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Folding Your Hand

Re-reading the notes I wrote while reading Skin In The Game a few years I came across this, in response to something in the first chapter: Roman emperor charging into battle to face certain death is meaningful only in a setting of honor and institutions. It is folding your current hand so that the next guy that takes your seat will have a fresh start and a strong hand. It only works if your sacrifice, transmitted via the public, transfers to your successor. Without that the incentives are to … (Continued)

Thoughts on "A Bright Shining Lie"

After finishing About Face by David Hackworth, my friend Gary renewed his recommendation of A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan. (I ended up with a copy that appears to be the first paperback edition, printed in 1989, with a sticker in the front declaring it withdrawn from Bowdoin College Library. When I got the book it showed no signs of ever being read.) It was a very good book, and I both enjoyed reading it and learned quite a bit from its 790 pages. T … (Continued)

Is Facebook More Like Cigarettes or Alcohol?

It's becoming increasingly clear that infinite-scroll, algorithmic social media in its current incarnation is harmful to both the users that over-indulge, as well as countries filled with obsessive users. For an overview of some evidence, here's a snippet fron Jonathan Haidt's interview with Joe Rogan. If that piques your interest, his full interview with Rogan is worth a listen, as well as his 2019 article in the Atlantic about how social media is corroding our republic, or his 2015 article wit … (Continued)

Durable Connections

Listening to Moxie Marlinspike on JRE, around 1h39m: "In a sense, I'm glad those things [social media] exist, because they're sort of what we wanted, but I think we underestimated how important the medium is, like the medium is the message kinda thing. What we were doing at the time, of writing zines and sharing information, I don't think we understood how much that was predicated on actually building community, and actually building relationships with each other, and that just... what we didn' … (Continued)

Limitations and Humility

There is a type of humility, an admission of limitations, that is as rare as it's ever been on the internet. But for some reason, I'm finding it standing out to me more and more. It sounds something like, "Here's what I think I know, and here's how I know it, but if that turns out to be wrong, I stand corrected." Here's a real world example: InstaHide Disappointingly Wins Bell Labs Prize, 2nd Place. The core argument of the article is thus: InstaHide (a recent method that … (Continued)

Parable of Discovery

Imagine two people meeting for dinner at 6 at a restaurant neither of them has been to before. Harry is a busy man with a calendar full of meetings. Google Maps says it's a 27 minute drive to the restaurant. At 5:31 he gets in his car, starts up the navigation, and gets directions straight to the restaurant. On the way, he listens to his podcasts at 150% speed because he has so many of them to get through. Tom on the other hand knows the general area is about 30 minutes away from his house. He … (Continued)

Quiet to Think

Eric Hoffer insisted that everyone needed time to think while your body was otherwise occupied. He famously wrote The True Believer, published in 1951, while working his job as a longshoreman on the docks of San Francisco. Unloading ships, mowing the lawn, or walking, whatever you do, you need quiet to hear yourself think. Time to digest whatever you've ingested in your intellectual diet, combine it with news from the day, and distill new knowledge or wisdom, concrete ideas that you can use to … (Continued)

Contempt

A moment of contempt is like a cigarette. Each one is a buzz. But it's the accumulation of them that kills you.

Empty Mind

The only way to an empty mind is not to push everything else out and decree silence. It is only by being open to every thought and allowing them to arise until they slow to a trickle. This may take a while, but it is quicker than the other option which is unending.

Good Things In Bad Times

There is a strange irony of difficult times like the current moment, when everyone expects everyone else to be tense and short-tempered. The podcasts, newsletters, and smartphone notifications say the world is coming apart at the seams. People expect bad things to happen. The result is that the slightest moment of friendliness has a magnified effect. A smiling nod, holding the door for someone, a kind word of thanks to a stranger. It's so unexpected that people are warmly surprised by it. It's … (Continued)

Supersonic Baseballs

I'm not sure what you were planning to do with the next 24 minutes (16 if you watch at 1.5 speed like I do with most talking-heavy videos) of your life, but I have a good suggestion: Smarter Every Day's video about building a supersonic baseball cannon. This episode is actually fairly light on explaining the underlying science that is often a part of his other videos. There's more of than in the one-hour making of video. This video just mentions a few things in passing like Schlieren imaging an … (Continued)

The World We Were Promised, Part 2

When I set out to build this blog, it was deliberately a place to tinker. I already have one blog running on WordPress and there wasn't a "cool factor" to starting up another one. Why? Because WordPress is so old-fashioned. It's built in PHP, a programming language that is a few generations out of date and quirky. People who have other options would never choose to start a new project in PHP these days. There are just too many newer languages that are better-designed. Surely, then, someone has … (Continued)

Transitional Moments

I've come to the decision that there is nothing of intellectual substance that can be done in under two minutes, which is the amount of time I am most often looking to fill on my smartphone. At best, I can review things and eliminate the ones that don't need attention: emails I don't need to read, RSS reader posts I'm not interested in, notifications that don't require a response. But even those tasks only take a few seconds when the time comes to read email or RSS. So I haven& … (Continued)

Natural Endings

Meditations 6.1 Nature is pliable, obedient. And the logos that governs it has no reason to do evil. It knows no evil, does none, and causes harm to nothing. It dictates all beginnings and all endings. So long as the ending is natural, it cannot be evil. It is simply the symmetric ending to a beginning set in motion years ago.

Two Bushes

When we moved into our house, there were a number of bushes planted in various places by the builders. We pulled a few out because wanted to put other things there. Another one died on its own which was just fine with us. But the two bushes next to our back porch we actually liked quite a bit. In a few years when they're larger, they'll provide a nice bit of visual screening to the porch. But this spring, when things warmed up, they weren't growing very well. On a hunch, Steph cut a … (Continued)