Friday, December 22, 2023
Monday, November 13, 2023
Sunday, August 13, 2023
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
- Shakespeare, "Macbeth"
Saturday, July 29, 2023
"He simply wasn’t all there. He wasn’t a complete human being at all. He was a tiny bit of one, unnaturally developed; something in a bottle, an organ kept alive in a laboratory. I thought he was a sort of primitive savage, but he was something absolutely modern and up-to-date that only this ghastly age could produce. A tiny bit of a man pretending he was the whole."
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
"I was unmoved; there was no part of me remotely touched by her distress. It was as I had often imagined being expelled from school. I almost expected to hear her say: 'I have already written to inform your unhappy father.' But as I drove away and turned back in the car to take what promised to be my last view of the house, I felt that I was leaving part of myself behind, and that wherever I went afterwards I should feel the lack of it, and search for it hopelessly, as ghosts are said to do, frequenting the spots where they buried material treasures without which they cannot pay their way to the nether world."
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
What the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive wants the world to know
What the last Nuremberg prosecutor alive wants the world to know
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-the-last-nuremberg-prosecutor-alive-wants-the-world-to-know/
"War makes murderers out of otherwise decent people. All wars, and all decent people."
Thursday, December 1, 2022
Monday, November 7, 2022
“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?” And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”
- - Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
what he sought was always something lying ahead, and even if it was a matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he advanced on his journey, because the traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Saturday, November 5, 2022
Almost every person in any saga tends to remember their own role as being a little more important than the other players see it. That’s true in our own lives. We recall vividly the brilliance of our own contributions to a discussion; we’re a bit hazier when recalling the contributions of others, or we tend to minimize their significance.
- Walter Isaacson, The Code Breaker
Friday, July 22, 2022
“No. I don't believe in anything. How many times must I tell you that? I don't believe in anything anyone; only in Zorba. Not because Zorba is better than the others; not at all, not a little bit! He's a brute like the rest! But I believe in Zorba because he's the only being I have in my power, the only one I know. All the rest are guts. All the rest are ghosts, I tell you. When I die, everything'll die. The whole Zorbatic world will go to the bottom!”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
Sunday, January 2, 2022
"Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel."
"You had to exert yourself to see this world. But if you did, if you had that kind of curiosity if you had an innate interest in the welfare of your fellow human beings, and if you went through that door, a strange thing happened: you left your petty troubles on the threshold. It could be addictive."
"This was what growing up was about: hide the corpse, don't bare your heart, do make assumptions about the motives of others. They're certainly doing all these things to you."
"Most of us can't go back and make restitution. We can't do a thing about our should haves and our could haves. But a few lucky men like Ghosh never have such worries; there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize. Now and then Ghosh would grin and wink at me across the room. He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live."
"Being the firstborn gives you great patience. But you reach a point where after trying and trying you say, Patience be damned. Let them suffer their distorted worldview. Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you know you owe them nothing."
"It helps to be me, I suppose. To not expect too much."
"Indeed to think of life as tragic is a posture of delusion, for life is uniformly worse than tragic"
- Abraham Verghese, Cutting for Stone
"There is no absolute knowledge; there is only conditional knowledge. History repeats itself—and so do statistical patterns. The past is the best guide to the future."
"Bernie Fisher, the surgeon leading the trial, wrote, 'In God we trust. All others must bring data.'"
- Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Laws of Medicine
"I admire you bravery, lieutenant."
"I'm not brave. I just wasn't in the mood to be a disappointment to everybody. I'm a foreigner you know."
"This city is full of us, isn't it? I'm one myself."
"Seeking something missing. Missing something left behind."
"Maybe with good luck, we'll find what eluded us in the places we once called home."
- The French Dispatch
"For several days, in fact, he had been fending off a state of restlessness. On his regular descent to the lobby, he caught himself counting the steps. As he browsed the headlines in his favorite chair, he found he was lifting his hands to twirl the tips of moustaches that were no longer there. He found he was walking through the door of the Piazza at 12:01 for lunch. And at 1:35, when he climbed the 110 steps to his room, he was already calculating the minutes until he could come back downstairs for a drink. If he continued along this course, it would not take long for the ceiling to edge downward, the walls to edge inward, and the floor to edge upward, until the entire hotel had been collapsed into the size of a biscuit tin."
"As he proceeds through life, he looks about in a state of confusion, understanding neither the inclinations nor the aspirations of his peers."
"For after all, if attentiveness should be measured in minutes and discipline measured in hours, then indomitability must be measured in years."
"By their very nature, human beings are so capricious, so complex, so delightfully contradictory, that they deserve not only our consideration, but our reconsideration—and our unwavering determination to withhold our opinion until we have engaged with them in every possible setting at every possible hour."
"They wander about at midnight because at that hour they can generally do so without being harried by the sound and fury of earthly emotions. After all those years of striving and struggling, of hoping and praying, of shouldering expectations, stomaching opinions, navigating decorum, and making conversation, what they seek, quite simply, is a little peace and quiet."
"Certainly, he wept for his friend, that generous yet temperamental soul who only briefly found his moment in time—and who, like this forlorn child, was disinclined to condemn the world for all its injustices."
- Amor Towles, A Gentleman in Moscow
"Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth."
"We know that if we can just catch the eye of the algorithm, we can take the humans for granted."
"Homo sapiens is just not built for satisfaction. Human happiness depends less on objective conditions and more on our own expectations. Expectations, however, tend to adapt to conditions, including to the condition of other people. When things improve, expectations balloon, and consequently even dramatic improvements in conditions might leave us as dissatisfied as before."
"For all practical purposes, it was reasonable to argue that I have free will, because my will was shaped mainly by the interplay of inner forces, which nobody outside could see. I could enjoy the illusion that I control my secret inner arena, while outsiders could never really understand what is happening inside me and how I make decisions."
"We should never underestimate human stupidity. Both on the personal and on the collective level, humans are prone to engage in self-destructive activities."
"What then is the secular ideal? The most important secular commitment is to the truth, which is based on observation and evidence rather than on mere faith."
"Power is all about changing reality rather than seeing it for what it is. When you have a hammer in your hand, everything looks like a nail; and when you have great power in your hand, everything looks like an invitation to meddle."
"Most of the injustices in the contemporary world result from large-scale structural biases rather than from individual prejudices, and our hunter-gatherer brains did not evolve to detect structural biases."
"Human suffering is often caused by belief in fiction, but the suffering itself is still real."
"Silence isn’t neuatrality; it is supporting the status quo."
"The current technological and scientific revolution implies not that authentic individuals and authentic realities can be manipulated by algorithms and TV cameras, but rather that authenticity is a myth. People are afraid of being trapped inside a box, but they don’t realise that they are already trapped inside a box – their brain – which is locked within a bigger box – human society with its myriad fictions."
"when you begin to explore the manifold ways the world manipulates you, in the end you realise that your core identity is a complex illusion created by neural networks."
"Pain is pain, fear is fear, and love is love – even in the matrix. It doesn’t matter if the fear you feel is inspired by a collection of atoms in the outside world or by electrical signals manipulated by a computer. The fear is still real."
"the mind is never free of manipulation. There is no authentic self waiting to be liberated from the manipulative shell."
"Unlike the creators of The Matrix and The Truman Show, Huxley doubted the possibility of escape, because he questioned whether there was anybody to make the escape. Since your brain and your ‘self’ are part of the matrix, to escape the matrix you must escape your self. That, however, is a possibility worth exploring. Escaping the narrow definition of self might well become a necessary survival skill in the twenty-first century."
"To run fast, don’t take much luggage with you. Leave all your illusions behind. They are very heavy."
"A wise old man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. ‘Well,’ he answered, ‘I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven’t figured out is why the other people are here.’"
"As if there was something intrinsically good about believing things without evidence."
"Unfortunately, human freedom and human creativity are not what the liberal story imagines them to be. To the best of our scientific understanding, there is no magic behind our choices and creations. They are the product of billions of neurons exchanging biochemical signals, and even if you liberate humans from the yoke of the Catholic Church and the Soviet Union, their choices will still be dictated by biochemical algorithms as ruthless as the Inquisition and the KGB."
"Liberalism has a particularly confused notion of ‘free will’. Humans obviously have a will, they have desires, and they are sometimes free to fulfil their desires. If by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to do what you desire – then yes, humans have free will. But if by ‘free will’ you mean the freedom to choose what to desire – then no, humans have no free will."
"Thousands of years before our liberal age, ancient Buddhism went further by denying not just all cosmic dramas, but even the inner drama of human creation. The universe has no meaning, and human feelings too are not part of a great cosmic tale. They are ephemeral vibrations, appearing and disappearing for no particular purpose. That’s the truth. Get over it."
"The Buddha taught that the three basic realities of the universe are that everything is constantly changing, nothing has any enduring essence, and nothing is completely satisfying. You can explore the furthest reaches of the galaxy, of your body, or of your mind – but you will never encounter something that does not change, that has an eternal essence, and that completely satisfies you."
"According to the Buddha, then, life has no meaning, and people don’t need to create any meaning. They just need to realise that there is no meaning, and thus be liberated from the suffering caused by our attachments and our identification with empty phenomena. ‘What should I do?’ ask people, and the Buddha advises: ‘Do nothing. Absolutely nothing.’ The whole problem is that we constantly do something. Not necessarily on the physical level – we can sit immobile for hours with closed eyes – yet on the mental level we are extremely busy creating stories and identities, fighting battles and winning victories. To really do nothing means that the mind too does nothing and creates nothing."
"So if you want to know the truth about the universe, about the meaning of life, and about your own identity, the best place to start is by observing suffering and exploring what it is."
"the deepest source of my suffering is in the patterns of my own mind."
- Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
"Anyone can nurture a myth about their life if they have enough manure, so if the grass looks greener on the other side of the fence, that’s probably because it’s full of shit."
"I said happiness is like money. A made-up value that represents something we can’t weigh or measure."
"If I’m being honest, I think that almost all of us have a need to tell ourselves that we’re helping to make the world better. Or at least that we’re not making it worse. That we’re on the right side. That even if… I don’t know… that maybe even our very worst actions serve some sort of higher purpose. Because practically everyone distinguishes between good and bad, so if we breach our own moral code, we have to come up with an excuse for ourselves. I think that’s known as neutralizing techniques in criminology. It could be religious or political conviction, or the belief that we had no choice, but we need something to justify our bad deeds. Because I honestly believe that there are very few people who could live with knowing that they are… bad."
"nothing unites a group of strangers more effectively than the opportunity to come together and sigh at a hopeless case"
"If you had to try things out and read things and find out the truth about things, then you’d never have time to have an opinion about anything."
"if you do it for long enough, it can become impossible to tell the difference between flying and falling."
"humor is the soul’s last line of defense, and as long as we’re laughing we’re alive, so bad puns and fart jokes were their way of expressing their defiance against despair."
"if there’s one thing modern life and the Internet have taught us, it’s that you should never expect to win a discussion simply because you’re right."
"took such a deep breath that she doubled in size, then she became smaller than ever."
"The new year arrives, which of course never means as much as you hope unless you happen to sell calendars. One day becomes another, now becomes then."
- Fredrik Backman, Anxious People
Saturday, November 13, 2021
"It has never seemed a problem to me, only a source of awe, amazement and profound surprise that my consciousness, my very sense of self, the self which feels as free as air, which was trying to read the book but instead was watching the clouds through the high windows, the self which is now writing these words, is in fact the electrochemical chatter of one hundred billion nerve cells."
"I found it consoling, when thinking about some of the mistakes I have made in my career, to learn that errors of judgement and the propensity to make mistakes are, so to speak, built in to the human brain. I felt that perhaps I could be forgiven for some of the mistakes I have made over the years."
"Within this dying, ruined body, invaded by cancer cells, ‘she’ was still there, even though she was now refusing even water, and clearly anxious not to prolong her dying any longer. And now all those brain cells are dead – and my mother – who in a sense was the complex electrochemical interaction of all these millions of neurons – is no more. In neuroscience it is called ‘the binding problem’ – the extraordinary fact, which nobody can even begin to explain, that mere brute matter can give rise to consciousness and sensation. I had such a strong sensation, as she lay dying, that some deeper, ‘real’ person was still there behind the death mask."
"Neuroscience tells us that it is highly improbable that we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die. Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken since what it really does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand. There are one hundred billion nerve cells in our brains. Does each one have a fragment of consciousness within it? How many nerve cells do we require to be conscious or to feel pain? Or does consciousness and thought reside in the electrochemical impulses that join these billions of cells together? Is a snail aware? Does it feel pain when you crush it underfoot? Nobody knows."
- Henry Marsh, Do No Harm Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
"Roger Fisher was a professor of law at Harvard University, who suggested back in 1981 that they should implant the American nuclear codes in the heart of a volunteer. If the President wanted to press the big red button and kill hundreds of thousands of innocent people, then first he’d have to take a butcher’s knife and dig it out of the volunteer’s chest himself; so that he realizes what death actually means first-hand, and understands the implications of his actions."
- Adam Kay, This is Going to Hurt
"Laziness is built deep into our nature."
"law of least effort"
"Let’s not dismiss their business plan just because the font makes it hard to read."
"We must be inclined to believe it because it has been repeated so often, but let’s think it through again."
"Familiarity breeds liking. This is a mere exposure effect."
"I’m in a very good mood today, and my System 2 is weaker than usual. I should be extra careful."
"We have limited information about what happened on a day, and System 1 is adept at finding a coherent causal story that links the fragments of knowledge at its disposal."
"The two headlines look superficially like explanations of what happened in the market, but a statement that can explain two contradictory outcomes explains nothing at all. In fact, all the headlines do is satisfy our need for coherence: a large event is supposed to have consequences, and consequences need causes to explain them."
"The sequence in which we observe characteristics of a person is often determined by chance. Sequence matters, however, because the halo effect increases the weight of first impressions, sometimes to the point that subsequent information is mostly wasted."
"This is just what you would expect if the confidence that people experience is determined by the coherence of the story they manage to construct from available information. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. Indeed, you will often find that knowing little makes it easier to fit everything you know into a coherent pattern."
"Overconfidence: As the WY SIATI rule implies, neither the quantity nor the quality of the evidence counts for much in subjective confidence. The confidence that individuals have in their beliefs depends mostly on the quality of the story they can tell about what they see, even if they see little. We often fail to allow for the possibility that evidence that should be critical to our judgment is missing—what we see is all there is."
"Furthermore, our associative system tends to settle on a coherent pattern of activation and suppresses doubt and ambiguity."
"They made that big decision on the basis of a good report from one consultant. WYSIATI—what you see is all there is. They did not seem to realize how little information they had.” “They didn’t want more information that might spoil their story. WYSIATI."
"The exaggerated faith in small samples is only one example of a more general illusion—we pay more attention to the content of messages than to information about their reliability, and as a result end up with a view of the world around us that is simpler and more coherent than the data justify. Jumping to conclusions is a safer sport in the world of our imagination than it is in reality."
"Statistics produce many observations that appear to beg for causal explanations but do not lend themselves to such explanations. Many facts of the world are due to chance, including accidents of sampling. Causal explanations of chance events are inevitably wrong."
"We see the same strategy at work in the negotiation over the price of a home, when the seller makes the first move by setting the list price. As in many other games, moving first is an advantage in single-issue negotiations—for example, when price is the only issue to be settled between a buyer and a seller. As you may have experienced when negotiating for the first time in a bazaar, the initial anchor has a powerful effect. My advice to students when I taught negotiations was that if you think the other side has made an outrageous proposal, you should not come back with an equally outrageous counteroffer, creating a gap that will be difficult to bridge in further negotiations. Instead you should make a scene, storm out or threaten to do so, and make it clear—to yourself as well as to the other side—that you will not continue the negotiation with that number on the table."
"The lesson is clear: estimates of causes of death are warped by media coverage. The coverage is itself biased toward novelty and poignancy. The media do not just shape what the public is interested in, but also are shaped by it. Editors cannot ignore the public’s demands that certain topics and viewpoints receive extensive coverage. Unusual events (such as botulism) attract disproportionate attention and are consequently perceived as less unusual than they really are. The world in our heads is not a precise replica of reality; our expectations about the frequency of events are distorted by the prevalence and emotional intensity of the messages to which we are exposed."
"The most coherent stories are not necessarily the most probable, but they are plausible, and the notions of coherence, plausibility, and probability are easily confused by the unwary."
"This is a trap for forecasters and their clients: adding detail to scenarios makes them more persuasive, but less likely to come true."
"The social norm against stereotyping, including the opposition to profiling, has been highly beneficial in creating a more civilized and more equal society. It is useful to remember, however, that neglecting valid stereotypes inevitably results in suboptimal judgments. Resistance to stereotyping is a laudable moral position, but the simplistic idea that the resistance is costless is wrong. The costs are worth paying to achieve a better society, but denying that the costs exist, while satisfying to the soul and politically correct, is not scientifically defensible. Reliance on the affect heuristic is common in politically charged arguments. The positions we favor have no cost and those we oppose have no benefits. We should be able to do better."
"There is a deep gap between our thinking about statistics and our thinking about individual cases. Statistical results with a causal interpretation have a stronger effect on our thinking than noncausal information. But even compelling causal statistics will not change long-held beliefs or beliefs rooted in personal experience."
"No need to worry about this statistical information being ignored. On the contrary, it will immediately be used to feed a stereotype."
"The fact that you observe regression when you predict an early event from a later event should help convince you that regression does not have a causal explanation."
"The commentator had obviously detected regression to the mean and had invented a causal story for which there was no evidence."
"the statistician David Freedman used to say that if the topic of regression comes up in a criminal or civil trial, the side that must explain regression to the jury will lose the case."
"our mind is strongly biased toward causal explanations and does not deal well with “mere statistics."
"Causal explanations will be evoked when regression is detected, but they will be wrong because the truth is that regression to the mean has an explanation but does not have a cause."
"Start with an estimate of average GPA. Determine the GPA that matches your impression of the evidence. Estimate the correlation between your evidence and GPA. If the correlation is .30, move 30% of the distance from the average to the matching GPA. Step 1 gets you the baseline, the GPA you would have predicted if you were told nothing about Julie beyond the fact that she is a graduating senior. In the absence of information, you would have predicted the average. (This is similar to assigning the base-rate probability of business administration graduates when you are told nothing about Tom W.) Step 2 is your intuitive prediction, which matches your evaluation of the evidence. Step 3 moves you from the baseline toward your intuition, but the distance you are allowed to move depends on your estimate of the correlation. You end up, at step 4, with a prediction that is influenced by your intuition but is far more moderate. This approach to prediction is general. You can apply it whenever you need to predict a quantitative variable, such as GPA, profit from an investment, or the growth of a company. The approach builds on your intuition, but it moderates it, regresses it toward the mean. When you have good reasons to trust the accuracy of your intuitive prediction—a strong correlation between the evidence and the prediction—the adjustment will be small."
"A characteristic of unbiased predictions is that they permit the prediction of rare or extreme events only when the information is very good."
"extreme outcomes are much more likely to be observed in small samples."
"Our intuitive prediction is very favorable, but it is probably too high. Let’s take into account the strength of our evidence and regress the prediction toward the mean."
"Narrative fallacies arise inevitably from our continuous attempt to make sense of the world. The explanatory stories that people find compelling are simple; are concrete rather than abstract; assign a larger role to talent, stupidity, and intentions than to luck; and focus on a few striking events that happened rather than on the countless events that failed to happen. Any recent salient event is a candidate to become the kernel of a causal narrative."
"we humans constantly fool ourselves by constructing flimsy accounts of the past and believing they are true."
"The halo effect helps keep explanatory narratives simple and coherent by exaggerating the consistency of evaluations: good people do only good things and bad people are all bad."
"The human mind does not deal well with nonevents. The fact that many of the important events that did occur involve choices further tempts you to exaggerate the role of skill and underestimate the part that luck played in the outcome. Because every critical decision turned out well, the record suggests almost flawless prescience—but bad luck could have disrupted any one of the successful steps. The halo effect adds the final touches, lending an aura of invincibility to the heroes of the story."
"You cannot help dealing with the limited information you have as if it were all there is to know. You build the best possible story from the information available to you, and if it is a good story, you believe it. Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance."
"The mind that makes up narratives about the past is a sense-making organ. When an unpredicted event occurs, we immediately adjust our view of the world to accommodate the surprise."
"Leaders who have been lucky are never punished for having taken too much risk. Instead, they are believed to have had the flair and foresight to anticipate success, and the sensible people who doubted them are seen in hindsight as mediocre, timid, and weak. A few lucky gambles can crown a reckless leader with a halo of prescience and boldness."
statistical fact of life: regression to the mean"
"System 1 is designed to jump to conclusions from little evidence—and it is not designed to know the size of its jumps. Because of WYSIATI, only the evidence at hand counts."
"The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future."
"The situation has provided a cue; this cue has given the expert access to information stored in memory, and the information provides the answer. Intuition is nothing more and nothing less than recognition."
"An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality—but it is not what people and organizations want."
"The main virtue of the premortem is that it legitimizes doubts."
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow
"If you want to make people believe in imaginary entities such as gods and nations, you should make them sacrifice something valuable. The more painful the sacrifice, the more convinced people are of the existence of the imaginary recipient. A poor peasant sacrificing a priceless bull to Jupiter will become convinced that Jupiter really exists, otherwise how can he excuse his stupidity? The peasant will sacrifice another bull, and another, and another, just so he won’t have to admit that all the previous bulls were wasted. For exactly the same reason, if I have sacrificed a child to the glory of the Italian nation, or my legs to the communist revolution, it’s enough to turn me into a zealous Italian nationalist or an enthusiastic communist. For if Italian national myths or communist propaganda are a lie, then I will be forced to admit that my child’s death or my own paralysis have been completely pointless. Few people have the stomach to admit such a thing."
"We see, then, that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we saw, novels we read, speeches we heard, and from our own daydreams, and weaves out of all that jumble a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause me to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all have our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as if in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories."
"What, then, is the meaning of life? Liberalism maintains that we shouldn’t expect an external entity to provide us with some readymade meaning. Rather, each individual voter, customer and viewer ought to use his or her free will in order to create meaning not just for his or her life, but for the entire universe. The life sciences undermine liberalism, arguing that the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms. Every moment, the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. Then more flashes appear and fade, appear and fade, in quick succession. These momentary experiences do not add up to any enduring essence. The narrating self tries to impose order on this chaos by spinning a never-ending story, in which every such experience has its place, and hence every experience has some lasting meaning. But, as convincing and tempting as it may be, this story is a fiction. Medieval crusaders believed that God and heaven provided their lives with meaning. Modern liberals believe that individual free choices provide life with meaning. They are all equally delusional."
"(“What is this mind of ours: what are these atoms with consciousness?” asked the late Richard Feynman. “Last week’s potatoes!”)"
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Saturday, February 13, 2021
Monday, December 30, 2019
So what's the point of getting out of bed in the morning?
I tell myself I bear witness, but the real answer is that it's obviously my programming, and I lack the constitution for suicide.
- Rustin Cohle, The Long Bright Dark, True Detective, 2014
Saturday, April 6, 2019
designed to survive at all costs.
But sophisticated enough to think they're calling the shots.
To think they're in control,
when they're really just...
The passengers
Then is there really such a thing as free will for any of us?
Or is it just a collective delusion?
A sick joke?
- Westworld 2×10
Who do you want doing the forgiving? God?
People.
People never forgive. Not in my experience. They say they do, but they don't. I'm not even sure forgiveness really matters.
Why wouldn't it matter?
Well, what is it, forgiveness? It doesn't mean anything. I mean, you still did what you did, right? Nothing's changed. Forgiveness is a mindset. Synapses in your brain telling you to think differently about something that's already happened. It's amorphous. It's not really there. And if it's not really there, what is it?
God, I hope that's not true. Every day, I fell like I'm getting kicked in the head a little. I know I deserve it, but I sure would like it to end someday.
Just do what I do, stay away from people. If you're not around them, there are no mistakes to be made.
That's not the answer. You know that. You need people.
To bum a light. That's about it, though.
Nah. You'll change your mind someday. Just wait. You'll see.
- The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel
- S1, EP10, Maniac
- Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
Tuesday, July 10, 2018
『無罪推定』，從來就不是刑事訴訟的基本精神，『給社會一個交代』才是
Monday, March 27, 2017
"Why flawed?" asked Noonan.
"Because biologists have already been burned attempting to apply human spychology to animals. Earth animals, I note."
"Just a second," said Noonan.
"That's totally different. We're talking about the psychology of intelligent beings."
"True. And that would be just fine, if we knew what intelligence was."
"And we don't?" asked Noonan in surprise.
"Believe it or not, we don't. We usually proceed from a trivial definition: intelligence is the attribute of man that separates his activity from that of the animals. It's a kind of attempt to distinguish the master from his dog, who seems to understand everything but can't speak. However, this trivial definition does lead to wittier ones. They are based on depressing observations of the aforementioned human activity. For example: intelligence is the ability of a living creature to perform pointless or unnatural acts."
"Yes, that's us," agreed Noonan.
"Unfortunately. Or here's a definition-hypothesis. Intelligence is a complex instinct which hasn't yet fully matured. The idea is that instinctive activity is always natural and useful. A million years will pass, the instinct will mature, and we will cease making the mistakes which are probably an integral part of intelligence. And then, if anything in the universe changes, we will happily become extinct - again, precisely because we've lost the art of making mistakes, that is, trying various things not prescribed by a rigid code."
"Somehow this all sounds so ... demeaning."
"All right, then here's another definition - a very lofty and noble one. Intelligence is the ability to harness the powers of the surrounding world without destroying the said world."
Noonan grimaced and shook his head. "No," he said. "That's a bit much ... That's not us. Well, how about the idea that humans, unlike animals, have an overpowering need for knowledge? I've read that somewhere."
"So have I," said Valentine. "But the issue is that man, at least the average man, can easily overcome this need. In my opinion, the need doesn't exist at all. There's a need to understand, but that doesn't require knowledge. The God hypothesis, for example, allows you to have any unparalleled understanding of absolutely everything while knowing absolutely nothing ... Give a man a highly simplified model of the world and interpret every event on the basis of this simple model. This approach requires no knowledge. A few rote formulas, plus some so-called intuition, some so-called practical acumen, and some so-called common sense."
"Wait," said Noonan. He finished his beer and banged the empty stein down on the table. "Don't get off track. Let's put it this way. A man meets an alien. How does each figure out that the other is intelligent?"
"No idea," Valentine said merrily. "All I've read on the subject reduces to a vicious circle. If they are capable of contact, then they are intelligent. And conversely, if they are intelligent, then they are capable of contact. And in general: if an alien creature has the honor of being psychologically human, then it's intelligent. That's how it is, Richard. Read Vonnegut?"
"Damn it," said Noonan. "And here I thought you'd sorted everything out."
"Even a monkey can sort things," observed Valentine.
"No, wait," said Noonan. For some reason, he felt cheated. "But if you don't even know such simple things ... All right, never mind intelligence. Looks like there's no making heas or tails of it. But about the Visit? What do you think about the Visit?"
"Certainly," said Valentine. "Imagine a picnic -"
Noonan jumped. "What did you say?"
"A picnic. Imagine: a forest, a country road, a meadow. A car pulls off the road into the meadow and unloads young men, bottles, picnic baskets, girls, transistor radios, cameras ... A fire is lit, tents are pitched, music is played. And in the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that were watching the whole night in horror crawl out of the their shelters. And what do they see? An oil spill, a gasoline puddle, old spark plugs and oil filters strewn about ... Scattered rags, burntout bulbs, someone has dropped a monkey wrench. The wheels have tracked mud from some godforsaken swamp ... and, of course, there are the remains of the campfire, apple cores, candy wrappers, tins, bottles, someone's handkerchief, someone's penknife, old ragged newspapers, coins, wilted flowers from another meadow ..."
"I get it," said Noonan. "A roadside picnic."
"Exactly. A picnic by the side of some space road. And you ask me whether they'll come back ..."
"Let me have a smoke," said Noonan. "Damn your pseudoscience! Somehow this isn't at all how I envisioned it."
"That's your right," observed Valentine.
"What, you mean they never even noticed us?"
"Why?"
"Or at least they paid no attention."
"I wouldn't get too disappointed if I were you," advised Valentine.
Noonan took a drag, coughed, and threw the cigarette down. "All the same," he said stubbornly. "It couldn't be ... Damn you scientists! Where do you get this disdain for man? Why do you constantly need to put him down?"
"Wait," said Valentine. "Listen. 'you ask: what makes man great?'" he quoted. "'Is it that he re-created nature? That he harnessed forces of almost-cosmic proportions? That in a brief time he has conquered the planet and opened a window onto the universe? No! It is that despite all this, he has survived, and intends to continue doing so.'"
There was silence. Noonan was thinking. "Maybe," he said uncertainly. "Of course, from that point of view ..."
"Don't get so upset," Valentine said kindly. "The picnic is only my hypothesis. And not even a hypothesis, really, but an impression. So-called serious xenologists try to justify interpretations that are much more respectable and flattering to human vanity. For example, that the Visit hasn't happened yet, that the real Visit is yet to come. Some higher intelligence came to Earth and left us containers with samples of their material culture. They expect us to study these samples and make a technological leap, enabling us to send back a signal indicating we're truly ready for contact. How's that?"
"That's much better," said Noonan. "I see that even among the scientists there are decent men."
"Or here's another one. The Visit did take place, but it is by non means over. We're actually in contact as we speak, we just don't know it. The aliens are holed up in the Zones and are carefully studying us, simultaneously preparing us for the 'time of cruel miracles.'"
- Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Roadside Picnic
- Michael Finkel, The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit
Wednesday, February 1, 2017
The rise of naked partisanship, increasing economic and regional stratification, the splintering of our media into a channel for every taste – all this makes this great sorting seem natural, even inevitable. And increasingly, we become so secure in our bubbles that we accept only information, whether true or not, that fits our opinions, instead of basing our opinions on the evidence that’s out there.”
- President Barack Obama's farewell address
Friday, July 8, 2016
- An Inspector Calls
Sunday, June 12, 2016
- Yeah, well, the problem with you liberals, you think you're the good guys, you think that gives you a pass to do random criminal acts, you know? Ooh, I-- I saved an owl, now I can go kill a baby.
- That seems like-- you must know that's not true.
- It's kind of an interesting thing, the way you guys define yourselves and each other. Liberal, conservative. How would you define a liberal? Like, to you, what is a liberal?
- Just P.C., fucking fake, animal rights, and gay agenda, always pushing the liberal agenda. They hate Christians and they hate white men. You know why? 'Cause they don't think it through. And they think they're better than everyone else and that they should tell everyone else how to think. They're just fucking assholes.
- Okay. How would you define a conservative?
- Uh, just Jesus everything and they hate gay people and racist but pretending they're not, and they're selfish and they only care about money and they think everyone has to do their conservative Christian shit.
- See, the fact that you start out by seeing each other like that, I mean, how could you possibly ever respect each other or agree on anything?
- Yeah, well, they do that, I don't.
- You just said you do. You just described us with a string of insults.
- Just like you did.
- Yeah--
- Okay, okay, okay. This is getting interesting. Now, you, define conservative.
- Conservative means values. Having values and sticking to 'em and defending what's right and not just saying what somebody said is right that year, you know what I mean? There's-- there's things in this world that are right and wrong and always have been. And you have to respect where this country came from, and you have to hold on to that. And the fact that country and God and life, those are all sacred things. And people should respect each other, and government is there to facilitate, all right? It's not there to control people. And the way you get the best out of people is to make room for their strengths, not by overcompensating for their weaknesses.
- Well, that sounds reasonable. That sounds like something most people can respect, right?
- Yeah.
- Now, define liberal.
- Just being open to things outside yourself, having your eyes open and thinking about others, and being aware that our planet is precious and we're responsible for that. And people need to listen to each other. And be decent and tolerant and that a diverse community is a strong community. And sometimes the little guy needs a hand. And we're a strong enough country to do that, and so we should.
- Okay, how's that sound?
- Sometimes, yeah. Yeah, okay.
- Yeah? So, if you start by taking his definition of himself and he starts with your definition of you, don't you stand a better chance, have a better shot at getting to some sort of consensus?
- Who said they want that?
- Well, that's another thing.
- They're not trying to reach an agreement. This is fucking sports.
- Hillary Clinton is a cunt, and I'm a liberal.
- Look, do you know how lucky we are to live in this country? You think this conversation is happening in a bar in any other country?
- God, I hope not.
- Give me a fucking break. This country is not that great. It's not even a democracy anymore.
- Then go live in Afghanistan, you got the fucking beard for it.
- You know what the sad thing is? This country has such potential. It's not a democracy, you're right. But it could be, tomorrow. If the people woke up, they could change the whole thing. The whole system's set up and waiting. It's just sitting there like exercise equipment, waiting to be touched while your fat ass watches TV. If everybody woke up tomorrow and said, "We're not gonna spend another fucking dollar "or cast another vote or fight another bullshit war until we get our fair share," that shit would change tomorrow. But it fucking won't, and the framers knew this. That's the sick part. They were sitting in their little room with their buckled shoes. And one of them, probably Jefferson, because he had the clearest head from blowing all his jizz on slave faces, said, "Hey, the way to control these people "is not to suppress them. That doesn't work anymore."
- That's right, that's what history shows us. Look at the French. Look at Cromwell. They knew that every time you give the control to the people, all of the control, they don't want it, they give it right back.
- Because they're fucking sheep.
- Those are Frenchmen.
- The reason the few and the rich control all the power is because the many poor and stupid let them. They're too afraid to try to succeed at anything, they want to dream about rich people and never be one. It's pathetic. And then you sit here doing your little "Punch and Judy" puppet show, as if it matters if you're a liberal and you're a conservative. You're both suckers.
Friday, June 19, 2015
Not objectify women less, but objectify men just as often as we objectify women. There are a lot of women who got careers out of it, and I’m using it to my advantage. And at the end of the day, our bodies are objects.
We’re just big bags of flesh and blood and meat and organs that God gives us to drive around."
- Chris Pratt
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Diane: Ultimately, perhaps every case is.
Reese: But isn't the law supposed to be impersonal? In the sense that it should be the same for everyone? You know, otherwise we're in China, right? Everything's determined by who you know.
Diane: The law is supposed to be fair. Not impersonal. In fact, I would argue that the law is always personal. It has to see the human side, too. Or else it's meaningless.
Reese: Hmm.
Diane: You're gonna fund this defense anyway, aren't you? The wedding planner?
Reese: Yes.
Diane: Why?
Reese: Three years ago, Barack Obama was against gay marriage. So was Bill Clinton. So was Hillary. You know, b-basically every Democratic icon was lined up against gay marriage. Now they're not. You know? Because it's politically expedient for them not to be. Who knows what they're gonna be for or against in another three years, right? I like people who stand by their opinions. I like people who stand by their beliefs. And I think a religious accommodation must be made for people who do that. You know? It's the right thing to do.
- The Good Wife
Sunday, May 10, 2015
- Frank Prady in The Good Wife
Monday, February 2, 2015
Accept it with pride
For you don’t count the dead
When God’s on your side
- Bob Dylan, With God On Our Side
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
Legal High
醍醐：……而且可信度高的目擊證詞還有很多。
古美門：哼！
醍醐：怎麼了？
古美門：也太多了吧！？一般情況下不可能有那麼多目擊者的。
醍醐：是老天有眼。
古美門：藤野真希子在准備晚飯的時候朝窗外望了望就看見安騰貴和從德永家的後門出來；川邊好美和往常一樣遛狗時偶然看見安藤貴和從德永家後門出來。都是在那個時間點正好看見安藤貴和從後門出來，那一帶難道有什麼條例規定大家每隔5分鐘都得朝德永家後門看一眼嗎？
醍醐：所有證人都堅信自己沒有看錯，很難讓人覺得那是偽證。
古美門：他們當然堅信了，即便從德永家後門出來的是《突擊 鄰居的晚餐》裡的桂米助看上去也一定是安藤貴和，因為大家都是這麼希望的，人們都會見自己想見聽自己想聽信自己想信的東西，檢察方不也是如此嗎？
醍醐：這是侮辱。
古美門：沒錯，確實是侮辱，因為你們不是出於證據而是為了順應民意起訴的。
醍醐：我們是人民的公僕，回應國民的期待是理所當然的！
古美門：即使是愚蠢國民愚蠢的期待你們也非回應不可嗎？
醍醐：愚蠢嗎？
古美門：是啊，愚蠢、醜陋又卑鄙。
醍醐：太傲慢無禮了。我認為這是一個了不起的國家，他們都是善良而驕傲的國民。
（審判長：請不要就與本案無關的話題爭辯。）
（判事：聽他們說說吧，這個議題挺深刻的。）
古美門：善良而驕傲的國民會在證據不足的情況下要求判被告人死刑嗎？
醍醐：本案中，如果被告人有罪，那極刑再合適不過，我國的極刑就是死刑。
古美門：生命是被賦予每個人的權利，奪人生命者，即便是國家也等同於殺人犯。
醍醐：真沒想到你是個主張廢除死刑的人。
古美門：不，我並不反對死刑，以牙還牙以眼還眼殺人償命，這個制度無可挑剔，我只是在說背地裡暗中處決的行徑實在是太卑鄙了。
醍醐：你是說要在光天化日之下殺了她嗎?
古美門：沒錯，在晴空下、鬧市中帶她游街示眾，把她綁在柱子上施以火刑，然後大家一人一刀將她捅死，梟首示眾再三呼萬歲，這樣更健全，但我們國家愚蠢的國民卻沒有讓自己成為殺人犯的覺悟，他們只會自己身在明處，等待著別人在暗中將她從社會中抹殺，因為這麼一來就不用再深入考慮死刑的問題，他們就會覺得這個世界是健全的，不是嗎？
醍醐：即便是這樣，那也是民意。
古美門：只要是民意，就是對的嗎？
醍醐：這就是民主主義。
古美門：要是把民主主義帶上法庭的話，司法就完了！
醍醐：真是這樣嗎？
古美門：這不是明擺著的嗎？
醍醐：真是迂腐啊！法律絕不是萬能的，彌補法律不足的是什麼？正是人心。因為犯罪的是人，裁決的也是人，順應大多數人的想法，使枯燥無味的法律充滿血性，才是人間正道，陪審員審判正是它的產物，本案中，人們作出的決斷，便是安藤貴和應當被處以死刑，為了他們深愛的家人、朋友、孩子們、健全的未來，這就是民意。
古美門：太精彩了，不愧是民意的代言人，醍醐檢察官，這番主張說得真是精彩。那好啊，那就判她死刑好了，安藤貴和確實是侵蝕社會的凶惡害蟲，必須加以驅除，因為下一個被她俘虜的可能就是你的丈夫，可能是你的戀人，可能是你的父親，也有可能是你的兒子，或者可能就是你自己！就判她死刑吧，雖然案發現場的目擊證詞真假未分，還是判她死刑吧；雖然沒有確切的證據能證明從被告人家中查出的毒藥就是犯案的毒藥，還是判她死刑吧；雖然有證詞表明現場掉有另外一個疑似毒藥的瓶子，都不用管，就判她死刑吧；證據證詞都無關緊要，誰讓她坐著高級進口車四處兜風，穿一身名牌每天吃著魚翅、肥鵝肝，所以判她死刑吧！這就是民意，這就是民主主義，多麼了不起的國家啊！民意就是對的，大家贊成的事全都是對的，那麼，大家使用暴力也無可厚非，群毆我的搭檔律師的事，因為是民意，所以也是對的。開什麼玩笑……開什麼玩笑！！！真正的惡魔，正是無限膨脹的民意，是堅信自己是善人、對落入陰溝的肮髒野狗進行群毆的善良的市民，但這世上，也有願意伸手援助那些落入陰溝的野狗的笨蛋，堅信自己的信念、不顧自身安危的笨蛋，托那個笨蛋的福，今天江上順子女士才得以擺脫民意的污流憑著自己的意志出庭作證，雖然可能只有江上女士一人，但這的確改變了民意，我為這個笨蛋，感到自豪。要是民意想判一個人死刑，那就判吧，因為說到底這一系列官司，不過就是一場以絞死討厭鬼為目的的國民運動，為了給自己無聊的人生消愁解悶的運動。沒錯吧，醍醐檢察官。你們五位到底是為了什麼坐在那裡的。如果民意可以決定一切，那就不需要這種拘泥於形式的建築和鄭重的手續，也不需要一臉傲慢的老頭子和老太婆，下判決的絕不是國民的調查問卷，而是我國學識淵博的你們五位，請你們秉承作為司法頂尖人士的信念進行判斷。拜托了！我的諸多無理，可能給各位帶來了不快，但這只是一個拜金討厭鬼坑爹律師的胡話，請全當它是耳邊風。
」
－Legal High 第二季第九集，人人影視翻譯
Friday, September 26, 2014