously imagined himself clever here: let's apply market dynamics to this situation, he suggested to himself, and himself agreed. But this just defies common sense: I'm a student on your campus, not a nameless member of a horde of rational utility-maximizing consumers; and you're talking about a course in your department, not a bushel of wheat. (And by the way, I think he's seriously deceived if he's under the misconception that students at Harvard are just clamoring to get into a boring and reading-intensive sophomore tutorial from the Ec department.)
Take for further example Professor N. Gregory Mankiw, hallowed patriarch of Ec10, who coerces students every semester to shell out $130 for his official course textbook (and who I name-drop only because he is a public figure and seems to relish---even invite---controversy). The Crimson Editorial Staff has done a good job explaining why this is pretty rich BS, but what they didn't address was how this is a beautiful instance of why economists overall tend to leave such a bad taste in people's mouths. See, Mankiw thinks he's being clever in his textbook pricing scheme: make Ec10 a concentration requirement, then demand MindTap for homework submission, then bundle it into your own textbook, and so on and so forth. But charging students $130 for the privilege of submitting homework doesn't take a clever person... it just takes an obnoxious one. It's not that normal people aren't smart enough to figure out how to act like this: it's just that they don't want to.
And while we're on the topic of Mankiw, consider this controversial Sunday column that ran in the New York Times right after the 2008 Financial Crisis, in which he patronizingly explains that higher taxes would make him write fewer articles, which presumably he considers a great loss to society. The Economist ran a great takedown, but at the core of what bothers me most about the piece is just how tone-deaf it is. Nobody likes taxation per se, but for contrast, take Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, both of whom left Harvard to accomplish things that are genuinely valuable to society, and both of whom have also actually advocated separately for expansion of tax funding, based simply on being good, caring people. It's not lack of cleverness that leads these people to act thus: it's lack of obnoxiousness.
So when it comes to economics, don't hate the game: hate the player.
"I have yet to see any problem, however complicated, which, when you looked at it in the right way, did not become still more complicated." --Poul Anderson
I think the Venmo app is brilliantly convenient: I marvel that, at the push of a button, my money dissolves into tiny little pieces and whizzes through the air overhead to the other side of the country until reassembling itself inside someone else's phone. "Actually," a friend of mine once objected, "it works through the Internet. It's just sending binary transaction data that gets updated on both sides. I took a class about this." This seemed to me a very sorry way of looking at things. Anybody can take a couple courses in programming and computer networks to learn roughly how Venmo works; indeed, like her, I had. I don't advocate ignorance. But it's important to allow yourself to marvel even at things that you 'already understand', to have a sense of wonder about them, for three reasons: first, it encourages you to appreciate the profound challenges of the problem and, in turn, intuitively grasp the innovations of the solution; second, it reinforces critical reasoning and healthy skepticism about other things that might be more unfamiliar or novel (rather than just blindly accepting everything as a mundane reality); and third, it promotes imagination and creativity. (I add as an aside that, fourth, it makes you a much more fun person to be around. Everybody likes a bit of whimsy.)
"The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?" --Jerry Lloyd Bona (as it turns out, all three are equivalent statements)
Albert Einstein (who insisted that "everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler"), despite contributing much to early theories of quantum physics, nevertheless refused to accept the idea that some natural phenomena are inherently random, complaining that "God does not play dice with the universe". To which a fellow scientist (possibly Niels Bohr), defending the idea, rejoined "Stop telling god what to do!". Eventually, Einstein was proven wrong. For more, Google 'EPR Paradox' and 'Bell's Theorem'. (Lawrence Berkeley particle physicist Henry Stapp declared that "Bell's Theorem is the most profound result of science"---of not just physics, but indeed science as a whole---and others have agreed. Bell's original paper and this MinutePhysics/3b1b video are a good start, but I think really understanding the theorem takes a lot of hard firsthand scrutiny, which not even I have had the chance to complete. Ask yourself what exactly it is about quantum mechanics that predicts the violation of an otherwise seemingly innocuous quantitative 'identity'. I might be wrong, but I think the 'nugget' is that (1) entanglement gives you the opportunity to make two different measurements of the 'same' particle, which is usually impossible because measuring a particle apparently irrevocably 'collapses' it (but, if local realism is valid, then measuring one member of the entangled pair can't possibly simultaneously collapse the other); and (2) by repeating those two measurements on many different identically prepared particles, you can get a very precise estimate of their correlation (and if local realism is valid, then the correlation should be the same regardless of whether the two measurements are made simultaneously on the same pair or sequentially on one member from each of two different pairs). In a way, then, experimental tests of Bell's Theorem are statistical hypothesis tests, where the null is that local realism is valid, and the test statistic is the observed correlation value.) It's pretty amazing that physical reality is so weird that even Einstein was wrong about it. (By the way, I have heard from my professors that Bell's Theorem is so simple, elegant, and (eventually) empirically supported that if Einstein had been around to read it, he, too, would probably have been compelled to immediately renounce his belief in local realism altogether.)
Funny occurs at particular junctions of three spatial dimensions, and one temporal: (S0) humor, the surprising content of the joke; (S1) delivery, the punctuation/intonation/pauses/etc with which you deliver the joke; (S2) audience, the tastes and preferences of the people to whom you're telling the joke; and (T) relevance, how topical your joke/observation is to what's actually going on right now. The last is perhaps the most overlooked: books full of jokes we might laugh at sit gathering dust in libraries, but the people we find funny are funny in realtime.
Yes.
1.5x. The jokes are snappier and, therefore, funnier.
This is a true story that actually happened to me. One time I asked a girl out, and she said that she wasn't looking for anything right then but I should hit up a certain close friend of hers who was single. "You could have just said no," I thought, "You didn't have to go and throw your friend under the bus."
You are both in love with her, which gives you something reliable in common.
After a while, something can still be confusing but no longer surprising. It's like the sixth time you watch a magic trick: it might not be clear how or why it's happening, but at the very least the outcome itself has ceased to be a shock.
Some people aren't actually crazy, but they purposely act crazy because they get some sort of weird kick out of making other people think they're crazy, and the second thing (getting a kick out of people thinking you're crazy) is the only crazy thing about them. Other than that, they're fine, normal people. I myself have met two such individuals.
mailto Link with the Address Literal in the HTML Source:
"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration." --Stan Kelly-Bootle
I have no idea. Somebody help me.
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets, and steal loaves of bread." --Anatole France
The ability of a salamander to regrow its tail and limbs after they've been severed is rivalled only by the ability of a politician to spontaneously regrow their moral compass and sense of righteous indignation after a president from the opposing party takes power.
quidem dēlenda est.
haikus are easy
but sometimes they don't make sense
refrigerator
If you lock yourself into a windowless basement, it becomes much easier to dedicate yourself to your homework without getting distracted by daily trifles like the passage of time.
Try to follow the lecturer's nose with your mouse pointer at all times, especially when they start moving back and forth across the stage a lot. Not only will it help you pay attention, but also it will improve your hand-eye coordination and reflexes.
No matter his priceless contributions to scientific understanding and the public imagination, I will always remember him as the guy who thought electrons travel in perfect circles.