Wisdom I Pondered This Week
- I contend that the best way to understand all the crazy beliefs out there — aliens, conspiracies, and all the rest — is to analyze them as crony beliefs. Beliefs that have been “hired” not for the legitimate purpose of accurately modeling the world, but rather for social and political kickbacks. As Steven Pinker says, “People are embraced or condemned according to their beliefs, so one function of the mind may be to hold beliefs that bring the belief-holder the greatest number of allies, protectors, or disciples, rather than beliefs that are most likely to be true.” In other words, just like Acme, the human brain has to strike an awkward balance between two different reward systems: (1) Meritocracy, where we monitor beliefs for accuracy out of fear that we’ll stumble by acting on a false belief; and (2) Cronyism, where we don’t care about accuracy so much as whether our beliefs make the right impressions on others. And so we can roughly (with caveats we’ll discuss in a moment) divide our beliefs into merit beliefs and crony beliefs. Both contribute to our bottom line — survival and reproduction — but they do so in different ways: merit beliefs by helping us navigate the world, crony beliefs by helping us look good.
- “There is a dynamic quality about enthusiasm which nothing can resist. You can see it in the street orator, whose whole heart is in his argument, swaying a crowd. You can feel it in the work of any artist—painter, writer, musician, or whatever he be—if he has put himself into the thing he has wrought in, felt it enough, suffered it enough. And the beginning of the year is a good time, it seems to me, to set about enkindling our enthusiasm afresh. For life is a dead thing without it. Make it woodwork, if our tastes lie in that direction; make it stamp collecting; make it anything in the wide world so long as it is alive and vital.” — A New Year Spirit, Woodworker Magazine (1938)
- “Success is not how high you have climbed, but how you make a positive difference to the world.” — Roy T. Bennett, The Light in the Heart
- “The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes within the souls of people when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that its center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” — Black Elk
- “The most important things are the hardest to say. They are the things you get ashamed of, because words diminish them — words shrink things that seemed limitless when they were in your head to no more than living size when they’re brought out. But it’s more than that, isn’t it? The most important things lie too close to wherever your secret heart is buried, like landmarks to a treasure your enemies would love to steal away. And you may make revelations that cost you dearly only to have people look at you in a funny way, not understanding what you’ve said at all, or why you thought it was so important that you almost cried while you were saying it. That’s the worst, I think. When the secret stays locked within not for want of a teller but for want of an understanding ear.” — Stephen King
Things I Learned This Week
- Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is an American multinational conglomerate holding company headquartered in Omaha, Nebraska.
- The Overton Window (奧弗頓之窗) is the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time. (指在某個政治氛圍中，公眾所能接受的政策，也就是說，政治對話的限度。一個政策可行性主要取決於它是否在這個範圍內，而不是政客的個人偏好。)
- A pet peeve (= pet aversion = pet hate) is a minor annoyance that an individual finds particularly irritating to a greater degree than the norm. For example, driving slowly in the fast lane, or talking during movies.
- A pastebin (= text storage site) is a type of online content-hosting service where users can store plain text. → (1) PrivateBin (2) GitHub Gists → allowing for pasting source code snippets for code review (3) Pastebin
- 黎巴嫩炸肉球 Kibbeh is a popular dish in the Levant (Middle East), based on spiced lean ground meat and bulgur wheat. It is considered to be a national dish of Syria and Lebanon.
