Sivers book notes

Travelling While Black - by Nanjala Nyabola

2026-04-20T04:00:00Z

summary:

Thoughts on human rights, race, gender, travel, inequality, tribe, home, visas, poverty, Kenya, Africa, and Bessie Head.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

First requirements before consider going somewhere: I only ask for a clean and safe hotel, an easy visa process, and a means to get there and back.

To survive, you depend on a foreign society’s hospitality.

When we move not out of choice, but out of necessity, we encounter other societies at their best or at their worst. Having an influx of people from disparate backgrounds show up at your border.

I became such an avid reader and writer to imagine all of these experiences that I couldn’t have in my real life.

Men imagine that a woman travelling solo is a declaration of sexual availability.

To give yourself over completely to another society - and its biases - challenges you to continue being fearless and turning up, or to walk away and return to your comfort zone.

The traveler depends not on power, but on motion, on a willingness to go into different worlds, use different idioms, understand a variety of disguises, masks, rhetorics. Travelers must suspend the claim of customary routine, in order to live in new rhythms and rituals.

Dislocation and exclusion gives you perspective on things that others may take for granted, and a deeper understanding of the fluidity and complexity of culture.

Language is a vector for a shared history.

It’s one thing to preach equality - it’s another thing altogether to shun privilege.

Would women accomplish if they didn’t have to spend so much energy learning how to survive men?

In Kenya, if you strip away the British Puritanism or the Islamic winds from the coast, there is a myriad of African identities jostling for dominance and survival.

People, when they learn that I am African, almost always assume that they have had a better life than I have. A black, African woman is almost always at the bottom of whatever constructed hierarchy of value a society has in place, and so I am more likely to be viewed as an object of pity.

Don’t ask, “How can I help?” Your presence clouds the conversation. It dangles an illusion of power that you don’t have.

Whatever fears you have in your normal life are only intensified by travel.

We consume information about each other and form stereotypes, not realising that they are doing the same to us.

Guidebooks are written with such certainty.

Privilege can insulate the traveller from consequences, but it can also make someone a lightning rod for unwanted attention.

The Instagram accounts of major international humanitarian organisations, where funds are raised: Black and brown subjects are photographed either struggling or in the process of receiving assistance. But for the places where these organisations work - the subjects are often photographed empowered or resolute. In the former, the photographs are a plea for help; in the latter, they offer an appearance of solidarity. They reduce a person’s entire life experience to a single moment for the purposes of raising money.

Europe has always been a violent place.

1990 Schengen Convention closed off all humane routes into Europe for citizens of these unwanted countries who could not meet the required thresholds.

When your options are certain death while standing still, versus a minute chance of success if you move, you will move.

Cities foster empathy, because they are by definition diverse and multifaceted, and understand intimately the importance of multiculturalism for enriching daily life.

People with a spiritual or intellectual disposition, constantly feeling like outsiders, are best placed to look at their societies. They can do it from a place of abstraction that makes their analysis sharper or clearer. Exiles cross borders, break barriers of thought and experience.

Some people find home in disconnection and transience. For some people, home is not a geography but a state of mind - it’s wherever they can do work that feels meaningful or useful. Writers recognise home isn’t a place, but is in the ever-changing community or fellowship of people who see the world the way you do, and find the words to describe it.

Editor at Random House tried to champion the African writer, but there was a sense that there could only be one.

The voice of men is often portrayed as neutral, while women’s voices are considered “special interest”.

Career writers are outsiders, comfortable with solitude and being misunderstood. Yet that compulsion to be seen and understood makes a person learn how to use language well. To lock yourself up in a room for 12-18 hours a day, weeks on end, speaking to nobody and committing words in the hopes that someone will resonate.

CBD in Johannesburg, Nairobi and elsewhere - abandoned after independence, when there was a mass exodus to nearby, newly built suburbs. Like Detroit and Cleveland, where formerly prosperous city centres have crumbled because that prosperity could not survive desegregation. They flourished because restricting non-white residents meant that economic resources could be focused on the white population. Once white people, who formerly represented the main tax base in an urban centre, leave for racially homogenous suburbs, cities shift their planning focus to those suburbs and deprive the formerly prosperous CBD of key resources.

South Africa economic system sees black foreigners as a threat, while white foreigners are seen as “investors”.

Kenya: as a British colony, colonialism was not uniform: Resistance from the coastal city-states that were never officially colonised.

If you are neutral in the face of oppression, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.

A foreigner is a person who lacks some fundamental right to make claims on the territory in which they are foreign.

A 2019 study of Canadian immigration data found that three of every four African students had had their student visa applications rejected, and that students from African countries were far more likely to experience this than those from any other region. The global average for rejection of Canadian student visas is only 39 per cent. Somalia and Mozambique had the highest level of rejections - 100 per cent of all Canadian student visa applications. Considering that each student visa application costs $160 in application fees and another $100 to provide biometrics, the Canadian government is raking in millions worldwide from African student visa applications that it knows it is going to reject

“Africa for beginners”: The implication is that Africa is hard, and you need to start off somewhere easy that won’t overwhelm you from the outset. When people call Nairobi “Africa for Beginners”, they mean all the upmarket places that have been deliberately packaged to be easy for outsiders, often to the exclusion of locals.

Something alien or “wrong” is more interesting than what we think is “normal” or “right”.

People who live in slums are not defined by their housing situation.

Only societies that have been through the violence of colonisation are put into the taxonomies of tribes. In themselves the colonisers saw “high societies” and organised politics. In the Other they saw chaotic brutes organised according to indiscernible, inferior clusters that they called the tribe. The term is riddled with the idea that this is something that lesser people do.

Swahili word for tribe is lugha or kabila. Lugha is the word for language. Kabila only came into popular use because ukabila for tribalism: “Wewe ni kabila gain?” - What tribe are you? - is something that a lot of Kenyans used to ask each other. But that changed after the 2007 election, because the question was followed by violence. Today, the question is loaded with the weight of this tragedy. Having the wrong surname at the wrong place during Kenya’s 2007–8 post-election violence left many people dead. In politically tense moments, a person’s name and the implications of ethnicity that come with it become critical.

Ethnicity is more important to the analyst than it is to the analysed. It’s a lens through which they can categorise. But doesn’t actually have as much explanatory power as the analysis claims.

As a woman, I got my tribe in Kenya. I inherit it from my father and I lose it as soon as I marry. I can’t pass it on to any children, unless they are intentional about carrying it forward.

Parklands, Nairobi: the heart of Nairobi’s Indian community. For a middle-class Kenyan, Parklands is the dream.

Asians in Kenya amount to about 1 per cent of the national population, but they are an economically powerful and highly visible minority.

Democratic Republic of Congo is in effect four countries - the Lingala, Kikongo, Kiswahili and Tshiluba regions. 600 languages within them, bound together by the absurdities of colonisation. It takes five hours to fly across the country at its widest point. Even its second and third largest cities are bigger than the capitals of most other African states.

Tribal - by Michael Morris

2026-04-16T04:00:00Z

summary:

I love cultural psychology. Great insights here, and examples of how change happens, on the personal level, cultural level, and even institutional level. American, but lived in Hong Kong for years and I appreciated his example of Singapore.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Older generation of scholars presumed that cultural landscapes were permanent fixtures. Psychology compared individual traits. These approaches reduced cultures to stable patterns - age-old institutions or fixed character traits. However cultural patterns - of societies and of individuals - are in flux. Generations develop new lifestyles through selective retention of their parents’ ways and heightened borrowing from other traditions. Individuals migrate more than ever but not always assimilating - instead, maintaining multiple cultural worldviews that they switched between situationally.

It was not simply collective institutions or individual psychologies that determined culture, but the interplay between them. Cultural institutions shape the individual’s mind, and the individual’s mind shapes cultural institutions. Culture and psyche are inexorably intertwined. This fusion of anthropology and psychology has produced a new science called “cultural psychology.”

Scholars study cultural groups - from clans to corporations to nations - investigating cognitive structures, social structures, biases, and behaviors. Cultural patterns are mutable and malleable. With the right tools, we can harness them. Like soccer coach Hiddink’s method of unlocking talent through selectively evoking and adjusting cultural patterns.

People tend to construe cultural patterns as unchangeable: “gun culture in Texas,” or “drug culture in Hollywood” or art “runs in the blood” of Italians. But people’s cultural conditioning and convictions change over time. We internalize new cultural identities and codes with every new community we join. Someone who joined the army or an ashram acquire a fresh identity and outlook.

People switch between their multiple cultural mindsets situationally. Cultural selves take turns.

If someone in your foraging band figured out how to dislodge coconuts from a tree, you would learn by watching, and soon the whole group would share the skill. In this way, groups living in different ecologies developed different pools of knowledge: different cultures. Surviving through sharing knowledge in these groups is tribal living.

We are tribal. Latin term tribus: the cultural and regional groups that made up ancient Rome. Only during the era of colonialist expansion did “tribe” take on pejorative connotations of primitivism. As anthropology developed, the tribe concept came to be used very broadly.

A culture evolves as some elements are learned and others are overlooked as the rising generation re-creates the society. Customs associated with success and status are more likely to be learned and passed on.

Three characters inside every person: Conformist seeks belonging and understanding. Contributor dreams of esteem and tribute. Traditionalist cherishes continuity. Once all three tribal instincts were in place, in the last hundred thousand years, our forebears began to thrive and to live in recognizably human ways.

Big brains evolved for mastery of the social environment, not mastery of the physical environment.

Social judgments are handled by different parts of the brain than judgments about the physical world.

Everyone in the group knows it. It’s what “we” do. It contributes to similarity within the in-group and distinctiveness from out-groups, heightening feelings of connection and loyalty. Because I know that they know it, I can anticipate their moves, and understand their intentions.

We are less alone than other primates because we carry around our peers in our heads. Continually reminded of what others in our group tend to do or think. We are kept company - and sometimes feel suffocated - by the steady stream of suggestions from our unconscious about what’s normal to think, normal to do, or normal to say in a situation.

The psychological processes of the peer instinct - attention to peers, mind reading, learning from observation, conformist motivations - are the underappreciated foundation of human culture. We internalize a cluster of peer codes for each cultural community we belong to. Those codes guide us toward socially safe actions. It’s why your mannerisms at church are different than at the gym. It’s why crypto investments go suddenly from boom to bust.

Lee Kuan Yew was impressed that British citizens abided the law because they believed that everyone else did too (the faith in “rule of law”). Lee believed that his fellow Singaporeans remembered the British rule-based approach. With the right cues, these memories could be reawakened. White cotton uniforms became the dress of all government officials. Lee also reinstated English as the language of government business. The changed sights and sounds cued the free port norms, backed by anti-corruption laws and role models of rectitude. Over time the change became contagious. There was less reason for merchants to offer bribes when they saw that their peers were no longer doing it. Within a decade, Singapore had become the “cleanest” business environment in the world.

People’s perceptions that “almost everybody does it” precipitate their own corrupt behaviors.

Peer instinct: the cue is presence of tribemates, or ambient signs of the tribe. Minor details in a setting that are diagnostic of a culture can trigger us, but it’s hard to recognize because it happens unconsciously. Signs of a tribe are powerfully evocative, but only for insiders to the culture.

I usually traced a person’s success or failure to character traits and credited or blamed the person accordingly. My Chinese friends tended to refer to more contextual pressures on the actor - whether from family, friends, or coworkers - and shared credit or blame with these groups surrounding the central figure.

In the early 1990s, psychology experiment evidence from outside of Western settings scarcely existed. Culture wasn’t considered to be relevant to basic processes like cognitive biases.

We interpret the same activity through different cultural lenses. Attributions of causality and the narratives that followed. This perception-warping power of cultures comes primarily from peer codes. The biggest difference was their perception of their peers’ beliefs. Differing views of peers accounted for their differing biases in explanations for behavior.

Code-switching among bilinguals: People told slightly different narratives and answered questions differently when interviewed in English as opposed to when interviewed in Japanese. Bicultural individuals switch automatically rather than deliberately. They would explain behavior in the Western way when that culture was cued and would explain behavior in the Eastern way when that culture was cued. Switching cultural frames reflexively without any awareness of the cues triggering them.

People can be fully at home in two or more cultures. Those who feel their two identities to be compatible tend to mesh with the cues of a setting (like chameleons). Those who feel identity conflict tend to resist the peer cues (like contrarians).

Preverbal infants are oblivious to race, but they prefer strangers who speak their mother’s language (and accent).

In Western societies, racial characteristics align with major cultural fault lines, but this is not true in much of the world. Skin color and facial features don’t reliably distinguish Russians from Ukrainians, Palestinians from Jews, or Hutus from Tutsis. Language and attire are the primary cues for tribes other than ethnic groups. For bankers, surfers, or hipsters, it’s how a person talks and dresses that marks them as one of the tribe and triggers in-group codes when interacting with them.

Lee Kuan Yew declared English the language of government in Singapore. He felt a language of the ethnic groups - Chinese, Malay, and Indian - would lend itself to favoritism, so better to use an external lingua franca.

Dress triggers peer codes: Army fatigues triggers military habits like discipline and obedience. Nurses who wear uniforms adhere to protocols more than non-uniformed nurses. EMTs uniforms cue shared frameworks and protocols that enable coordinated work. Undercover agents adopt the attire of the networks they infiltrate, and sometimes start to identify with the criminals they have been sent to spy upon.

Imagine that you are driving to a countryside inn. Your car’s navigation system suggests a path to your destination - a well-traveled route that most drivers take. But you prefer scenic back roads, or might try a shortcut. Now imagine you’re leading a convoy of wedding guests to the inn: You prefer a route that is certain and clearly understandable, so no one gets lost. Peer instinct prompts you toward paths that are normal or typical for your group. When we want to be original, we ignore its advice. But when we crave certainty and understandability, we tend to follow the peer-code path. Pressure heightens conformity.

Immigrants: if settled in a group from their heritage country, adhered more to the heritage-country customs.

Peer instinct: what most people do. Hero instinct: what the most respected people do. Contributing to a community requires noticing what behaviors its members approve and admire.

Altruism pays off because friends reciprocate in your hour of need. If members of a community evaluate each other’s behaviors, share these judgments with others, and treat people according to their reputations, then prosociality helps reproductive prospects and would be selected for.

We volunteer for service positions in our community to gain approval and respect. We work hard to make a name for ourselves in our fields as it “opens doors” for us professionally. We engage with others or avoid them based on their reputations.

To discern what the community admires and desires, it’s hard to learn by observing or asking each person. A handy shortcut is focusing on the behavior of those members with most status. Individuals with high status exemplify qualities that the community appreciates. They are beacons that show us paths to public approval.

Emulating heroes is why there’s clickbait about what CEOs eat for breakfast, wears boxers or briefs.

Instead of just motivation to act normally, we look for exemplary ways to contribute to the good of the group. Motivating our aspirations to gain skills, uphold ideals, and distinguish ourselves.

People hold noble ideals but don’t always live up to them. Ideals become buried in our minds under the clutter of everyday tasks and selfish concerns. Part of a minister’s role is to rouse people’s higher selves and lift their ideals to the fore of their minds.

Rituals reduce anxiety by asserting control over dangers. Funeral rites that assert control over death by ushering the deceased’s soul to the afterlife.

Tradition serves our need for continuity. Threats to tribal mortality: Changes can threaten the continuity of their tradition. Majority groups, who think of a country as “their land,” feel threatened by rising populations of minority cultures and immigrants. They respond defensively with rash efforts to lock in and defend their traditions.

“Undecided”s tend to gravitate toward the majority stance on an issue - they go with what the average believes.

Victorian photographs: grim expressions were a practical necessity. Portrait sitters used to say the word “prunes” to achieve the standard pressed-lip look. Photography was regarded as an ordeal best left to professionals. Kodak realized it needed to change the cultural assumptions around photography. It introduced a cheap, user-friendly camera as a loss-leader product. Kodak donated cameras to schools, Scout troops, and YMCAs to hook the youth. Taught tricks for evoking smiles: asking adults to say “cheese”. Americans began to see others smiling for the camera. Smiling became an acceptable practice, which gave more people license to try it, and this put more smiling photographs into circulation. Through this cycle of changed perceptions and changed behavior, smiling became the standard thing to do and then even the obvious thing to do. Nowadays we do it as a reflex, on autopilot.

A minority faction consistent in its views (e.g., several participants calling a shade of blue “green”) influences their peers. Their behavior prompts a third of participants to see the stimulus that way at least once. People “try out” alternative beliefs and practices suggested by peers, even if they are not sure that they will embrace them permanently.

In the book Private Truths, Public Lies: Considered peer perceptions in the fall of the Soviet Union - an event that caught most of its citizens by surprise. Why didn’t they see it coming? For decades, the Kremlin had repressed dissent. Citizens tended to praise the system in public even if they harbored doubts in private. Discontent known only through vague rumors, not covered in the news.

Street protests are called “demonstrations” because they reveal the prevalence of a belief otherwise unseen.

Society’s understanding of itself often lags behind progressive change in its members’ private attitudes, as attitudes are not directly observable. Many citizens are loath to express their liberalized attitudes in public, for fear of offending more traditional neighbors. But this reticence perpetuates the community’s inaccurate self-understanding and its exclusionary behavior.

For definitive social change, it’s not enough to change many individuals’ private attitudes about an issue. There also must be change in their perception of the societal consensus. Getting the public to recognize a consensus that they have long overlooked requires overcoming skepticism with multiple types of evidence.

Counterproductive support group: Month-long retreat for women with disordered eating at a spa-like setting in Europe. Did people’s eating habits change? Yes, she said, some of the bulimics became anorexic. ☺

To encourage a behavior, don’t emphasize how many people currently aren’t doing it. Political campaigns used to try to shame voters about low turnout: “Only one in three Americans voted in the last election.” But this message informs you that your peers are not bothering to vote - so why should you?

Hippocrates oath was not part of medical training for most centuries since. It was adopted in modern times once physicians sought to separate themselves from bloodletters and barbers and needed a distinguished ancestor. Medical societies appropriated the white lab coat of scientists around this time too.

Connections to the ancient past infuse an activity with meaning and legitimacy. Any history that we tell is very selective in its focus and thus never definitive. Official histories are strategic in what they include and what they elide. By emphasizing parts of the past that are analogous to their favored plan, leaders rationalize it as obligated by a binding precedent. Christianity spread through Europe by scheduling its holy days around prior pagan rituals (e.g., Christmas came at the time of Yule, and Easter incorporated the eggs of spring fertility rites). The US kept the red, white, and blue of the Union Jack. “My Country, ’Tis of Thee” followed the tune of “God Save the Queen”. “Star-Spangled Banner” followed a familiar drinking song.

Complaints of “cultural appropriation”: People guard their traditions vigilantly because, as we’ve seen, traditions are quite malleable and hence vulnerable. Cultural groups with less power over global media and discourse are particularly vulnerable to distortion of their tradition.

UNESCO was founded to recognize and preserve the world’s cultural heritage sites. But the problem is that UNESCO’s stamp puts a site on every tourist’s “bucket list.” Foot traffic is “ruining the ruins”. It saved decaying buildings but displaced their inhabitants, centuries-old homes becoming postcard shops. Residents don’t want to live in a theme park. Wealthy regimes succeed in lobbying for certification more often than poor nations, leading to a highly Eurocentric representation of the world’s cultural heritage.

Pace of life is encoded at many different cultural levels: in shared habits like a brisk walking speed, in collective ideals like administrative efficiency, in traditions like relying on public clocks. In other words, it involves peer codes, hero codes, and ancestor codes.

Bottom-up progression of change - from ordinary people’s daily habits to collective ideals shared in the media and finally to public traditions and institutions - is called a “grassroots” movement.

Abrupt institutional changes (independence and stiff anti-corruption laws) set the stage for the signaling of ideals. Lee Kuan Yew’s modeling of austerity and incorruptibility and then the triggering of “free port” habits (through English and white uniforms). These are top-down progressions from institutions to ideals to habits. This strategy is often called “shock therapy” because institutional change disrupts a group’s equilibrium, allowing for the coalescence of new ideals and habits.

If most nurses are women, we jump to the value judgment that most nurses should be women.

Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness - by Patrick House

2026-04-08T04:00:00Z

summary:

Using the story of Anna - the patient who laughed when the surgeon stimulated parts of her brain - the author looks at the subject of consciousness from 19 different angles, writing in slightly different styles. He used the format of another book I have notes on here, titled “Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei”. Some beautiful poetic writing here.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Dolphins or whales, which crawled back into water after a brief stint as hippos, saddened by how murky it was, used all the vocal tricks learned on land to re-create through echolocation and sonar, as much as possible, the range of visual distance the eyes granted.

Like life, the game of pinball is never won but, instead, can be lost less badly at some times than at others.

Zugunruhe, a German term, and translated it roughly, perhaps poetically, as “the anxiety felt by migratory birds prevented from migrating.”

Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music.

We took the motion required to predict the effects of our motions and internalized them in order to achieve thinking.

What about a caterpillar when it turns into a butterfly? When it is liquid goo during its metamorphosis, is it butterfly or caterpillar or what? The brain is never in exactly the same state. A child’s mind metamorphoses into an adult’s mind. It does not simply grow. From a purely biochemical point of view, the human brain thus is always comparable to metamorphic goo.

Your brain is spending gobs of stored metabolism keeping track of the walls and ceilings and their spatial arrangement specifically with respect to you, all so that you perceive a virtual reality with you at its center. What we see is not the object itself, but an evolved decoding of the parts of that object relevant to survival, not to the truth. A red pill is not red. A blue pill is not blue. They are the same color, which is to say that they are no color at all, to all but our eyes. What you experience are the brain’s deductions about the relevance of objects or a room’s layout to you, to your survival, and to your goals.

A cat one hundred feet away is not actually smaller than a cat nearby at your feet. Your brain simply chooses to depict it as smaller because things farther away are less likely to harm you.

A bit of electricity can cause a brain to experience movements, emotions, sensations, memories, urges: laughter with or without mirth, the feeling that the body is levitating or floating, vertigo, dissociation, the sensation of “falling flat”, blurred vision, nausea, sounds seeming “distant”, blurred or distorted faces, déjà vu, an inability to count, speak, read, name things, or breathe, a fleeting, transient depression.

If you look at castles built during the Crusades, you will find holes in the walls and may, at first, believe that these were made as places to shoot arrows from. They were not. When the castle was built, there was no free-standing scaffolding, so wood logs were driven between the stones until the next layer and another platform could be added. Then the wooden scaffolding was removed. Any explanation that the holes were constructed in order to shoot arrows from - despite how well suited they appear for the task, after the fact - is incorrect, and the lesson applies wholesale to castles as well as to all of biology. Many erroneous assumptions are likewise made when one looks at any modern mammalian brain and infers, hundreds of millions of years after its creation, purpose from function. Brains are not the product of a single evolutionary line with any kind of plan or reason but a Frankensteinian patchwork of error, theft, malformation, crookedness, accident, and chance.

Baghdad airport highway intuition: We’re driving along, and my driver, this enlisted man, this kid, slams on the brakes, cuts across the median, and heads back to Camp Victory. And I said “What happened?” And he said “I don’t know, something felt wrong.” He was very upset. We-were-going-to-die upset. I let him go for a while, and later I said, “What do you think it was?” He says, “There were no kids. We drive that same route every day at the same time and there are kids kicking around an old soccer ball, in that field, and today there were none. And that felt really dangerous to me. And thinking about it, it’s because the moms know when the bad guys have planted a roadside bomb, and they keep their kids away.”

Anytime one learns a new skill, that awareness fades into the background of the littler brain with practice. Intuition is the reasoned product of a lifetime of careful, metabolically expensive observation. Intuition works so well because the brain is predicting everything all the time. The ringing red bell of alarm was a mismatch in their observed statistics of how things should be.

Most of the brain’s neurons are devoted to prediction and feedback so that the brain can learn and update the validity of previous predictions.

“Elegance is refusal.” - Coco Chanel

Those interested in animal conservation have a bias toward “charismatic megafauna”.

The difference between biology and physics is the difference between dropping a pigeon and a bowling ball from high atop a tower.

If the goal of the brain is to predict, and prediction means silencing, do bodies disappear when their goal is done - when they’ve predicted everything? That can’t be right.

The way out of a whirlpool is not to swim against it but rather to give in and let it take you around a full loop to the top, upriver, but where escape is easiest.

“But no one knows for certain And so it’s all the same to me I think I’ll just let the mystery be” - Iris DeMent

Theories of how the brain works latch on to whatever complicated technology or idea exists at the time. Hence, we got steam-based theories of the brain in the eighteenth century, computational theories in the twentieth. It implies that no matter how complicated a discovery we make, nature has already both known and taken advantage of the phenomenon.

Why is it the case that there is not one kind of “what it is like” to be human?

Brain’s only output is the motor neuron, so consciousness must do only one thing well: Reduce the cost of movement by making the world appear simple and actable. Make movements more efficient through prediction of what movements will do based on everything that has been tried before.

Within every raw block of marble of considerable size and quality is a statue of the David just waiting for someone to come along and chip away the unnecessary bits. So, too, does a brain create a story of self. From this totality of incoming input we expertly carve out the relevance of light and sound and call it “seeing” and “hearing”.

She imagines how the men, who have never themselves met, might interact. She “endlessly considered in her mind, first each of them separately, then the two together.” Such conscious simulations help the human brain generalize similar features of objects, locations, or people without having to experience them in every possible situation. They act as a kind of educated practice and, as data from the results of the simulations accumulate in the mind, the results can be used for ever further simulations.

Stoics engaged in premeditation: prestudying bad future. We spend almost half of our waking thoughts reliving memories or planning for the future.

The act of reporting a thought also changes it.

Consciousness evolved because it is an incomparable playground for learning. Mind wandering is not random. It is purposeful, careful, and efficient.

A mouse, seconds after it is plucked from a maze, shows signs of neural activity as if it is replaying, at a rapid speed, and sometimes backward, pieces of the maze it just left.

A one-terabyte hard drive full of data weighs more than an empty one, but a monkey brain full of memories weighs no more than an empty one, and a conscious monkey brain no more than an unconscious one.

It is harder to create a robotic soccer fan than a robotic soccer player. It is harder to create a sex-enjoying robot than a sex robot.

Principles of simplicity, elegance, and beauty drive physicists.

People thought the sun revolved around the earth because it looked like it did. What would the sun’s arc in the sky be if the opposite of what it merely looked like were true? It would appear identical. Intuition alone could not distinguish which of the competing ideas was correct. Nothing about any theory of how the brain works tells us definitively how the feeling of subjectivity unfolds from its workings.

Most people cannot tickle themselves, but those with a tendency toward schizophrenia sometimes can.

Elephant in the Brain - by Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson

2026-03-30T04:00:00Z

summary:

You have hidden motives and subconscious incentives. You have two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason. Instititutions are even more worse at this. Many institutions are wasteful because they’re serving hidden purposes no one acknowledges. Great insights amongst some obvious statements.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

We are unaware of our deepest biological incentives. We are strangers to ourselves.

We act in our self-interest on hidden motives. While not to appear selfish - to look good while behaving badly.

Man always has two reasons for doing anything: a good reason and the real reason.

It’s easy for us to rationalize our own motives. When we make up stories about things outside our minds, we open ourselves up to fact-checking. People can argue with us: “Actually, that’s not what happened.” But when we make up stories about our own motives, it’s much harder for others to question us.

Social institutions behave as though they were designed to achieve other, unacknowledged goals. They say school teaches valuable skills and knowledge. Yet students don’t remember most of what they’re taught, and most of what they do remember isn’t very useful. Schools are structured in ways that actively interfere with the learning process. * The art scene isn’t just about appreciating beauty. It’s an excuse to affiliate with impressive people. * Education is about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed: stamped for the approval of employers. * Religion is about conspicuous public professions of belief that help bind groups together. … Many institutions waste wealth, resources, and human effort - largely for the purpose of showing off. They’re inefficient because they’re simultaneously serving purposes no one is eager to acknowledge.

Conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we’re ready to say to others.

Difference between cynicism and misanthropy: between thinking ill of human motives and thinking ill of humans.

Prestige is your “price” on the market for friendship and association. (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market) Price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly Highly prestigious people have many many would-be friends.

Norms suppress competition and promote cooperation. We hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good. The desire to skirt and subvert norms is one of the key reasons we deceive ourselves about our own intentions.

Egalitarianism is concerned with early warning signs of people who position themselves above others: dominating, bragging, ganging up, and otherwise attempting to control others’ behavior. Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. Groups need to create an incentive for good citizens to punish cheaters. Punish anyone who doesn’t punish others. For example, it’s unlawful to witness a crime without reporting it.

Anything that hampers enforcement will improve the odds of getting away with a crime.

Norm against selfish motives: Consider how awkward it is to answer certain questions by appealing to selfish motives. Why did you break up with your girlfriend? “I’m hoping to find someone better.” Why do you want to be a doctor? “It’s a prestigious job with great pay.” Why do you draw cartoons for the school paper? “I want people to like me.” There’s truth in all these answers, but we systematically avoid giving them, preferring instead to accentuate our higher, purer motives.

Discretion creates ready-made excuses or alibis. Skirting a norm instead of violating it outright. Prevents a norm violation from becoming full common knowledge, which makes it more difficult to prosecute. The pretext doesn’t need to fool everyone - just plausible enough to make people worry that other people might believe it. Smoke shops sell drug paraphernalia - pipes, bongs, vaporizers - as devices for “smoking tobacco”. Innuendo: drugs (“Do you like to party?”), euphemism: (“Want to come up and see my etchings?”)

We don’t just deceive others; we also deceive ourselves. Patients with the worst test results - who were judged the most at-risk of cholesterol-related health problems - were most likely to misremember their test results, and they remembered their results as better (i.e., healthier) than they actually were.

There’s no value in sabotaging yourself per se. The value lies in convincing other players that you’ve sabotaged yourself. It’s never useful to have secret gaps in your knowledge, or to adopt false beliefs that you keep entirely to yourself. The entire value of strategic ignorance and related phenomena lies in the way others act when they believe that you’re ignorant. Ignorance is at its most useful when it is most public. When you’re playing against an opponent who can take your mental state into account.

We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. The best way to convince others that we believe something is to actually believe it. Wear a mask long enough and it becomes your face. Play a role long enough and it becomes who you are. Spend enough time pretending something is true and you might as well believe it.

“I’m doing this no matter what,” says the Madman, “so stay outta my way!” When we commit ourselves to a particular course of action, it often changes the incentives for other players.

We measure loyalty in our relationships by the degree to which a belief is irrational or unwarranted by the evidence. When someone remains committed despite a strong temptation to defect. It only demonstrates loyalty to believe something that we wouldn’t have reason to believe unless we were loyal.

Self-discretion is our mental habit of giving less psychological prominence to potentially damaging information. Discretion among different brain parts: When part of the brain has to process a sensitive piece of information - wanting to get the upper hand in a particular interaction, for example - it doesn’t necessarily make a big conscious fuss about it. Instead, we might just feel vaguely uneasy until we’ve gained the upper hand, whereupon we’ll feel comfortable ending the conversation. It can threaten our self-image and therefore our social image.

We don’t have privileged access to the information and decision-making that goes on inside our minds. We think we’re good at introspection, but that’s an illusion. We’re like outsiders within our own minds.

One of the most effective ways to rationalize is telling half-truths. We cherry-pick our most acceptable, prosocial reasons while concealing the uglier ones.

Listeners prefer speakers who can impress them wherever a conversation happens to lead, rather than speakers who steer conversations to specific topics where they already know what to say.

Prestige is synonymous with “one’s value as an ally.”

Academics are motivated to produce research for prestige, rather than the underlying value of the research. When articles previously published in a journal were resubmitted soon afterward with new obscure names and institutions, only 10 percent of them were noticed as having been published before, and of the remaining 90 percent, only 10 percent were accepted under the new names.

People often claim not to be influenced by a particular piece of media, yet believe that other people will be influenced.

Art is anything “made special”: not functional or practical, but for human attention and enjoyment. In the fitness-display theory, art is largely a statement about the artist, a proof of his or her virtuosity. If a work of art was made too easily (like if a painting was copied from a photograph), we’re likely to judge it as much less valuable than a work that required greater skill to produce. Consumers appreciate the same artwork less when they’re told it was made by multiple artists instead of a single artist - because they’re assessing the work by how much effort went into it.

Contemplate the idea of a hypothetical “replica museum” - a gallery stocked entirely with copies of the world’s masterpieces - indistinguishable from the originals.

A sculpture looks like a seashell. It might actually be a seashell. Did she just pick it up off the beach, or did she somehow make it herself? This question is now absolutely central to your appreciation of this “sculpture.” If she found it on the beach: meh. If she made it by manually chiseling it out of marble: whoa!

We prize originality and spurn works that are too derivative, however pleasing they might otherwise be to our senses or intellect. It makes a world of difference in gauging the artist’s skill, effort, and creativity.

The fundamental challenge facing artists is to demonstrate their fitness by making somethingthat lower-fitness competitors could not make. Hence the appeal of constraints in a given art form. Poets who adhere to strict meter and rhyme schemes prevent themselves from using words that don’t fit. Sculptors who work with marble don’t allow themselves to patch up their mistakes with putty or glue. Those constraints allow their talents to shine.

Artists advertise their survival surplus by doing something that serves no concrete survival function.

The bunker reflects a kind of desperation of an animal worried about its survival, rather than the easy assurance of an animal with more resources than it knows what to do with.

We need to consume a lot of art to calibrate our judgments, to learn which things are high status. An unrefined palate won’t appreciate a Michelin-starred restaurant. An untrained ear can’t appreciate the genius of Bach. Discernment becomes important not only for differentiating high quality from low quality (and good artists from mediocre ones), but also as a fitness display unto itself.

Factors that influence our charitable behavior: We give more when we’re being watched. We prefer to help people locally rather than globally. We give more when the people we help are identifiable (via faces and/or stories).

Charities bracket donations into tiers and advertise only which tier a given donor falls into. Someone who gives between $500 and $999 might be called a “friend” or “silver sponsor,” while someone who gives between $1,000 and $1,999 might be called a “patron” or “gold sponsor.” If you donate $900, then, you’ll earn the same label as someone who donates only $500. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of donations to such campaigns fall exactly at the lower end of each tier. Put another way: few people give more than they’ll be recognized for.

Charity solicitation works: People donate when they’re asked for money, especially by friends, neighbors, and loved ones. People seldom initiate donations on their own. Up to 95 percent of all donations are given in response to a solicitation.

In charity, we privilege our fellow citizens over people in foreign countries. For most people, the “warm fuzzies” just aren’t enough. We also want to be seen as charitable. Conspicuous compassion: motivated to appear generous, not simply to be generous. Spontaneous, almost involuntary concern for the welfare of others.

Charity subconscious motivation: “See how easily I’m moved to help others? When people near me are suffering, I can’t help wanting to make their situation better; it’s just who I am.” This is a profoundly useful trait to advertise. It means you’ll make a great ally.

People donate opportunistically. Most donors don’t sketch out a giving strategy and follow through as though it were a business plan. Instead we tend to donate spontaneously.

Empathy focuses our attention on single individuals, leading us to become both parochial and insensitive to scale. The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep. If only we could be moved more by our heads than our hearts, we could do a lot more good.

Which kind of people are likely to make better friends, coworkers, and spouses? “Calculators” who manage their generosity with a spreadsheet? “Emoters” who simply can’t help being moved to help people right in front of them?

One such unsung activity is giving to people in the far future. Instead of donating money now, we might put it in a trust and let the magic of compound interest work for 50 or 500 years, stipulating how it should be put to use after it’s grown to a much larger size. Helping people in the far future doesn’t showcase our empathy or prosocial orientation. We’re rewarded (by our peers) for giving in the here and now, to people who are part of our local communities. There’s something suspect about wanting to help people who are too remote in space or time.

While we profess many noble reasons for our behavior, other less-noble motives usually lurk in the background. We need ideals to let ourselves be judged. Promising to behave well (and in staking our reputation on that promise) incentivizes us to behave better than if we refused to be held to any standard.

Design institutions to account for hidden motives. Institution designers must identify both the surface goals to which people give lip service and the hidden goals that people are also trying to achieve.

China in Ten Words - by Yu Hua 余华

2026-03-14T04:00:00Z

summary:

Famous fiction author. I loved the movie from his book “To Live”. Memoir of growing up in China filtered through ten topics. Sometimes it’s cultural insights, but sometimes just his personal stories. Deep insights on “copycat” and “bamboozle”. Note those words are rough English translations of the real Chinese words he’s discussing.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

Nothing is so likely to forge a connection between people as pain. When in this book I write of China’s pain, I am registering my pain too, because China’s pain is mine.

We survive in adversity and perish in ease and comfort. Adversity enhances our endurance, while ease and comfort tend to hasten our demise.

In the short space of thirty years, a China ruled by politics has transformed itself into a China where money is king. Political passions that had accumulated since the Cultural Revolution finally expended themselves completely in one fell swoop, to be replaced by a passion for getting rich. When everyone united in the urge to make money, the economic surge of the 1990s was the natural outcome.

During the Cultural Revolution, the definition of “the people” was workers, peasants, soldiers, scholars, shop clerks. Now the expression “the people” has been denuded of meaning.

What other political figure would make a point of waving to his people in a swimsuit? Only Mao.

The word that has lost the most value the fastest during the past thirty years is “leader.” In today’s China we no longer have a leader - all we have is a leadership.

During the Dragon Boat Festival of 2009 the following text message began to circulate: « New China News Agency, May 28: The Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully cloned Mao Zedong. The clone’s physical indicators match those of Mao in his prime. This announcement has elicited a powerful reaction internationally. President Obama has declared that within three days the United States will repeal the Taiwan Relations Act and withdraw all military forces stationed in Asia. The prime minister of Japan has ordered the demolition of the Yasukuni Shrine, acknowledged that the Senkaku Islands are Chinese territory, and approved reparations for the 1937 invasion of China to the tune of 13 trillion dollars. The European Union has lifted its ban on arms sales to China. Russia’s President Medvedev has conceded China’s claim to a million square miles in eastern Siberia. Mongolia has signaled to the United Nations that it has always been part of China. Taiwan’s President Ma Ying-jeou has promised to abide by all arrangements proposed by the mainland regarding reunification and has applied to be a scholar at the National Archives. North Korean leader Kim Jong-il has sent instructions to his representative at the Six Party Talks to handle things according to Chairman Mao’s directives. There has been a rapid turnaround in domestic affairs: In just twenty-four hours officials from the county level and up have returned their ill-gotten gains, to the tune of 980 trillion yuan. Privately run businesses have converted to public ownership. 25 million sex hostesses have become honest women overnight. The stock market has soared. House prices have declined by 60 percent. The Chinese people once more are singing the anthem of the age: “The east is red, the sun is rising, / China has brought forth another Mao Zedong.” »

Although life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles. Today survival is like war. The strong prey on the weak, people enrich themselves through brute force and deception, and the meek and humble suffer while the bold and unscrupulous flourish.

Mao Zedong Thought has not perished. His ideas retain their vitality like seeds planted in receptive soil.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao’s poems were put to music. His quotations were sung by adults and children. Mao’s poems and quotations were everywhere. In our daily encounters with Mao’s pronouncements, the most ordinary things would take on weighty meaning. As we got ready for bed, on our pillowcases we would read “Never forget class struggle” and, on our sheets, “Advance bravely through wind and waves.”

“Chairman Mao is at our side,” people used to say, and I believed that, too. I was certain he’d be happy if I did something good and disappointed if I did something bad.

If it had been just a few people weeping, I would certainly have felt sad, but a thousand people all weeping at the same time simply struck me as funny.

One day when I noticed a poster with a cartoon. My reading had finally discovered another new continent.

You may start off with an advantage, only to box yourself in over time, or sometimes you may start with a handicap, only to find it carries you a long way.

Writing enables me to claim ownership of two lives, one imaginary and one real, and the relationship between them is like that between sickness and health: when one is strong, the other is bound to fall into decline. So, as my real life becomes more routine, my imaginary life is all the more brimming with incident.

My experience of growing up consisted largely of revolution.

When society undergoes a drastic shift, an extremely repressed era soon becomes a very lax one.

China’s high-speed economic growth seems to have changed everything in the blink of an eye, rather like a long jump that let us leap from an era of material shortages into an era of extravagance and waste, from an era when instincts are repressed into an era of impulsive self-indulgence.

One of Mao Zedong’s remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution: “We should support whatever the enemy opposes, and oppose whatever the enemy supports.” The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the enemy was always wrong and we were always right. Nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: “A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it’s black or white.” In so saying, he overturned Mao’s system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist. So China moved from Mao Zedong’s monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping’s polychrome era of economics above all.

She said, “Money is not the sole criterion for judging happiness.” I said, “If you are someone with an annual income of only 800 yuan, you will earn a lot of respect for saying what you did, but you’re not.”

The Rich List is popularly known as the Pigs-for-Slaughter List. In China there’s a saying: “People fear getting famous just as pigs fear getting fat.” Reflecting the observation that fame invites a fall just as a fattened pig invites the butcher.

“Copycat” (in Chinese) originally denoted a mountain hamlet protected by a stockade or other fortifications. It was also a name once given to the lairs of outlaws and bandits, and the word has continued to have connotations of freedom from official control. “Copycat” has more of an anarchist spirit than any other word in the contemporary Chinese language.

As the copycat concept has gained acceptance, plagiarism, piracy, burlesque, parody, slander, and other actions originally seen as vulgar or illegal have been given a reason to exist. And in social psychology and public opinion they have gradually acquired respectability.

In China today, in some spheres there is still a lack of freedom, while in others there is so much freedom it’s hard to believe. More than twenty years ago I could say whatever came into my head when I was interviewed by a journalist, but the interview would undergo strict review and be drastically edited before publication. Ten years ago I began to be more circumspect in interviews, because I discovered that newspapers would report everything I said, even my swear words. Now I am often amazed to read interviews I have never given - remarks that the reporter has simply concocted, a gushing stream of drivel attributed to me.

“That was a copycat.” That is our reality today: you may have done something illegal or unconscionable, but as long as you justify yourself with some kind of copycat explanation, your action becomes legitimate and aboveboard in the courtroom of public opinion.

When in 1966 Mao Zedong proclaimed, “To rebel is justified,” it triggered a release of revolutionary instincts among the weaker segments of society, and they rebelled with a passion. Everywhere they rose up against those in positions of authority. Traditional Communist Party committees and state organizations totally collapsed, and copycat leadership bodies sprouted up all over the place. All you needed to do was to get some people to back you, and overnight you could establish a rebel headquarters and proclaim yourself its commander-in-chief.

Notice the parallel between the sudden appearance of myriad rebel headquarters at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution and the rapid emergence of the private economy. In the 1980s, Chinese people replaced their passion for revolution with a passion for making money, and all at once there was an abundance of private businesses. Just as the copycat challenges the standard, so too the private sector assailed the monopoly status of the state-owned economy. Innumerable businesses soon went belly-up, only for countless others to take their places. China’s economic miracle was launched in just this way. Through its continual cycles of ruin and rebirth the private sector demonstrated its enormous capacity for survival, at the same time forcing ossified, conservative state enterprises to adapt to the cutthroat competition of the marketplace.

“Copycat” took on a rich new range of meanings, it has suddenly brought into view all manner of things that have been churning below the surface during these years of hectic development. Copycat: that is the name they have all adopted.

Barefoot doctors were an invention of the Mao era: peasants with a smattering of education were shown how to perform routine medical procedures and then sent back home with a medical kit on their backs. Why were they called barefoot doctors? Because for them practicing medicine was just a sideline activity; their basic work remained going out to the fields and laboring in their bare feet. When peasants around them came down with some minor injury or illness, they would be in a position to provide basic treatment on the spot.

I used to be a copycat dentist.

Bamboozle: to mislead. Hyping things up and laying it on thick. Playing a con trick and ripping somebody off. A social propensity toward chicanery, pranks, and other shenanigans. Once these words with negative connotations took shelter under bamboozlement’s wing, they suddenly acquired a neutral status. “Bamboozle” throws a cloak of respectability over deception.

Copycat phenomenon emerged in collectivist fashion, like bamboo shoots springing up after spring rain. “Bamboozle” immediately took the nation by storm. Like a rock stirring up a tidal wave it triggered a tsunami-style reaction as phenomena long existent in Chinese society - boasting and exaggerating, puffery and bluster, mendacity and casuistry, flippancy and mischief - acquired greater energy and rose to new heights.

Chinese homily: “The timid die of hunger, the bold of overeating.”

Maintenance of Everything, part one - by Stewart Brand

2026-03-03T05:00:00Z

summary:

Because I loved his book “How Buildings Learn”, I expected a more philosophical look at maintenance, but it’s mostly a deep dive into a few specific examples of boats, guns, and cars.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

“Maintenance” means the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.

Maintenance is what keeps everything going. Every living thing spends time maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on: bodies, vehicles, homes, cities. Everything is nested in something larger, even more worth maintaining.

The necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually.

When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.

My boat is (like) new every day.

A large part of maintenance is routine inspection. Fix something when you first see it beginning to fail.

Prepare for the worst.

Read “Shop Class as Soulcraft” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.

Work back from the visible part of the problem to the issues hidden behind it.

Ensure the problem goes away and stays away.

A noteworthy fix is a detective story.

Maintenance is frustrating. That’s what makes it interesting. Inspect the aggravation itself. When you’re baffled, your current theories aren’t working, so empty your mind of them.

Conquer the gumption trap of value rigidity. (“an inability to revalue what one sees because of the commitment to previous values”)

If you can't think that way, just fake it. Pretending to be open-minded can work well enough to reward you into gradually developing the real thing.

Allow what seems like an excess of time for your tasks, because things almost always take longer than expected.

Tidiness, like cleanliness, is a social signal - as much to yourself as to others. It's visible evidence that something is respected.

Write down every step of the disassmbly process with reassembly in mind.

Understand how it works, and how it's made.

Anything he looked at, he’d mentally dismantle then reassemble before trusting it.

To take proper ownership of something, study its manual. There are usually two manuals: the one from the manufacturer, and the 3rd party one that goes deeper and wider.

Swiss Environmental Action Foundation has a great book “Dry Stone Walls” that teaches the principles of the craft. It applies metaphorically to anything that has to hold itself together: a poem, a theory, a software program. Gravity plus friction.

Never paint rust.

The most active frontiers of maintenance are manufacturing, aerospace, software, and the military.

Design process: 1. Question every requirement. 2. Delete any part or process you can. If you don't have to add back 10% of them later, you didn't delete enough. 3. Simplify and optimize, only after step 2. 4. Accelerate cycle time, only after step 2 and 3. 5. Automate only after all other steps.

You’re Not Listening - by Kate Murphy

2026-02-25T05:00:00Z

summary:

Being a great listener when people speak. Deep insights about understanding, connection, helping people express themselves, overcoming assumptions, the ethics of gossip, and more. Specific techniques for the support response, encouraging elaboration, and keeping it balanced. You can’t be ethical without being a good listener. When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.”

recommend: 9/10

my notes:

Toastmasters can perfect your public speaking, but there’s no comparable training of listening.

Listening goes beyond just hearing what people say. It’s also paying attention to how they say it and what they do while they are saying it.

Listening has to do with how you respond - the degree to which you elicit clear expression of another person’s thoughts.

Lonely people have no one with whom to share their thoughts and feelings. They have no one who shares thoughts and feelings with them.

Listening plugs you into life. Our desire to have our brains sync, or to connect, with another person is basic and starts at birth. We are all “waiting for it.” It’s how we find friends, create partnerships, advance ideas, and fall in love.

Our ability to listen and connect with people as adults is shaped by how well our parents listened and connected with us as children. Insecure anxious attachment style people are concerned about losing people’s attention and affection. Can lead them to be overly dramatic, boastful, or clingy.

To listen well is to figure out what’s on someone’s mind and demonstrate that you care enough to want to know.

If you have someone in your life who listens to you and who you feel connected to, then the safer you feel. Stepping out in the world and interacting with others: You know you will be okay if you hear something or find out things that upset you because you have someone, somewhere, you can confide in and who will relieve your distress. It’s called having a secure base, and it’s a bulwark against loneliness.

Everybody is interesting if you ask the right questions. If someone is dull or uninteresting, it’s on you.

Uncertainty makes us feel most alive. Events that shake you out of your rote existence: you feel more fully engaged. Your senses are sharper. You notice more. You get a greater surge of pleasure from chance encounters with people than planned meetings.

Listening for things you have in common and gradually building rapport is the way to engage with anyone.

Interrogation doesn’t work. Peppering people with appraising and personal questions like “What do you do for a living?” or “What part of town do you live in?” or “What school did you go to?” or “Are you married?” is interrogating. It makes people reflexively defensive and will likely shift the conversation into the superficial. Prying is the quickest way to lose someone’s confidence.

Assumptions are earplugs. People in long-term relationships tend to lose their curiosity for each other. Convinced they know each other better than they do. They don’t listen because they think they already know what the other person will say. Close friends also overestimated how well they grasped each other’s meaning. The understanding, ‘What I know is different from what you know,’ is essential for effective communication to occur. Opinions, attitudes, and beliefs change. If you stop listening, you will eventually lose your grasp of who they are and how to relate to them. Relying on the past to understand someone in the present is doomed to failure. How long would you want to stay with someone who insisted on treating you as if you were the same person you were the day you two met?

A happy marriage is a long conversation that always seems too short.

People confided their most pressing and worrisome concerns to people with whom they had weaker ties, even people they encountered by chance, rather than to those they had previously said were closest to them. They avoid telling the people in their innermost circle because they fear unkindness, judgment, blowback, or drama.

We can never really know another person’s mind.

We unconsciously create file folders in our heads into which we drop people, usually before they even start talking. That makes us jump to conclusions about people before we know who they really are. Our unconscious drive to categorize and the inherent difficulty of imagining realities we have not experienced ourselves. Everyone has a singular experience that separates them from everyone else who shares that label. What you know is a persona and not a person, and there’s a big difference. There’s more than you can imagine below the surface.

When people feel insecure or isolated, they tend to overdramatize and espouse more extreme views to get attention.

In dating situations, people may be reluctant to give their surnames upon meeting someone new, fearing that person will do the digital equivalent of going through their dresser drawers instead of getting to know them more organically. Divulging your last name is now seen as a significant turning point in the relationship. The delay reflects a yearning to be known more deeply and individually first; to not be judged by posts, tweets, and other signals.

People want the sense you get why they are telling you the story, what it means to them, not so much that you know the details of the story. You are the detective, always asking, “Why is this person telling me this?” understanding that speakers sometimes may not know the answer themselves. Good listeners help speakers figure that out by asking questions and encouraging elaboration. People rarely tell you something unless it means something to them. It comes to mind and out of their mouths because it begging for a reaction. A man always has two reasons for what he does - a good one, and the real one.

When someone else talks, we take mental side trips. We get too absorbed in our musings, diverting our attention just a little too long, only to return to the conversation somewhat behind. Smart people are often worse listeners because they come up with more alternative things to think about and are more likely to assume that they already know what the person is going to say. The use, or misuse, of this spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person can concentrate on the spoken word. To be a good listener means using your available bandwidth to double down on your efforts to understand and intuit what someone is saying. Continually ask yourself what their motivations are for telling you whatever they are telling you. You don’t need to worry what to say next.

Getting to know another person well enough to laugh. To have an inside joke, to be able to make someone smile even when that person is mad at you, to have license to let down your guard and be silly, requires the investment of listening. You have to listen to them long enough to be able to repeat back something they said and put a funny twist on it and also to know what the lines are that you’d better not cross. Think who can make you burst out laughing, it’s usually your closest confidants. That’s because you feel free enough to let loose with them but also because the things that are the funniest to us are often the most personal.

We listen like a game of catch with a lump of clay. Each person catches it and molds it with their perceptions before tossing it back.

Remember more of what people say: Precursor to empathy, which requires you to summon emotions felt and learned in previous interactions and apply them to subsequent situations.

Conversational sensitivity: picking up hidden meanings and nuances in tone. You can’t be good at detecting intricate cues in conversation if you haven’t listened to a lot of people. Intuition is nothing more than recognition. The more people you listen to, the more aspects of humanity you will recognize, and the better your gut instinct will be. It’s a practiced skill that depends on exposure to a wide range of opinions, attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.

When people feel known and appreciated, they are more willing to share.

We often miss lies, as well as truths, because when someone says something that doesn’t make sense, we don’t stop the conversation and say, “Wait. Back up. I don’t understand.” People shrug and move on because it doesn’t seem worth the trouble or they think they can guess what the other person meant. Assume everything is relevant. If something doesn’t quite make sense to you, pay attention. “I’m not a better listener, but if I hear something I don’t understand, I ask about it.”

Misunderstandings, like differences of opinion, are valuable reminders that others are not like us. We incorrectly assume other people’s logic and motivations resemble our own. Misunderstandings are an opportunity. They are an inspiration, and invitation to listen more closely and inquire more deeply.

Miles Davis: “If you understood everything I said, you’d be me.”

The self generates conversations with itself by taking the perspective of another. An example is an athlete who might internalize the voice of a coach. Listening to others determines the tone and quality of our inner dialogues. The more people you listen to in the course of your life, the more sides to an issue you can argue in your head and the more solutions you can imagine.

Ray Bradbury responded that his morning ritual was to lie in bed and listen to the voices in his head. “I call it my morning theater. My characters talk to one another, and when it reaches a certain pitch of excitement, I jump out of bed and run and trap them before they are gone.”

Our inner voices are influenced by the voices we regularly hear in the media. This is important because your inner voice influences how you ponder things, interpret situations, make moral judgments, and solve problems. Whether you see the best or worst in people or yourself. Your inner voice: if it can’t get your attention during the day, it will roust you at 4:00 a.m.

Cognitive behavioral therapy is all about learning how to talk to yourself differently. An unhelpful inner voice is replaced by kinder or more open one.

By recording and transcribing more than a hundred informal dinner conversations, he identified two kinds of responses. More common was the shift response, which directs attention away from the speaker and toward the respondent. Less common was the support response, which encourages elaboration from the speaker. Shift responses are symptomatic of conversational narcissism. Shift responses are usually self-referential.

I asked him, “What made you decide to become a sociologist?” Becker’s face contorted as if he’d just smelled something dreadful. “You’re assuming it was a decision. Better to ask, ‘How did it happen that you became a sociologist?’”

He now divides his time between homes in San Francisco and Paris. The shuffle between cultures and languages keeps him from getting complacent about what he knows.

Negative emotions are louder. We’re five times more upset by negative interactions than made happy by positive interactions.

Squelch the impulses to: * suggest you know how someone feels * identify the cause of the problem * tell someone what to do about the problem People usually aren’t looking for solutions from you anyway; they just want a sounding board. You shut people down when you start telling them what they should do or how they should feel. No matter how good your intentions. When people tell you how you feel or what you should do, it makes you defensive. We start defending the indefensible.

Open and honest questions don’t have a hidden agenda of fixing, saving, advising, or correcting. Open questions allow people to tell their stories, express their realities, and find the resources within themselves to figure out how they feel about a problem and decide on next steps.

Good listeners are good questioners, because you have to listen to ask an appropriate and relevant question.

Many journalists prefer telephone to in-person interviews so they don’t get biased or distracted by the other person’s appearance or nonverbal tics. It’s the same idea behind the confessional booth in the Roman Catholic Church. It makes people less self-conscious and encourage a more open and honest exchange.

Japan saying: “The silent man is the best to listen to.”

Gossip is defined as at least two people talking about someone who is absent. Gossip allows us to judge who is trustworthy, who we want to emulate, how much we can get away with, and who are likely allies or adversaries. Listening to gossip contributes to our development as ethical, moral members of society. We are socialized by the gossip we hear from our families, friends, colleagues, teachers, and religious leaders. The Jesus parables and Buddha stories are recorded gossip. The more shocked or upset you are by gossip, the more likely it is that you’ll learn a lesson from it. Of course, you are also likely to reform if you are the subject of gossip. Organizations that allow their members to gossip will be more cooperative and deter selfishness better than those that don’t.

Social dynamics change rapidly and are incredibly complicated. Trying to understand this complexity is extremely challenging. That’s why we’re so interested in listening to and examining lots and lots of examples to try to understand how the game is played.

Listening it is in itself a virtue that makes us worthy of the most valuable information. Integrity and character develop by choices. This includes to whom and how well you choose to listen.

Ethical behavior requires that you take into account how your words and actions affect others. You can’t get a sense of that without listening.

Individualism: when no sense of social obligation, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order. He gained freedom, but he has lost security, belonging and connection.

People tend to regret not listening more than listening and tend to regret things they said more than things they didn’t say.

You need to listen enough to know when the other person is ready to hear what you have to say.

Not everything needs to be said as you are feeling it. In fact, sometimes it’s better to wait until you aren’t feeling it quite so strongly.

Relationships most often fail due to neglect - not being attentive.

Communication is fundamentally a cooperative endeavor, so if we perceive our partners aren’t keeping up their ends of the bargain, we are going to feel cheated.

Conversational expectations: * truth * get information we don’t already know * … but not so much that we feel overwhelmed * relevance and logical flow * Manners - we expect the speaker to be reasonably brief, orderly, and unambiguous * politeness and fairness in turn taking

Careful listening is draining. Air traffic controllers are limited to two-hour shifts.

Few people are effortlessly eloquent. They often need time to build up enough trust in you, and maybe also in themselves, to talk freely. A good listener takes the time and makes the effort to help people find their voice. Intimacy and understanding are earned.

The best friendships are those where you are able to immediately pick up the conversation where you left off because the person’s words have remained with you. One of the most gratifying things you can say to another person is: “I’ve been thinking about what you said.”

Friends can connect what you are saying in the moment to things you’ve said in the past to help you work through problems, clarify your thinking or just make you laugh at the association.

People sometimes say things that they are embarrassed by what they said. They may apologize for saying too much or might later act distant or coolly toward you, resentful that you know what you know. When you start drawing from other people’s accounts, they are going to get upset, even if you believed the information was not embarrassing or sensitive. Better to be a reliable confidant. Otherwise, people will think twice about telling you anything of significance.

Think about the people in your life who you have a hard time listening to and ask yourself why.

When people say, “I can’t talk right now,” what they really mean is “I can’t listen right now.” Many never get around to it.

You Will Not Stampede Me - by Bryan Caplan

2026-02-17T05:00:00Z

summary:

Tiny blog posts about non-conformity. I love his writing in general, but these were topics that I’d already read his writing on before, or too out of my realm (like academic life) to be interesting to me.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Society is consistently wrong. The public gets hysterical: massive overreaction to a statistically tiny evil. What drives perceptions is availability bias: well-publicized emotionally gripping anecdotes.

Any very large, unselective group includes some villains. If you identify with any large, unselective group, you will be regularly tempted to commit the villainous act of standing up for your groups’ villains. When they do wrong – as they inevitably will – your impulse will be to ignore, minimize, or justify their misdeeds. Never identify with large, unselective groups!

Suppose you identify with a large, unselective group – a nationality, religion, ethnicity, political party, etc. Historian shows that this group once committed a monstrous atrocity – say mass murder. This leaves you with four options: 1. To keep your identity and share the blame: “We were terrible.” 2. To renounce your identity and avoid the blame: “They were terrible.” 3. To redefine the perpetrators’ identity and avoid the blame: “We weren’t involved.” 4. To keep your identity and deny the facts: “Never happened – and they had it coming.”

Restrict your identity to groups that are small, selective, or both. The classic small, unselective group: nuclear family, and circles of friends.

A conformist says what others say, but does what others do. People dislike expressing views or taking actions unless other people do. Normal people lack integrity. They feel little need to bring their actions in harmony with their words – or their words in harmony with their actions.

Civilization is not the product of knowledge alone, but a partnership of knowledge and effort. Great thinkers bring most of the knowledge, but the common man provides most of the effort. Neither is worth much without the other.

Trolling diverts intellectual resources from the construction of compelling arguments to the elicitation of negative emotions.

Revenge: Suppose X is the most severe morally acceptable punishment for act Y committed by person Z. Suppose that the government fails to do anything about Y. What’s wrong if a person personally affected by act Y does X to Z? (If the victim punishes the attacker if the government doesn’t.)

“Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong?” You could just as easily have a bumper sticker saying: “Why do we imprison people who imprison people to show that imprisoning is wrong?”

When faced with demands for conformity, silently ask, “What will happen to me if I refuse?”

Societies are huge, anonymous, and forgetful.

Spend the first year of any job convincing your employer he was right to hire you, and he’ll spend your remaining years on the job convincing you not to leave.

If I created my own school, what would it be like? Two goals: 1. prepare students for independent adult life 2. give them a fun childhood 90 minutes of math every day. Most high-status jobs require good math skills, and that’s unlikely to change. Ample time reading and writing, but what they read and write is up to them.

I know that I’m going to hedonically adapt to most good and bad life events, so I place little stock in life events.

Libertarians may be perfectly happy living in a society bound together by nothing stronger than “I’ll leave you alone, you leave me alone.” But psychologically normal humans crave a sense of deep belonging – a sense only big government satisfies.

If people really crave a sense of deep belonging, how come almost no one voluntarily lives in intentional communities? People want to sound like communitarians, but live like individualists. Governments deliver what people pretend to want. Free markets deliver what they actually want.

Hollywood makes a lot of socially conservative movies. When you strip away the glamorous actors and cool music, the message is clear: Live a responsible bourgeois life or you will soon be severely punished. The Godfather saga, Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Fargo. The message of all this cinema: Follow the path of bourgeois virtue. Work hard, keep the peace, abstain from alcohol, have very few sexual partners, and keep your whole family far away from anyone who lives otherwise. The writers try to create engrossing stories – and end up weaving morality tales.

I wish to clone myself and raise the baby as my son. Seriously. I want to experience the sublime bond I’m sure we’d share. I’m confident that he’d be delighted, too, because I would love to be raised by me.

Supply-and-demand solves countless mysteries of the world – everything from rent control to road congestion.

Resolve debates about “what’s obvious” by betting, not talking.

Productive moral arguments begin with clear-cut simple cases, not one-sentence moral theories or trolley problems.

Violence and theft are presumptively wrong, and calling yourself “the government” does nothing to rebut these presumptions.

The best three pages in philosophy remain Epicurus’ “Letter to Menoeceus.”

Kingdom of Characters - by Jing Tsu

2026-01-27T05:00:00Z

summary:

Since I’m learning to read and write Chinese, I thought this was going to go more into the history of the characters themselves, but it was about the technological innovations that enabled their adoption and distribution.

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

Drawn by pamphlets and flyers that mythologized the rich bounties of the golden hills of California, Chinese immigrants poured into San Francisco to work in the gold mines during the 1849 gold rush. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese coolies worked on the transcontinental railway from 1865 to 1869. By the 1870s, Chinese laborers accounted for one-fourth of the workers in California. They made up 90 percent of the labor force that built the transcontinental railway.

Existentialism: A Beginner’s Guide - by Thomas Wartenberg

2026-01-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

Light introduction to Existentialism. Points to some more important works, and gives some context. Good information and insights but written in a style that was hard for me to parse. Happy to now have my notes here after much editing.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

One fundamental thesis of Existentialism: human beings value their freedom more than anything else.

Social and political freedom: social conventions and political institutions must not illegitimately constrain the human beings who are governed by them.

Metaphysicalconcept of freedom: the capacity to initiate a series of events.

Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938) was perhaps the greatest philosophical novel ever written. Sartre was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature but he refused it lest it seem that he endorsed its bourgeois values.

Everything that is not a consciousness has a nature that it must embody to be the thing that it is.

A person does not, as a consciousness, simply perceive the world. He simultaneously is aware of himself perceiving the world. Consciousness is the only entity in the world that does not just exist, but also presents itself to itself as existing.

Seeing chocolate cake on a menu does not force me to eat it, though I love chocolate and could eat the cake if I decided to. Existentialists will not accept addiction to chocolate as an excuse. You could have refrained from eating that cake. There was nothing in your nature as a consciousness that required you to be a ‘cake-eater.’ You were free to eat the cake but didn’t have to.

I can nihilate the desire to eat the pie. I can control it. This is what it is to be a free being. We have the ability to nihilate every desire.

I am a being who exists through my own nihilation of my circumstances.

Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is.

Being free forces you to take complete responsibility for what you do. It’s totally up to you. This responsibility can seem overwhelming. You remake the world according to your own design.

Human beings, because they are free, exhibit transcendence - an ability to move beyond their given circumstances. Our freely chosen projects are evidence of our transcendence. We take it upon ourselves to create something through our own actions.

Engaging in our ‘projects’ – a term used to refer to any of the undertakings we choose. We are able to undertake our projects, in which we seek to go beyond the given conditions in which we find ourselves, only in those very conditions themselves.

Our projects often involve creating ourselves to be, in the future, something that we are not now. Although we do create ourselves in the course of our lives, we are never what we have made of ourselves, for that created self becomes simply another factor in our factical situation. And, as transcendent beings, we are once again free to become what we are not.

People do not want their freedom; it only scares and troubles them.

People perpetrate social evil because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them. Because they believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’ They think people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided by themselves and others who are ‘in the know.’ Thus, a small group of knowledgeable insiders can embrace all sorts of ill-treatment of outsiders.

We fear our own freedom because it brings responsibility in its wake and it’s that that daunts us. A free person has to accept complete responsibility for the choices he or she makes. No gods determine how we shall act.

Protestantism saw the interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior. The standard views of people in the twenty-first century remain significantly influenced by this revolution. Existentialists believe that an emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages the tendency human beings have to deceive themselves about why they do what they do.

Our knowledge of the existence of other minds is based on what we each see - that other bodies behave much like our own body.

Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state.

Existentialists value individuality. First-person singular, rather than plural. ‘Why am I here?’ rather than ‘Why are we here?’ Existentialists sought to counter the tendency to live guided by standards valid for all. People have to work out fundamental questions as individuals. Hence, distrust of the general and their admiration for the particular.

Why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs. Our self-consciousness makes us doubt their validity, but are also unable to be fully present within them.

The key to humans discovering their own nature, according to the Existentialists, is anxiety. Anxiety allows humans to correctly understand the nature of the being that they are, but only if they have a full and complete experience of this emotion. Anxiety is crucial because of the significance of what it signals. Worry is characterized by something about which I am worried, some ‘object’ which is the focus of my concern. the target of my worry is some future event. Anxiety, on the other hand, has no obvious object toward which anxiety is directed. Yet it is at least as upsetting an emotion as worry and maybe even more so, particularly since it’s so hard to figure out what is making one anxious. From a psychoanalytic perspective, anxiety is really a form of worry, only the object of one’s worry is unconscious.

Existentialists’ say anxiety’s object is the fact that we have to make decisions that ‘make all the difference,’ but have nothing to rely on in making them. We lack adequate grounds for deciding the fundamental issues of our lives. You have to take a leap and stake your entire existence on your faith. (Kierkegaard’s idea that one had to stake one’s existence on what one had faith in is one origin of the term ‘Existence-ialism.’) We experience anxiety because we lack rational justifications for all the crucial decisions in our lives. We are, as Sartre puts it, condemned to be free.

Existentialists differ from other schools of philosophy that only put forward their own theories without attempting to confirm them experientially.

People find this form of philosophizing so compelling, for it starts with our ordinary experience as human beings and shows it to have deep, philosophical significance.

Absurd is to say that it contradicts reason. Life is absurd. Contrast it with its opposite, namely the contention that life possesses a meaning. By claiming that life is absurd, Camus intends to deny the possibility that there is a meaning just waiting to be discovered.

We are free to create outselves in accordance with our own desires. Our freedom means that we do not have any essence, any nature, that is given to us from outside ourselves.

The act of rebellion or revolt is a crucial means of self-realization in an absurd world.

Every development contains within itself a ‘negative moment,’ that is, the seeds to its own destruction. Every negation contains within itself the seeds of the next positive development.

Although Zeus has the power to condemn him to an eternally unachievable task, he does not have control of Sisyphus’s mind. So, instead of seeing himself as a victim of a cruel fate as Zeus would like, Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation, to free himself from a sense of defeat.

He is becoming an individual. Achieving individuality. Being an individual requires one to separate oneself from the conformity that dominates sociality.

Camus’s novel, The Stranger, continues to introduce young people to some of the basic ideas of Existentialism.

One impetus to conformity is the denial of death. On his death-bed, he finds himself alone, separate from the others. His scarcely perceptible attempts to struggle against what was considered good by the most highly placed people, those scarcely noticeable impulses which he had immediately suppressed, might have been the real thing, and all the rest were false. And his professional duties and the whole arrangement of his life and of his family, and all his social and official interests, might all have been false.

Conformist behavior’s problem it is legitimated by something external to an individual human being, either the general consensus of a ‘They’ or the authority of a Grand Inquisitor. An individual has not had to reflect on and acknowledge the validity of the action itself.

Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others. We inhabit a world that contains other beings. If we do not act so as to foster their freedom, we jeopardize our own freedom as well.

The tyrant who thinks he is free is not. When he oppresses others, he contradicts his own nature as a free being.

Society enforces conformity and keeps people from becoming free individuals.

The anti-Semite conforms to a set of norms in order to be part of a social group. The benefits felt as part of a group to fend off the anguish that comes from acknowledging one’s freedom and responsibility. Not comfortable with acknowledging their own acceptance of such leveling norms and so need to find a way to see themselves as superior. It is a mistake to treat anti-Semitism as simply the result of ignorance on the part of the anti-Semite.

All must be mediocre in order to ensure the social uniformity.

Things that initially appear to be structured in one way turn out, upon deeper analysis, to be the exact opposite, as when the supposedly independent being turns out to really be the dependent one.

‘Woman’ as the negation of ‘man,’ which is the primary or ‘valorized’ term. To be human is, implicitly, to be a man. To be a woman is, inherently, to be relative to him - defined and differentiated with reference to man. Men, especially those who feel inferior to other men, benefit from gender oppression by allowing them to feel superior to women.

Jews or Blacks can seek to liberate themselves from their oppressors, since they don’t need them. But women need men in order continue the propagation of the human race. Women are different from that of other oppressed groups, for they cannot simply live in isolation from their oppressor.

Nothing is more essential to us than our freedom. Freedom is so important to humans that we would prefer to go insane rather than accept the idea that our actions are completely determined. I’ll do something stupid, unexpected, just to show you that I am different - that my actions are not determined.

The general human tendency to forgo freedom and aspire to a more thing-like status that allows people to evade many of the difficulties that freedom.

Their oppression has provided women with the metaphysical solace of avoiding the burden of freedom. Freed’ from the burden of their own freedom, saved from having to face all the difficult and painful questions about life.

Objects from tables to trees have a nature which observation can reveal. Human beings, though, are different. We do not have a predetermined nature that can be read off our appearance. Objectification: legible nature by reading it off his appearance. His black skin means that his accomplishments are never seen as those of a human being, but always of a Black man.

Children in the colonies are taught to read the literature of the colonizer. As a result, the young internalize the colonists’ values, which emphasize the inferiority of the colonized.

The fundamental message that the Existentialists hoped to deliver to us is that we have many more options for living our lives than we typically acknowledge.

Martin Heidegger’s magnum opus: Being and Time.

You are free to make your nature. You are not determined by your past, but always have the option of changing how you act. You can decide to climb mountains because you do not want to be a person whose life is determined by fears.

To be in contact with nothingness, (refusing everything), to determine how things might have been otherwise.

Only the human being is what it is not and is not what it is. You can change and make of yourself something different from what you appear to be at any time.

You are also creating yourself to be, in the future, something that you, now, are not.

People perpetrate social evil not because they have evil aims, but because they think they are better than other people and know what is best for them. They believe they have unique access to ‘the truth.’ As a result, they believe that people who do not comprehend their ‘truth’ need to be guided.

Freedom is actually a source of much of our trouble and pain. Most people would prefer to live a life without the pain resulting from possessing freedom. Better to be a satisfied fool than Socrates, troubled but free.

We have abandoned the gods by no longer giving them control over our actions.

There is a great deal of security to be had from seeing oneself as simply following someone else’s orders.

The Catholic Church stressed the importance of rituals. Protestantism focus on interior lives of people as more significant than their external behavior

“It’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.” This is often seen as laughable in these days of seemingly unbridled competition. Claiming that what matters are not external factors which are not completely within one’s control, but the internal attitudes one takes to one’s actions.

Emphasis on intentions rather than actions encourages you to deceive yourself about why you do what you do.

Freedom is difficult for humans to bear. Because we are free, we have to accept responsibility for our actions. There is no one else to blame. Our freedom to transform the circumstances of our existence and remake the world and ourselves in accordance with our own ideas.

Once you become aware that you are in a certain state, you no longer fully inhabit that state. When you become aware of what you are feeling, you feel alienated from that feeling. It was sort of act you were putting on.

Human beings have developed a range of different ways to slough off responsibility for their actions. God is a prime example. There are way more commandments than just those ten. The Old Testament actually lists 613 commandments that determine virtually every aspect of a person’s life.

The religious observant do not have to decide which norms of conduct adhere to. Moral rules are determined for them. No freedom to decide whether or not to obey the rules.

Understand how people benefit existentially from giving up control over their own lives.

Purely dyadic (twotermed) relationships are impossible, for we are always aware of the possibility of being observed by a third person, the ‘other’ who takes us out of our primary ways of being. This explains why Sartre thinks that ‘hell is other people’: Their look pulls us out of our own world and turns us into an object in theirs.

Unable to be fully present doing our projects, incapable of embracing them as meaningful. We acquire a self-consciousness that makes us doubt their validity.

Existentialism can be thought of as a form of radical empiricism.

To call something an absolute evil is to say that it is so horrible it cannot be redeemed or justified in relation to something else.

Kant was so worried that he would not finish explicating the Critical Philosophy that he adhered to a rigid schedule.

The basic feature of religion was its positing of things that were absurd, that is, contrary to reason. Calling a religious belief ‘absurd’ is not a way of denigrating it, but a matter of describing a specific feature of it: its violation of the norms of human reason. Existentialists’ use the concept of the absurd as, partially at least, a technical term with a very specific meaning. To say that something is absurd is to say that it contradicts reason.

It’s a mistake to say that nature is indifferent, for this suggests that nature has that very minimal attitude toward what happens, one situated midway between cruelty and compassion, as if it just didn’t really care what its effects on human beings were. Nature is simply incapable of having any attitude about what it brings about. It simply is what it is. What’s absurd is that we are creatures who demand reasonableness of a universe that cannot provide it.

Man is a useless passion.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. Sisyphus is happy. His scorn for Zeus and the fate to which he has been consigned allows him to take control of his own situation. Sisyphus is able to choose a different way of interpreting his situation.

One impetus to conformity is the denial of death.

An authentic action is one you do in full awareness of your freedom. When you act authentically, you have to accept complete responsibility for what you do, and not attribute the action to any form of influence or compulsion.

Your freedom requires you to respect and support the freedom of others.

While the anti-Semite may be ignorant about many features of Jewish culture, this cannot explain why she favors the oppression of Jews. I know very little about the Inuit, for example, but think they deserve the same respect due any human being. Without the presence of the Jew there would be no one whom the anti-Semite could use to secure her sense of her own superiority. Without the Jew, she would be forced to either invent a replacement or face her own life without this strategy of denial.

At the Existentialist Café - by Sarah Bakewell

2026-01-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

More like a memoir of her re-discovery of existentialist writers. Interesting but because of it, less educational than I wanted.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Freedom, for him, lay at the heart of all human experience

As a human being, I have no predefined nature. I create that nature through what I choose to do. I am always one step ahead of myself, making myself up as I go along.

Ex-student of his had come to him for advice. Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’

Trolley problem? “trolleyologists” Sartre was not concerned with reasoning his way through an ethical calculus in the traditional way of philosophers.

None can relieve you of the burden of freedom. Ultimately you must do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.

You might think you are guided by moral laws, or that you act in certain ways because of your psychological make-up or past experiences, or because of what is happening around you. But the whole mixture merely adds up to the ‘situation’ out of which you must act. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

It is forbidden to forbid.

Be realistic: demand the impossible.

Sartre had taught me to drop out, an underrated and sometimes useful response to the world.

Merleau-Ponty was a brilliant essayist. Merleau-Ponty’s main work The Phenomenology of Perception. I was amazed afresh at how adventurous and rich his thinking was.

Read: * Sartre on freedom * Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression * Kierkegaard on anxiety * Camus on rebellion * Heidegger on technology * Merleau Ponty on cognitive science Their philosophies feel current - and remain of interest.

Existentialists inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre. She later moved away from it. She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

Philosophy becomes more interesting when it is cast into the form of a life. Likewise, personal experience is more interesting when thought about philosophically.

His aim was always to work in whatever topic seemed the ‘most distressing and uncertain’ to him at any time — the ones that filled him with most anxiety and self-doubt.

Phenomenology describes stripping away clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to see the ‘things themselves’, exactly as they appear. As it presents itself to my experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. Set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. A general suspension of judgement about the world. Phenomenology is useful for talking about religious or mystical experiences: We can describe them as they feel from the inside without having to prove that they represent the world accurately. In forcing us to be loyal to experience, and to sidestep authorities who try to influence how we interpret that experience, phenomenology has the capacity to neutralise all the ‘isms’ around it.

If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back.

He was so absorbed in his reading that at first he barely noticed the outside world. He drank and went for long walks. “I rediscovered irresponsibility.”

Argumentative Indian - by Amartya Sen

2025-12-25T05:00:00Z

summary:

Famous analysis of India’s intellectual and political heritage, quite against Hindu nationalism. I learned a lot. I’d happily read ten more books like this.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

When taking a view of Indian civilization, don’t forget the period preceding the Muslim conquest. Muslim Arab traders settled in India from the eighth century. India was not a ‘Hindu country’ even before the arrival of Islam. Buddhism was the dominant religion in India for nearly a millennium. The Chinese in the first millennium CE standardly referred to India as ‘the Buddhist kingdom’.

The roots of scepticism in India go back a long way, and it would be hard to understand the history of Indian culture if scepticism were to be jettisoned. There’s a long tradition of accepted heterodoxy in India. See how much heterodoxy there has been in Indian thoughts and beliefs from very early days. Not only did Buddhists, Jains, agnostics and atheists compete with each other and with adherents of what we now call Hinduism (a much later term) in the India of the first millennium BCE, but also the dominant religion in India was Buddhism for nearly a thousand years.

Bhagavad Gītā presents a tussle between two contrary moral positions: 1. Krishna’s emphasis on doing one’s duty 2. Arjuna’s focus on avoiding bad consequences (and generating good ones) … Arjuna questions whether it is right to be concerned only with one’s duty to promote a just cause and be indifferent to the misery and the slaughter that the war itself would undoubtedly cause. Krishna argues against Arjuna. His response takes the form of articulating principles of action – based on the priority of doing one’s duty – which have been repeated again and again in Indian philosophy. Krishna insists on Arjuna’s duty to fight, irrespective of his evaluation of the consequences. It is a just cause, and, as a warrior and a general on whom his side must rely, Arjuna cannot waver from his obligations, no matter what the consequences are. Krishna’s view is the form of an admonishment: ‘And do not think of the fruit of action. / Fare forward.’

The univocal message of the Gītā requires supplementation by the broader argumentative wisdom of the Mahābhārata, of which the Gītā is only one small part.

India was the first country in the non-Western world to choose a resolutely democratic constitution.

World-conquering Alexander received some political lecturing as he roamed around north-west India in the fourth century BCE. For example, when Alexander asked a group of Jain philosophers why they were paying so little attention to the great conqueror, he got the following – broadly anti-imperial – reply (as reported by Arrian): “King Alexander, every man can possess only so much of the earth’s surface as this we are standing on. You are but human like the rest of us, save that you are always busy and up to no good, travelling so many miles from your home, a nuisance to yourself and to others! … You will soon be dead, and then you will own just as much of the earth as will suffice to bury you.”

The secular demand that the state be ‘equidistant’ from different religions. The inclusiveness of India made it easy for Christians, Jews, Parsees and other immigrants to settle in India to lead ‘their own lives’, coming from places where they had been persecuted,

Relations between Bangladesh and India demand much subtlety of perception, linked as the two countries are not only by history, but also by language and literature (Bengali culture flourishes on both sides of the border), religion (the Muslim minority in India constitutes about the same proportion of the Indian population as the Hindu minority does of the Bangladeshi population),

The important thing about a man is his dharma [roughly, the personal basis of behaviour], not necessarily his religion.’

Following the electoral victory of coalitions led by the BJP in 1998 and 1999, various arms of the government of India were mobilized in the task of arranging ‘appropriate’ rewritings of Indian history. The rapidly reorganized National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) became busy, from shortly after the BJP’s assumption of office, not only in producing fresh textbooks for Indian school children, but also in deleting sections from books produced earlier by NCERT itself (under pre-BJP management), written by reputed Indian historians. The ‘reorganization’ of NCERT was accompanied by an ‘overhaul’ of the Indian Council of Historical Research (ICHR), with new officers being appointed and a new agenda chosen for both, mainly in line with the priorities of the Hindutva movement.

Rabindranath Tagore, who died in 1941 at the age of 80, is a towering figure in the millennium-old literature of Bengal. His poetry as well as his novels, short stories and essays and songs.

Tagore did come from a Hindu family in what is now Bangladesh. The newly independent Bangladesh choose one of Tagore’s songs as its national anthem. India chose a song of Tagore’s (‘Jana Gana Mana Adhinayaka’) as its national anthem. He may be the only one ever to have written the national anthems of two different countries.

Tagore popularized the term ‘Mahatma’ – great soul – as a description of Gandhi.

Schopenhauer argued that the New Testament “must somehow be of Indian origin: this is attested by its completely Indian ethics, which transforms morals into asceticism.”

Fling away your promise if it is found to be wrong.

The works of Satyajit Ray (1921–92): his Pather Panchali – the profound movie that immediately made him a front-ranking film-maker in the world – was directly influenced by Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. Using natural locations and unknown actors.

Chili was brought to India by the Portuguese. Tandoori came from the Middle East.

Factfulness - by Hans Rosling

2025-12-12T05:00:00Z

summary:

What a great man. Empathy and charity embodied. I love his worldview. Written as he was dying. Its main message is to help us see the world more accurately - to see how much it’s improved. Shows why we tend towards us-versus-them stories, the difference between frightening versus dangerous, focusing on the system.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

People think the world is more frightening, more violent, and more hopeless - in short, more dramatic - than it really is.

Our cravings for drama are causing misconceptions and an overdramatic worldview. When we realize we have been wrong about the world, feel not embarrassment, but that childlike sense of wonder, inspiration, and curiosity: “Wow, how is that even possible?”

Embrace facts that don’t fit your worldview and trying to understand their implications. Let your mistakes trigger curiosity instead of embarrassment. “How on earth could I be so wrong about that fact? What can I learn from that mistake? Those people are not stupid, so why are they using that solution?”

Misconceptions disappear only if there is some equally simple but more relevant way of thinking to replace them.

People’s knowledge is outdated, often several decades old. Their worldview dates to the time when their teachers had left school. Update your knowledge. Some knowledge goes out of date quickly. Technology, countries, societies, cultures, and religions are constantly changing. Collect examples of cultural change. Challenge the idea that today’s culture must also have been yesterday’s, and will also be tomorrow’s.

The vast majority of the world’s population lives somewhere in the middle of the income scale, not extreme poverty. Their girls go to school, their children get vaccinated, they live in two-child families, and they want to go abroad on holiday, not as refugees. Step-by-step, year-by-year, the world is improving. Only 9 percent of the world lives in low-income countries.

There is no gap between the West and the rest, between developed and developing, between rich and poor. We should all stop using the simple pairs of categories that suggest there is.

Human beings have a strong dramatic instinct toward binary thinking, a basic urge to divide things into two distinct groups, with nothing but an empty gap in between. Good versus bad. Heroes versus villains. My country versus the rest. Dividing the world into two distinct sides is simple and intuitive, and also dramatic because it implies conflict. Journalists know this. They set up their narratives as conflicts between two opposing people. The fragile individual against the big, evil corporation.

Negativity instinct: our instinct to notice the bad more than the good. There are three things going on here: 1. the misremembering of the past 2. selective reporting by journalists and activists 3. feeling that as long as things are bad it’s heartless to say they are getting better.

When we hear someone say things are getting better, we think they are also saying “don’t worry, relax” or even “look away.” Things can be both bad and better.

We pay attention to information that fits our dramatic instincts. We believe that the unusual is usual: that this is what the world looks like. The image of a dangerous world has never been broadcast more effectively than it is now, while the world has never been less violent and more safe.

The fear instinct is a terrible guide for understanding the world. It makes us give our attention to the unlikely dangers that we are most afraid of, and neglect what is actually most risky.

“frightening” and “dangerous” are two different things. Something frightening poses a perceived risk. Something dangerous poses a real risk.

When helping those in deepest poverty, don’t aim to do anything perfectly. If you do, you are stealing resources from where they can be better used. Paying too much attention to the individual visible victim rather than to the numbers can lead us to spend all our resources on a fraction of the problem, and therefore save many fewer lives.

Items on a list: just a few of them are more important than all the others put together.

To avoid misjudging something’s importance, avoid lonely numbers. Never, ever leave a number all by itself. Never believe that one number on its own can be meaningful. If you are offered one number, always ask for at least one more. Something to compare it with. Number in a news report triggers an alarm: What should this lonely number be compared to? What was that number a year ago? Ten years ago? What is it in a comparable country or region? And what should it be divided by? What is the total of which this is a part? What would this be per person?

Preference for single causes and single solutions: Being always in favor of or always against any particular idea makes you blind to information that doesn’t fit your perspective. Instead, constantly test your favorite ideas for weaknesses. Be humble about the extent of your expertise. Be curious about new information that doesn’t fit, and information from other fields. See people who contradict you, disagree with you, and put forward different ideas as a great resource for understanding the world.

Look beyond a guilty individual and to the system.

Every activist exaggerates the problem to which they have dedicated themselves. It hurts our ability to develop a true, fact-based understanding.

Urgency instinct: The call to action makes you think less critically, decide more quickly, and act now. Relax. It’s almost never true. It’s almost never that urgent, and it’s almost never an either/or. The constant alarms make us numb to real urgency.

Art of Spending Money - by Morgan Housel

2025-12-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

Philosophical thoughts on what to do with your money, which then relates to happiness, independence, envy, scarcity, and more. Putting money into savings is like buying independence. Imagine a 5-star chef cooks the most amazing meals for you 3× a day, every day. You’d lose the joy of a great meal since it’s no longer scarce. Implications for life?

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Those happiest with money tend to be those who have found a way to stop thinking about it.

All behavior makes sense with enough information. What have you experienced that I haven’t that makes you believe what you do? And would I believe the same if I experienced what you have?

Everyone driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

If flying first-class to a five-star resort and building sandcastles on the beach with my kids is a 10, playing LEGOs with my kids on the living room floor of a small apartment was still a solid 8 or 9.

People will admire you more if they aren’t jealous of you.

Happiness is when you stop asking what else you need to be happy.

Not needing wealth is more valuable than wealth itself.

If you don’t have those things, then they can mean a great deal to you. When you do have them, they mean nothing to you.

So much of a good life is about what didn’t happen.

The most valuable financial asset is not needing to impress anyone.

A good life is everything you need and some of what you want. If you have everything you want, you appreciate none of what you have.

When you live a simple and modest life, your occasional experience with nice things can generate more joy than if you had those things all the time.

A simple life can be the most potent way to enjoy luxury items. It’s the power of contrast. Imagine if you had a 5-star chef on staff, cooking you 3 amazing meals a day. You’d lose the joy of eating an exceptional meal at a nice restaurant.

Taking too little risk is like smoking cigarettes, taking too much risk is like doing heroin. Both will harm you, the only difference is how quickly.

If you knew you’d live to be 102, you wouldn’t feel guilty sleeping in, taking a sabbatical. You’d be more willing to learn a new skill. You’d take better care of your joints, and long-term investing would be more exciting.

Instead of “Live for today” or “Save for the future”, try “Minimize future regret.” You will regret different things as you age. Experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia.

Formula for a nice life: independence plus purpose.

If I move $500 into my savings account, I purchased $500 of independence. No different than if I had purchased a $500 item. The money is “spent” in either scenario. Spend to have control of my calendar. Spend on autonomy. Independence has the highest ROI.

Doesn’t matter what you have, but what you are afraid of losing. The more you have to lose, the more fragile you are.

What do you do when your real life exceeds your dreams? Keep it to yourself.

For every substance, small doses stimulate, moderate doses inhibit, large doses kill. A little bit of sun exposure is healthy, even necessary. A moderate amount can cause sunburn. Way too much can cause lethal cancer. Money works in the same way. There’s an “ideal” net worth for everyone, when money not only stops bringing pleasure but becomes a social liability.

A family that was worth $8 billion: If you googled their name, nothing came up. No Forbes list, no gala photos, no profiles, no Wikipedia pages… nothing. They lived the most amazing life you could imagine, and they had virtually no social debt. They had total freedom, privacy, and independence. They chose their friends carefully and gave money away anonymously. Their lack of social debt may have been their most valuable asset. Be rich and anonymous.

A belief is not dangerous until it turns absolute. Mental liquidity: quickly abandon previous beliefs and strategies.

Spend extravagantly on the things you love, while you mercilessly cut the things you don’t. Try a million different things. Reject what doesn’t bring you joy.

The more susceptible you are to advertising, the less satisfied you are with your own life. You’re desperate for someone to tell you what you should like because you haven’t yet figured it out for yourself.

Pick your lifestyle carefully, as a parent, since it will set your children’s lifestyle expectations. Generational growth - the feeling that you have matched or exceeded the life built by your parents - is an important part of most people’s well-being.

Fail without failing so hard you can’t recover.

There’s no way to learn the value of money without feeling the power of its scarcity.

Learning that you can’t have everything you want is the only way to understand the difference between a need and a desire.

Be frugal without it hurting.

The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.

Man notices his coworker drinking a latte. Asks, “How often do you drink lattes?” “Every day,” says the coworker. “Wow! Every day for thirty years of your professional career! That’s so much money! A latte a day means you’re spending about $1,900 a year. If you invested that money instead at an eight percent return, you’d have $250,000. That’s enough to buy a Ferrari.” Coworker looks puzzled, asks, “Do you buy lattes?” she asked the man. “No.” “So where’s your Ferrari?”

Charisma Myth - by Olivia Fox Cabane

2025-12-01T05:00:00Z

summary:

Your body language, mannerisms, speaking habits, listening habits, all affect how you’re perceived. Many tips in here sound manipulative (to convey power, take up more space) - but are ultimately about helping your outside match your inside, for the desired effect including helping people feel more comfortable around you, more seen and understood. Empathetic advice like making sure you’re sitting at a 90° angle instead of directly across from someone, and making sure their back is not to an open space with people moving behind them, which makes us feel uncomfortable. I use these tips when meeting with strangers.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

When we first meet someone, we instinctively assess whether that person is a potential friend or foe and whether they have the power to enact those intentions. Power and intentions are what we’re aiming to assess. “Could you move mountains for me? And would you care to do so?” To answer the first question, we try to assess how much power he or she has. To answer the second question, we try to assess how much he or she likes us. When you meet a charismatic person, you get the impression that they have a lot of power and they like you.

Show high power, high warmth, and presence: completely here with you, in this moment.

Lower the intonation of your voice at the end of your sentences. Reduce how quickly and how often you nod. Pause for two full seconds before you speak.

Someone who possesses warmth without power can come across as overeager, subservient, or desperate to please.

Just by getting into a charismatic mental state, your body will manifest a charismatic body language.

Michelangelo insisted that he never created his glorious statues - he simply revealed them. His only talent, he said, was in looking at the block of marble and discerning the statue within. All he then needed was the skill to chip away the excess, letting the statue emerge. Identify the obstacles that are holding back your charismatic self.

Physical discomfort affects your body language. Plan ahead to prevent the discomfort from occurring - to ensure you’re physically comfortable. Temperature and noise level. Clothing is loose enough for you to breathe well, makes you feel both comfortable and highly confident in your appearance. Arrive at the venue early so that you can get comfortable with the space. Assess the room before sitting down to make sure you won’t be facing the sun. Your face: notice if it is tense.

Our inability to tolerate uncertainty can cause us to make premature decisions - can lead us to feel anxious. People go to great lengths to get rid of the anxiety produced by uncertainty, from making premature decisions to forcing bad outcomes to numbing their anxiety with mind-altering substances. Envision a variety of ways it could play out, and you strategize how to best deal with each. Once you’ve thought through each scenario, the rational, reasonable, logical thing to do would be to put the situation out of your mind and go about your day until action is actually required. Get comfortable with uncertainty and ambiguity - and being uncomfortable.

To alleviate the discomfort of uncertainty: RESPONSIBILITY TRANSFER. In uncertain situations, we want to know that things are somehow going to work out fine. If we could be certain that things will work out - that everything will be taken care of - the uncertainty would produce much less anxiety. Take the weight of everything you’re concerned about off your shoulders and place it on the shoulders of another entity or spirit. They’re in charge now. Lift everything off your shoulders and feel the difference as you are now no longer responsible for the outcome of any of these things. Everything is taken care of. You can sit back, relax, and enjoy whatever good you can find along the way. Perform a quick visualization to transfer responsibility. Feel the instant sense of relief and the warmth, calm, and serenity rising. Feel your whole body relax.

Impostor syndrome: more than 70 percent of the population has experienced this. Impostor syndrome is worst among high performers.

Delve into those very sensations of discomfort. Give your full attention to the very sensations you’d instinctively want to push away. Focus on the minute sensations of your physical discomfort.

Humans are the most empathetic species on the planet.

Everyone you meet has stories to tell. Everyone has a few that would break your heart. Imagine their past. What if you had been born in their circumstances, with their family and upbringing?

Kindness charisma when you want to create an emotional bond or make people feel safe and comfortable. Radiate warmth and complete acceptance. People who may have never felt completely, wholeheartedly accepted suddenly feel truly seen and enveloped in acceptance. Kindness charisma is primarily based on warmth. It connects with people’s hearts, and makes them feel welcomed, cherished, embraced, and, most of all, completely accepted. Kindness charisma comes entirely from body language - specifically your face, and even more specifically your eyes.

One of the downsides of kindness charisma: it can lead to adulation and overattachment. She suffers when people, having become enchanted, feel hurt or resentful when she can’t make room for them in her life.

Clothing is one of our first and strongest clues in evaluating status, thus potential power, and thus authority charisma. If you want to make others feel comfortable, adapt to their tribal wear.

Authority charisma: To project power and confidence in your body language, you’ll need to learn how to “take up space” with your posture. Reduce nonverbal reassurances (such as excessive nodding), and avoid fidgeting. Speak less, to speak more slowly, to know how and when to pause. Warmth reduces the risk of your being perceived as arrogant or intimidating, it will also be more highly valued because you’re now seen as high-status.

Authority charisma disadvantages: It can inhibit critical thinking in others. It doesn’t invite feedback, so you risk not receiving information you actually need. It can easily make you appear arrogant.

Once we’ve made a judgment about someone, we spend the rest of our acquaintanceship seeking to prove ourselves correct. Everything we see and hear gets filtered through this initial impression. People were able to accurately judge nine out of ten personality traits by looking at a single photograph. Overall appearance is evaluated before demeanor and body language.

What’s the story? Asking for a story sends them straight into storytelling mode. Never interrupt - not even if the impulse to do so comes from excitement about something the other person just said. No matter how congratulatory and warm your input, it will always result in their feeling at least a twinge of resentment or frustration at not having been allowed to complete their sentence. They finish their sentence. Your face absorbs. Your face reacts. Then, and only then, you answer.

The longer you speak, the higher the price you’re making them pay.

When you consciously mirror someone’s body language, you activate deep instincts of trust and liking. People open up, and instinctively start sharing more.

Cases in which the other person is exhibiting negative body language? First mirror their body language, then gradually lead it in a more positive direction.

Carefully observe her posture - the way she’s sitting, holding her head, what her shoulders are like - and gradually move into the same position. Look for rhythms. Is she nodding her head periodically? Tapping her knee? Fidgeting with a button? You can find a way to loosely mirror that, too. And, of course, match your voice to hers: adopt a similar cadence, tempo, and volume. Once you’re in a mirrored position, spend your entire listening time in that mode: as long as you’re listening, match your body language to hers. Only when it’s your turn to speak should you start infusing the interaction with warmth, caring, and compassion through your voice, face, and eyes. As you speak, gradually shift into a more relaxed, calm, and, eventually, confident posture. There’s a good chance that she’ll follow. Mirror-then-lead is a smart strategy when the person you’re interacting with needs reassurance, when they’re feeling nervous or timid, anxious or awkward, stiff or withdrawn. With any of these emotional states, mirror them to establish comfort and rapport, and then gradually draw them out.

To establish warm rapport with someone, avoid a confrontational seating arrangement and instead sit either next to or at a 90-degree angle from them. These are the positions in which we feel most comfortable. If you want someone to feel comfortable, avoid seating them with their back to an open space, particularly if others are moving behind them.

Find a busy, crowded space. As you walk around, try to get other people to move aside for you. Not allowed to step aside to make way for others. Your subconscious mind is constantly scanning your surroundings as you move through your environment to glean the information you need to keep moving forward. Your eyes scan and assess potential obstacles, including other people in your way. To determine whether you need to modify your route to avoid them, you read their body language without even realizing it. If they’re broadcasting a body language that says, “You better move aside, baby,” you will most likely pick up on it and make way for them. Conversely, if you feel that you’re the bigger gorilla, you’ll stay your course and expect them to deviate. Imagine a very large gorilla. We read confidence the same way: how much space people are willing to take up. Powerful people sit sideways on chairs, drape their arms over the back, or appropriate two chairs by placing an arm across the back of an adjacent chair. They put their feet on the desk or sit on the desk. All of these behaviors are ways of claiming space. Assume expansive poses (taking up more space).

Regal Posture: cool, calm, and collected This kind of high-status, high-confidence body language is characterized by how few movements are made. Composed people exhibit a level of stillness, which is sometimes described as poise. They avoid extraneous, superfluous gestures like incessantly nodding their heads.

Excessive or rapid nodding. Excessive verbal reassurance: making a sound, such as “uh-huh.” Restlessness or fidgeting. Gestures, which behavior experts identify as low-status, are often signs used by someone wanting to convey reassurance to the person they’re interacting with. Empathy: wanting to ensure that the other person feels heard and understood and knows you’re paying attention Insecurity: wanting to please or appease the person you’re interacting with In contrast, people who come across as powerful, confident, or high-status are usually more contained. They don’t feel the urge to give so much reassurance because they’re not as worried about what their counterpart is thinking.

Broadcasting too much power can come across as either arrogant or intimidating

To help a shy colleague or subordinate feel comfortable and open up, punctuate with both nonverbal (nodding) and verbal (uh-huh) reassurance.

Asking for someone’s opinion is a better strategy than asking for their advice, because giving advice feels like more effort, as they have to tailor a recommendation to your situation, whereas with an opinion, they can just spout whatever is on their mind.

Bill Clinton was known to go around asking everyone, from his chef to his janitor, for their opinion on foreign policy. He’d listen intently, and in subsequent conversations would refer back to the opinion they’d offered.

Rule Makers, Rule Breakers - by Michele Gelfand

2025-11-30T05:00:00Z

summary:

Asks the question I love: Why are different cultures that way? Focuses particularly on strict versus loose cultures, hence the title. Some of its answers were insightful, but others feel dead wrong and easy to disprove. Still, a worthy read for the good bits. I liked that they used New Zealand as a frequent example.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

Tight cultures have strong social norms and little tolerance for deviance, while loose cultures have weak social norms and are highly permissive. The former are rule makers; the latter, rule breakers.

Groups that experience any collective painful experience reported a remarkably higher sense of bonding.

Merely following the same exact routine with others is sufficient to increase cooperation.

In New Zealand, a highly permissive culture, women have the highest number of sexual partners in the world - an average of 20. Global average is 7.3. Kiwis tend to become acquainted very quickly, and they eschew formal titles. People are known to walk barefoot on city streets, in grocery stores, and in banks.

Tightest nations in our sample were Pakistan, Malaysia, India, Singapore, South Korea, Norway, Turkey, Japan, China, Portugal, and Germany. Loosest nations were Spain, United States, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Venezuela, Brazil, the Netherlands, Israel, Hungary, Estonia, and the Ukraine. Based on how much freedom they had to choose what to do, whether they had clear rules for appropriate behavior, and whether they were required to monitor their own behavior and “watch what they do.”

Even tight nations have select domains where anything goes. Takeshita Street in Tokyo, in zany costumes. Tehran has developed a vibrant artistic culture. Theater and musical groups put on shows for large crowds, whether in isolated fields, tunnels, or caves. Facebook page “My Stealthy Freedom”. Photos of Iranian women removing their hijabs in public and enjoying other forbidden moments of independence.

Collectivist and tight (Japan and Singapore) Collectivist and loose (Brazil and Spain) Individualist and loose (the United States and New Zealand) Individualist and tight (Austria and Germany)

Researchers in Netherlands temporarily added graffiti to an alley near a shopping area - in essence, making it an impromptu “loose” environment. In the other condition, they kept the alley clean, making it a spotless, tight environment. Then they hung useless leaflets that read “We wish everybody happy holidays” on the handlebars of parked bicycles in both conditions. Bike owners would need to remove the leaflets from their handlebars to ride their bikes, yet there were no trash cans around. Would the riders take the leaflets with them or throw them on the ground? 70 percent in the loose, graffiti-ridden alley littered. 30 percent in the tight, clean alley did.

Loose cultures tend to be open, but they’re also much more disorderly. Tight cultures have a comforting order and predictability, but they’re less tolerant.

Crime rates are significantly lower in tight countries. Like Japan, China is known for its low level of crime, as are India and Turkey. In looser countries, like New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United States, crime is much more common.

Tight cultures maintain social order through threat of serious punishments. “Eyes are upon you” practice in fostering norm-compliant behavior. In their university coffee room, the researchers hung a banner with an image of a large pair of eyes above the coffee maker. Next to the machine, there was an “honesty box” as a collection receptacle for people’s payments for coffee, tea, or milk. During weeks when the banner with eyes hung above the coffee machine, people put almost three times more money into the honesty box.

Tighter countries tend to have more cleaning personnel on city streets. Not only keep things tidy but also a reminder to citizens about the value of doing so. When we’re exposed to untidy environments, it creates a powerful feedback loop that facilitates more norm violations and disorder.

Singapore rail operators can be fined up to one million dollars a year for delayed performance.

Tight cultures are synchronized. People are more likely to dress the same, buy the same things. There are far fewer “lefties” in tight cultures. Investors in tight cultures are more likely to make similar buying and selling decisions. Stock price synchronicity.

Connection between social constraint and self-constraint. The more people have to attune their conduct to others, the stronger their ability to regulate their impulses. People weigh much more, alcohol consumption, spending habits.

German word for debt and guilt is the same.

Loose cultures tend to be cosmopolitan, and more receptive to foreigners. Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, and the Netherlands, were the most welcoming, People in tight cultures are more likely to believe their culture is superior and needs to be protected from foreign influences.

Tight cultures of Sparta, the Nahua, and Singapore faced a common fate: Each had (or has) to deal with a high degree of threat. Loose cultures of New Zealand, Athens, and the Copper Inuit, the opposite: These groups had (or have) the luxury of facing far fewer threats.

Groups that deal with many ecological and historical threats need to do everything they can to create order in the face of chaos. Strong norms are needed to cultivate the societal order that is necessary for surviving the most difficult circumstances. Societies with low population density (such as Australia, Brazil, Venezuela, and New Zealand) can afford to be much looser.

Does diversity correlate with a country’s looseness? It does, at least up to a point. When diversity gets to be extreme, as it is in Pakistan, and India, diversity can cause conflict, which requires strict norms to manage.

Too little stress can be almost as harmful to well-being too much stress. Nations that were extremely tight and extremely loose had the lowest levels of happiness and the highest levels of suicide. Very tight and very loose nations had the lowest life expectancies.

Egypt’s swing from tight to loose and back to tight again: After ousting Mubarak, the Egyptian populace was ecstatic to have escaped decades of brutal rule. “Egypt is free!” Stock market was down more than 40 percent. Crime rates rose 200 percent. Reacting to the chaos following the ousting of Mubarak, people became amenable to yet another strong ruler who promised to restore the social order.

Nationalist groups that long for tightness are fighting back against globalists who embrace looseness.

How to Know a Person - by David Brooks

2025-11-26T05:00:00Z

summary:

First part was great - so empathetic - about how and why to really get to know someone. I skipped the middle part about difficult conversations in the Culture Wars. Last part was great, about what it is to be wise.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Sure it works in practice, but does it work in theory?

Building a friendship or creating a community involves performing a series of small, concrete social actions well: * revealing vulnerability at the appropriate pace * being a good listener * end a conversation gracefully * ask for and offer forgiveness * let someone down without breaking their heart * sit with someone who is suffering * host a gathering where everyone feels embraced * see things from another’s point of view. All these different skills rest on one foundational skill: the ability to understand what another person is going through.

See someone else deeply and make them feel seen. Accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.

The #1 reason people don’t see others is that they are too self-centered to try. “I’m all about myself. Let me tell you my opinion. Let me entertain you with this story about myself.” Many people are unable to step outside of their own points of view.

Illuminate them with a gaze that is warm, respectful, and admiring. Offer a gaze that says, “I’m going to trust you, before you trust me.” A gaze that says, “I want to get to know you and be known by you.”

Resist the urge to project your own viewpoint. Do not ask, “How would I feel if I were in your shoes?”

Morality is mostly about how you pay attention to others.

We are constantly representing people to ourselves in self-serving ways, in ways that gratify our egos and serve our ends.

look at everyone with a patient and discerning regard,

Inspiration knocks softly and then goes away if we don’t answer the door.

Offer the kind of attention that can change people.

90% of life is just going about your business: supermarket, small talk while there are other people around. In these normal moments of life, you’re not staring deeply into another’s eyes or unveiling profound intimacies. You’re just doing stuff together - not face-to-face but side by side. You are accompanying each other. When you’re first getting to know someone, you don’t want to try to peer into their souls right away. It’s best to look at something together. Not studying a person, just getting used to them. Getting a sense of each other’s energy, temperament, and manner. Subtle, tacit knowledge about each other that is required before other kinds of knowledge can be broached. Becoming comfortable with each other, and comfort is no small thing. Until the situation feels safe and familiar.

Be willing to let the relationship deepen or not deepen, without forcing it either way. Act in a way that lets other people be perfectly themselves. Patience: Trust is built slowly.

People are more fully human when they are at play. Play isn’t an activity; it’s a state of mind.

Accompaniment is a humble way of being a helpful part of another’s journey. Let others voluntarily evolve.

Writers are at their best not when they tell people what to think but when they provide a context within which others can think. Man listens more willingly to witnesses than teachers, and if he does listen to teachers, it’s because they are witnesses.

An extrovert walks into a party and sees a different room than an introvert does.

A person is a point of view. We take the events of life and, over time, create a very personal way of seeing the world. Each person takes the experiences of a lifetime and integrates them into a complex representation of the world. A distinct way of seeing. People don’t see the world with their eyes; they see it with their entire life.

Someone who can tell funny stories? That’s a raconteur, but it’s not a conversationalist. Someone who can offer piercing insights on a range of topics? That’s a lecturer, but not a conversationalist. A good conversation sparks you to have thoughts you never had before.

There is a “novelty penalty” when we speak. People have trouble picturing and getting excited about the unfamiliar, but they love to talk about what they know.

People aren’t specific enough when they tell stories. They tend to leave out the concrete details. But if you ask them specific questions... (“Where was your boss sitting when he said that? And what did you say in response?”) ... they are likely to revisit the moment in a more vivid way.

The experience of being listened to all the way on something - until your meaning is completely clear to another human being - is extremely rare in life.

Nobody escapes high school. Whatever your high school fears were, they are still there.

Asking good questions can be a weirdly vulnerable activity. You’re admitting that you don’t know. Sometimes a broad, dumb question is better than a smart question, especially one meant to display how well-informed you are. The worst kinds of questions imply, “I’m about to judge you.”

Encourage the other person to take control and take the conversation where they want it to go.

Big questions interrupt the daily routines people fall into and prompt them to step back and see their life from a distance.

* “What crossroads are you at?” * “If you died tonight, what would you regret not doing?” * “Can you be yourself where you are and still fit in?” * “What is the no, or refusal, you keep postponing?” * “What have you said yes to that you no longer really believe in?” * “What forgiveness are you withholding?” * “How have you contributed to the problem you’re trying to solve?” * “Tell me about a time you adapted to change.” * “What’s working really well in your life?” * “What are you most self-confident about?” * “Which of your five senses is strongest?”

People are longing to be asked questions about who they are.

Social disconnection warps the mind. When people feel unseen, they tend to shut down socially. People who are lonely and unseen become suspicious. They start to take offense where none is intended. They become afraid of the very thing they need most. People become proud of their bitterness. To be moral in this world, they think you just have to feel properly enraged at the people you find contemptible. It’s a sadistic striving for domination. Love rejected comes back as hatred.

As a society, we have failed to teach the skills and cultivate the inclination to treat each other with kindness, generosity, and respect. How to restrain their selfishness and incline their heart to care more about others. How to find a purpose, so their life has stability, direction, and meaning. Basic social and emotional skills so you can be kind and considerate to the people around you. The breakdown in basic moral skills produced disconnection, alienation, and a culture in which cruelty was permitted.

If you want to know someone well, you have to see the person in front of you as a distinct and never-to-be repeated individual. But you’ve also got to see that person as a member of their groups. And you’ve also got to see their social location - the way some people are insiders and other people are outsiders, how some sit on the top of society and some are marginalized to the fringes. The trick is to be able to see each person on these three levels all at once.

Every conversation takes place on two levels: the official conversation and the actual conversation. The actual conversation occurs in the ebb and flow of underlying emotions that get transmitted as we talk. With every comment you are either making me feel a little more safe or a little more threatened. With every comment I am showing you either respect or disrespect. With every comment we are each revealing something about our intentions: “Here is why I am telling you this. Here is why this is important to me.”

Every conversation exists within a frame: What is the purpose here? What are our goals? A frame is the stage on which the conversation takes place. I should have stayed within her frame a little longer, instead of trying to yank the conversation back to my frame. The person who is lower in any power structure than you are has a greater awareness of the situation than you do.

The achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.

Get into narrative mode. Don’t ask, “What do you think about X?” Instead, “How did you come to believe X?” This is a framing that invites people to tell a story about what events led them to think the way they do. Don’t ask people to tell their values. Instead, “Tell me about the person who shaped your values most.” “Where’d you grow up?” “When did you know that you wanted to spend your life this way?”

Ask about intentions and goals. I’m asking myself as people tell me their stories: What’s the plot here? I’m not just listening to other people’s stories; I’m helping them create their stories.

Culture is a shared symbolic landscape that we use to construct our reality.

People who are descended from those who practiced plow-heavy agriculture tend to live in cultures that have strongly defined gender roles, because it was mostly men who drove the plow. People who are descended from those who did non-plow farming tend to have less defined gender roles. People descended from sheepherding cultures tend to be individualistic, because a shepherd’s job requires him to go off on his own. People descended from rice-farming cultures tend to be very interdependent, because everybody has to work together to raise and harvest rice.

For Jews, argument is a form of prayer.

When I’m trying to know you, I’m going to want to ask you how your ancestors show up in your life. That means asking certain key questions: * Where’s home? * What’s the place you spiritually never leave? * How do the dead show up in your life? * How do I see you embracing or rejecting your culture? * How do I see you creating and contributing to your culture? * How do I see you transmitting your culture? * How do I see you rebelling against your culture? * How do I see you caught between cultures?

WISE PEOPLE: Wise people don’t just possess information; they possess a compassionate understanding of other people. Wise people don’t tell us what to do; they start by witnessing our story. They take the anecdotes, rationalizations, and episodes we tell, and see us. They see the way we’re navigating the dialectics of life - intimacy versus independence, control versus uncertainty - and understand that our current self is just where we are right now, part of a long continuum of growth. They’re really good confidants - the people we go to when we are troubled - are more like coaches than philosopher-kings. They take in your story, accept it, but push you to clarify what it is you really want, or to name the baggage you left out of your clean tale. They ask you to probe into what is really bothering you, to search for the deeper problem underneath the convenient surface problem you’ve come to them for help about. Wise people don’t tell you what to do; they help you process your own thoughts and emotions. They enter with you into your process of meaning-making and then help you expand it, push it along. Wise people create a safe space where you can navigate the ambiguities and contradictions we all wrestle with. Receptivity, the capacity to receive what you are sending. Creating an atmosphere of hospitality, Free to be yourself, encouraged to be honest with yourself. Wise people help you come up with a different way of looking at yourself, your past, and the world around you. Very often they focus your attention on your relationships.

In Praise of Commercial Culture - by Tyler Cowen

2025-11-24T05:00:00Z

summary:

Cultural optimism! I’d never considered that term before, but I love its mindset. My life was changed when Camille Paglia said, in the 90s, that Hollywood movies are the high art of our times. It enriched my life to see them that way ever since. Now in this book Tyler uses her statement as an example of cultural optimism. I see it in his day-to-day writing and podcasting too. I recommend this book for its focus on that, and great art/cutlure insights. But the book is 25 years old now, with expired references, and he’s improved so much as a writer since then.

recommend: 4/10

my notes:

Successful high culture usually comes out of a healthy and prosperous popular culture.

Economic incentives affect the artist’s choice of audience. Poetry costs very little to write, and therefore can appeal to minority tastes. Most movies, in contrast, must cover their high capital costs.

Artistic values: One point of view = There’s nothing that an audience won’t understand. The only problem is to interest them. Once they are interested, they understand anything in the world. Another point of view = Masterpieces are inaccessible to most readers. Only those who read, reread, and study the classic works can hope to unlock their secrets. A work easily accessible on first reading is unlikely to be truly great. The best writers know far more than their audiences. ... Capitalism can support each kind of art.

Cultural optimist position: Modern creators offer a large variety of deep and lasting creations that are universal and significant. These creations delight and enrich large numbers of intelligent listeners, and continue to influence subsequent artists. We can expect many modern and contemporary works to stand the test of time.

Cultural pessimists take a strongly negative view of modernity, believing that the market economy corrupts culture. Pessimism of the neo-conservatives often extends beyond culture in the narrow sense. Many neo-conservatives believe that Western civilization is collapsing under a plague of permissiveness, crime, and loss of community.

Camille Paglia defends the Rolling Stones and Hollywood cinema as artistically vital forces in the modern world. She writes favorably about how capitalist wealth has stimulated artistic production.

Literacy has been increasing over time, rather than decreasing.

Material wealth helps relax external constraints on internal artistic creativity, motivates artists to reach new heights, and enables a diversity of artistic forms and styles to flourish.

Artists work to achieve self-fulfillment, fame, and riches. The complex motivations behind artistic creation include love of the beautiful, love of money, love of fame, personal arrogance, and inner compulsions. Creators hold strong desires to be heard and witnessed. The highest ambition of every artist is to be thought a man of genius.

Consumers and patrons stand as the artist’s silent partners. We support creators with our money, our time, our emotions, and our approbation. We discover subtle nuances in their work that the artists had not noticed or consciously intended. Inspired consumption is a creative act that further enriches the viewer and the work itself.

Wealth and financial security give artists the scope to reject societal values. The bohemian, the avant-garde, and the nihilist are all products of capitalism. They have pursued forms of liberty and inventiveness that are unique to the modern world.

A large market for art lowers the costs of creative pursuits and makes market niches easier to find. In the contrary case of a single patron, the artist must meet the tastes of that patron. Today it is easier than ever before to make a living by marketing to an artistic niche.

Stravinsky, Picasso, and the Beatles outpaced their competitors, at least for a while, by undergoing several metamorphoses of style.

Artistic fertilizations and innovations also occur backwards in time, as later works improve the quality of earlier ones by changing their meaning. Verdi’s opera Otello and Orson Welles’s film Othello tell us more about Shakespeare’s Othello than does any piece of literary criticism. These variations on the work, through different media and presentation, enable us to see Shakespeare’s work anew. The more notable works that are produced, the greater the significance of the best works from the past. The present therefore deserves at least partial credit for our understanding of the past.

The very best creators manage to anticipate the future development of their genre and to produce works that will subsequently exhibit an ever greater richness.

Growth eventually transforms popular culture into high culture. As popular culture genres lower their costs, they achieve the potential for greater diversity and exoticism. Art films, documentaries, and avant-garde movies have expanded since the early days of the medium.

Charles Perrault’s late seventeenth-century versions of folk tales - “Mother Goose,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” and “Sleeping Beauty” - served as a broadside in these debates. Perrault defended cultural optimism and printing with enthusiasm. By writing his fairy tales, he hoped to show that modernity could match such ancient achievements as Aesop’s Fables.

Criticisms of contemporary culture strongly resemble the criticisms leveled at past masterworks.

History often judges a culture differently than do critics or participants of that time.

A culture already admired by the establishment usually is a culture whose best days lie in the past.

Pessimists focus on the decline of what they like and neglect the nascent forces that will appeal to others.

Cultural products compete with churches and religious figures for the attention of the populace. Religious and ideological competition tend to turn monotheism into polytheism. Islam, the most self-consciously monotheistic of the major religions, has placed especially severe restrictions on the depiction of images in the mosque.

Cultural pessimism is not easily accountable to controlled experiment. The magician can be asked to perform, but the cultural pessimist need only point to artistic failures

The Christian right are not concerned first and foremost about family values per se. Family is a codeword for constraint. Families and family values place constraints on individuals more effectively than any other institution, including government. The Christian right seeks a society in which all are constrained. They reject big government for failing at constraint. This hidden agenda helps account for the obsession of the Christian right with homosexuals: Gay males often have no commitments to children, and no other culture has so proudly paraded a conscious rejection of external constraint.

Multiculturalists have shied away from the cultural optimist position. Cultural optimism would create the impression that today’s world, no matter how imperfect, was somehow on the right track. Embracing cultural optimism might also appear to diminish the moral force of past injustices.

Cultural pessimists seem to enjoy envisioning themselves as superior to the medium of TV. Deep down, an improvement in the quality of television would disappoint them by removing this source of satisfaction.

Pessimists who question contemporary trends help the modern world sort out good from bad. If no one attacked contemporary culture, our understanding of that culture would remain at a low level. The attacks force us go back and reread, relisten, and reexamine our basic assumptions about art.

Bohemians write or paint in response to the establishment. The criticism they encounter helps them define their roles as outsiders and innovators.

We understand Gauguin better by knowing what his work reacted against. The Clash and the Sex Pistols were fortunate to have had Margaret Thatcher in office during a period of resurgent social conservatism.

A sense of impending decline sometimes will spur cultural creativity. Pessimistic creators wish to capture a mood, spirit, or times before it vanishes.

Stefan Zweig and Arthur Rubinstein, who portrayed the decline of pre-War Europe in their writings, in fact produced some of the finest portraits of that world.

Mathematica - by David Bessis, Kevin Frey

2025-11-14T05:00:00Z

summary:

Math is imagination, visualization, and intuition. The symbols are just a language to explain the mind’s image - like sheet music. You can train your intuition and develop visualization skills with practice. Math is an inner tool to enhance human cognition, more akin to psychology.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

If we taught children music by giving them the written scores to decipher - without their ever having heard it played - music would be as universally hated as math.

Intuition is the soul of mathematics.

No one really knows how to define mathematics.

By studying math, you can learn how to translate your visual intuition into rigorous proofs. It will never be a perfect translation. It takes a lot of words to express a simple intuition. It all seems so clear in your head. But once you start to write it down, it seems technical and complicated.

There are many different sizes of infinity that can be precisely described.

Everyone around me seemed to be better at math. I wanted to know how to do real math, difficult math. But all that I was able to learn was the easy math. It was only an optical illusion. The horizon was shifting with me - always staying at my level. When you learn a magic trick, it ceases being magical. That may be sad, but you’d better get used to it. If you find that the math you do understand is too easy, it’s not because it’s easy, it’s because you understand it.

He doesn’t really read what’s in the book. He prefers to concentrate on “the thoughts between the lines.” Once he has a clear idea, the formalism and all the technical details suddenly seem useless and superfluous: “When the idea is clear, the formal setup is usually unnecessary and redundant. I often feel that I could write it out myself more easily than figuring out what the authors actually wrote.” “It’s like a new toaster that comes with a 16-page manual: If you already understand toasters and if the toaster looks like previous toasters you’ve encountered, you might just plug it in and see if it works, rather than first reading all the details in the manual.”

You’re capable of synesthesia. Looking at the word chocolate, are you able to sense a sound, a color, a taste? Looking at “999,999,999,” do you get the feeling of something large? Be aware of your capability for synesthesia and try to develop it systematically. Secret math is a mental yoga whose goal is to retake control over our ability for synesthesia.

Mathematics is a sensual and carnal experience that is located upstream from language.

The quality of your inventiveness and your imagination comes from the quality of your attention, listening to the voice of things.

You find yourself in the pilot’s seat of a commercial jet or the command post of a nuclear generator: There are a lot of buttons and screens, but you have no clue how they work and an intense desire not to make a mistake. You would love to know how it all works, but you don’t. The normal reaction is to stay seated and not touch anything. Before making any move you need to study and think about it. But if you put any two-year-old in the pilot’s seat, they’ll act differently. They’ll push all the buttons, starting with ones that are red or blinking. Act like the two-year-old. When you want to understand something, go straight at it, without hesitations, as a child would. Don’t wait to understand before launching into it. Act without thinking, a bit haphazardly.

Interrogating things, listening to the voice of things, means trying to imagine them, examining the mental images that form within you, seeking to solidify these images and make them clearer, working at unveiling more and more details, as when you try to recall a dream.

It’s worthless to gather information about things that you can’t yet see. Instead, allow yourself to imagine the things right away, without waiting. Even when you’re well aware that it might not work and your mental images will likely be terribly wrong. Don’t be afraid of failure. Even be certain that you’ll be wrong, and that’s exactly what you’re looking for. Actively seek out the error as a young child actively seeks mischief.

Each time you find something bizarre or intriguing, unclear or unsatisfactory, incoherent or disagreeable, that’s where you began digging. Finding mistakes is a crucial moment, a creative moment, in all work of discovery. It’s a moment when our knowledge of the thing being examined is suddenly renewed.

Fear of mistakes and fear of the truth is one and the same thing. The person who fears being wrong is powerless to discover anything new.

Learning to see, to walk, use a spoon, tie your shoelaces, talk, read and write, is always about reconfiguring your brain. And it’s never done in one shot. Children don’t learn how to walk until they’ve tried and failed. They need to fall in order to learn how to stand up. It’s the accumulation of errors that allow them to develop their intuitive sense of balance.

Logic doesn’t help you think. It helps you find out where you’re thinking wrong.

The written transcription of what seems obvious to you might be 10, 100, 1000 times as long as the summary you make for yourself in your head. Even then, you’ll have to leave aside a bunch of details you won’t have the heart to write down. Visualize what you do when you tie your shoes. Now take pen and paper and try to describe each movement exactly, so that an absolute beginner could follow your instructions and get the same result.

Mathematical comprehension is creating within yourself the right mental images in place of a formal definition, to turn this definition into something intuitive, to “feel” what it is really talking about.

Mathematicians use logic and language as an apparatus for learning to see.

If you’ve never learned to think in multiple dimensions, you’ve missed out on one of the great joys of life. It’s like you’ve never seen the ocean, or never eaten chocolate.

When you look at photos, you have the sense of actually seeing scenes that occur in three dimensions. It doesn’t require any particular effort. It doesn’t tire you out.

Transforming mathematical definitions into mental images is so important. When you’re unable to imagine mathematical objects, you don’t really understand them.

The fourth dimension is whatever you want it to be. When you do geometry in two dimensions, on a plane, a point is determined by two coordinates, generally called x and y, that represent exactly what you want them to represent. In a space with ten dimensions, a point is determined by ten coordinates that are generally called x1...x10. If you want these coordinates to represent something, it can be whatever you want. If you wanted to describe the geographic expansion of an invasive population of rabbits, you would need to think in four dimensions, since you’d need four coordinates: longitude, latitude, time, and population density.

The sole function of mathematical statements is to help you generate mental images, and only these images will lead to comprehension. Once you have the correct mental images, everything else becomes clear.

Mathematical intuition is so banal, simple, and stupid, that you need a lot of self-confidence not to throw it in the trash.

The work of reeducation is based on the repetition of the same exercises of imagination. Progress is slow because the body needs time to transform itself. You just need to commit to a regular training schedule.

Five-dimensional shapes are hard to visualize - but it doesn’t mean you can’t think about them. Thinking is really the same as seeing. For a mathematician, “seeing” signifies thinking in a rapid and intuitive manner, directly, without need for reflection, as if the object really existed, as if it were right there in front of you.

The essence of mental plasticity is to transform audacity into competence. The process is slow and invisible, and at first success seems unachievable. That’s the biological reality of our learning mechanisms. By an unfortunate coincidence, that’s also the perfect recipe for discouragement. You need a lot of self-control and self-confidence to commit to a process that’s confusing, slow, and uncertain.

Try to recall your dreams, to put words to the fleeting impression that left a strange taste in your mouth, to sort out your most confused and contradictory ideas.

The stupid images in my head had a tendency to correct themselves once I made the effort to describe and name them, when I got into the habit of lending an ear to the dissonance between my intuition and logic.

If my intuition tells me to choose option A and my reason tells me to choose option B? I tell myself there’s something going on and I’m not ready to make the decision. That’s the moment to resort to an assortment of introspection and meditation techniques aimed at establishing a dialogue between intuition and rationality. In practical terms, here’s what that means. When my intuition tells me A and rationality tells me B, I put myself in the position of a referee. I force myself to translate my intuition into words, to tell it like a simple and intelligible story. Vice versa, I try to picture what logical reasoning is actually expressing, to experience it in my body, to hear what it’s trying to say. I ask myself if I really believe it. The goal is to understand where things are going wrong. In the end, it’s almost always my intuition that wins. When I force it to listen to what logic is saying, it takes that into account and adjusts its position. Logic is something inert, like a pebble. My intuition is organic, it is living and growing. I’m personally incapable of thinking against my intuition and I have serious doubts as to the sincerity of people who claim they can.

When I’m able to put my finger on an error in my intuition, I know it’s good news, because it means that my mental representations are already in the process of reconfiguring themselves.

You can reprogram your intuition. Any misalignment between your intuition and reason is an opportunity to create within yourself a new way of seeing things. Don’t expect it all to come at once, in real time. Developing mental images means reorganizing the connections between your neurons. This process is organic and has its own pace. Don’t force it. Simply start from what you already understand, what you can already see, what you find easy, and just play with it. Try to intuitively interpret the calculations you would have written down. If it helps, scribble on a piece of paper. With time and practice, this activity will strengthen your intuitive capacities. It may not seem like you’re making progress, until the day the right answer suddenly seems obvious.

Nothing is counterintuitive by nature. Something is only ever counterintuitive temporarily, until you’ve found means to make it intuitive. Explaining something to others is proposing simple ways of making it intuitive.

Every time we practice a given activity we habituate our System 1 to the specifics of that activity.

By telling us there was a “trick,” he sent us the wrong message. There are no tricks. There never were any and there never will be. Believing in the existence of tricks is as toxic as believing in the existence of truths that are counterintuitive by nature.

Superstition: This belief that our intuition isn’t worth a dime and that we have to mechanically apply methods that we don’t fully understand.

It can happen that things work without our understanding. But it’s always a temporary situation that’s just waiting for an explanation. Believing that tricks exist is to accept the idea that there are things you’ll never understand and that you have to learn by heart.

Each time someone talks to you about “tricks,” they’re telling you to stop thinking at precisely the moment when it starts to get interesting.

Mathematics is the science of imagination. The real enemy of imagination, which blocks understanding and makes us feel like fools, is fear.

Descartes positioned himself in opposition to official knowledge. He lived in a world where truth was still conflated with authority: truth was tradition, what was written in books.

Take doubt seriously. Everyone can get personal benefit from Cartesian doubt.

You can only doubt with your gut. All Cartesian doubt is visceral. Doubt is personal and intimate.

To doubt is to give an argument the sniff test and sense that there’s something off. It’s allowing yourself to ask, “What? Really?” To doubt something is to be able to imagine a scenario, even seemingly improbable, where the thing could be untrue. Doubt not only what others say, but also, and above all, your own certitudes. Cartesian doubt is a universal technique for reprogramming your intuition. Doubt is a technique of mental clarification. It serves to construct rather than destroy.

Arrogant people who love being contradicted? Show-offs who smile when you prove them wrong? Dogmatists ready to change their mind in a heartbeat? I’ve encountered this singular attitude only among very good mathematicians.

If only the mental actions of mathematicians were visible. In losing the possibility of imitation, we also lose our main driver of desire. When you were a child, no one needed to make you want to ride a bike. No one had to convince you that it would serve you well later on in life, or that it would look good on your CV. You saw other kids riding bikes. You liked it and you wanted to do the same.

Transcribing my dreams: As an effect of my trying to memorize them and put them into words, my dreams grew in richness and precision. Each with a complete story and enough details to fill up a lot of pages. I wasn’t looking for meaning in them. I just wanted to master the art of writing them down. To me, this is the essence of writing. Starting from images and sensations and seeking a way to render them in words, to make them clear and solid. Transcribing the situations, what’s at stake - capturing the moods, the music, the smells, the textures. If you can do that, you can do anything. It’s an ability you develop through practice. There are techniques to begin and techniques to get better. The more faithfully you learn to transcribe what you see, the more you see.

The special state of mind just before falling asleep: On subjects that preoccupy me, I let myself be filled with them. Contemplating it without a goal, almost like dreaming. I try to remember all the rooms I’ve slept in.

To practice switching viewpoints, a good exercise: 1. Choose a random reference point around you, for example, the corner opposite from you in a room, or the window of a house when you’re walking in the street. 2. Try to imagine what you’d see if you were looking in your direction from this reference point.

Creativity emerges when we force ourselves to continue looking at things that intimidate us until they finally become familiar and obvious.

Our well-being depends on many things we do that are hard to explain in an intellectual way. Bare reason is likely to lead you astray. None of us are smart and wise enough to figure it out intellectually.

When someone comes up with a reasoning where everything all fits together too neatly, suspect that something isn’t right. In some cases, rationality leads you astray from the truth. You can apply the methods used by mathematicians outside of math. But when we use it outside of mathematics, we need to be careful: it’s only within mathematics that this method is able to produce unshakeable truths. By anchoring our convictions in indisputable evidence and rigorous deduction, we can turn them into certitudes that, over time, become as strong as reinforced concrete. Except that sometimes these certitudes are false.

The riddle of the chicken and the egg is supposed to present us with a “paradox.” A sort of unbreachable wall to human comprehension, before which we have no other choice but to bow down. Being a paradox is always a temporary status, in wait of a resolution. Presenting a problem as structurally being a paradox is just a pompous way of saying you can’t solve it. This way of solving the riddle, however, leaves aside its most troubling aspect: Why was there a riddle in the first place? How can it be that, starting from a hypothesis that is indisputably true, following a reasoning that is indisputably correct, we arrive at a conclusion that is indisputably false? Language is structurally incompatible with logical reasoning, and we can never have 100 percent certainty in truths expressed in human language and arrived at through deductive logic.

Rationality should be used as a guide rather than an ultimate judge.

When we say that something is “true,” we never mean it literally. We only ever use the word as a shortcut for all these other things, because otherwise we’d have no occasion to use it.

In acknowledging the intrinsic limitations of our language, Wittgenstein made one of the great philosophical breakthroughs: He broke with a multi-millennial tradition dominated by metaphysics, in which philosophers believed that it was possible to attack, using rationality, problems

Math is an inner tool. Its main purpose is to enhance human cognition. To develop an intuitive and familiar understanding of mathematical notions extends our intuitive understanding of the world. The math that you understand augments reality and adds layer of intelligibility.

Without numbers, without your perception of points and trajectories in a three-dimensional space, without x and y, without the concepts of distance, speed, and acceleration, without probabilities, ... the whole world around you would suddenly become so blurred and unsteady that you’d feel like you’d been lobotomized.

In the 1800s, there were still serious mathematicians who claimed that negative numbers were nothing but a fairy tale. In the 1500s, even their advocates labeled them absurd numbers. Since then, it’s as if reality itself had changed.

In practice, mathematics doesn’t have much to do with the hard sciences. It’s rather more related to psychology, of which it’s a kind of esoteric and applied sub-branch.

To understand math is to reprogram your intuition. It’s a matter of neuroplasticity.

We learn precisely when we force ourselves to imagine things that we don’t yet understand.

Vagabonding - by Rolf Potts

2025-11-05T05:00:00Z

summary:

I read it long after release, when its ideas are thoroughly ingested into my culture, so it had few surprises. I prefer his newer “Vagabond’s Way”.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

Three general methods to simplifying your life: 1. stopping expansion 2. reining in your routine 3. reducing clutter.

The best way to prepare for a trip was to “throw some tea and bread into an old sack and jump over the back fence.”

Vagabonding is like a pilgrimage without a specific destination or goal.

Tourists from Los Angeles will travel to Thailand to see relatively modernized Hmong villagers don ethnic costumes, yet those same tourists would never think to visit a community of similarly modern Hmong-Americans in Los Angeles. People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.

Which is the real adventure: Buying into a guided expedition? Or lingering for a few weeks in some Bolivian village to learn a local craft without fully knowing the local language?

The secret of adventure, then, is not to carefully seek it out but to travel in such a way that it finds you. To do this, you first need to overcome the protective habits of home and open yourself up to unpredictability.

View each new travel frustration — sickness, fear, loneliness, boredom, conflict — as just another curious facet.

Adventurous men enjoy shipwrecks, mutinies, earthquakes, conflagrations, and all kinds of unpleasant experiences. What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is golden for him who has the vision to realize it as such.

At home, political convictions are a tool for getting things done within your community. On the road, political convictions are a clumsy set of experiential blinders, compelling you to seek evidence for conclusions you’ve already drawn. If a Japanese college student tells you that finding a good husband is more important than feminist independence, she is not contradicting your world so much as giving you an opportunity to see hers. If a Paraguayan barber insists that dictatorship is superior to democracy, you might just learn something by putting yourself in his shoes and hearing him out. Mute your compulsion to judge what is right and wrong, good and bad, proper and improper. Have the tolerance and patience to try to see things for what they are.

Create Your Own Economy - by Tyler Cowen

2025-10-28T04:00:00Z

summary:

Surprised me by being a book about autism. But it had some good points anyway.

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

Framing effects are irrational but framing effects help. We spend time and energy framing things in the right way so that we can enjoy them more or learn more from them. Framing helps us care and it gives meaning to our experiences.

Good mental ordering is how you can create your own set of frames and thereby create your own economy.

Autism often comes with problems. But a correlation should not be turned into a definition, any more than we should define sub-Saharan Africa as being full of poor people. If we define autism in terms of its problems, we will find it harder to understand how those problems come about, how to remedy them, and how to appreciate and build upon autistic strengths.

We tend to miss unfamiliar forms of beauty, hidden to us because they are hard to see from the outside looking in. We now have unprecedented access to small bits of culture.

When it comes to romance not so many people are willing to fly across the country for a peck on the cheek. When the cost of a trip is high, usually you want to make sure it is worth your while. It was common for a classical music concert to last five or six hours. If people were walking long distances or arriving by slow coach, the trip had to be worth their while. When access is easy, we tend to favor the short, the sweet, and the bitty. When access is difficult, we tend to look for large-scale productions, extravaganzas, and masterpieces.

Shorter bits of culture makes it easier to try new things - to indulge your desire to sample. You want to be trying new things all the time so you have something to look forward to and so you have the thrill of ongoing discovery.

A blog will fail if the blogger doesn’t post every day or at least every weekday. People don’t like the idea of visiting the blog and coming away empty-handed. In my emotional universe that site no longer exists for me and it holds a status lower than the proverbial needle in the haystack. Top websites supply of new bits of information and pleasure each day.

Individuals can learn to improve their productivity at multitasking and task-switching. Small bits are building blocks for seeing and understanding some larger trends and narratives.

There is no information overload, there is only filter failure.

Shift in the meaning of cultural literacy: Not whether you know the classics but whether you can operate an iPhone

Bypass traditional cultural canons and go to a more direct perception of the underlying aesthetic values.

Daydreaming = internally directed resting thoughts.

No one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated? Maybe that’s what current methods of education already consist of.

Buyers of useless things are wiser than is commonly supposed. They buy little dreams.

Smith’s life’s work was to mix economic reasoning with Stoic moral philosophy and applied psychology, most of which he generated from his own reasoning.

A lot of human behavior is about creating artificial scarcity and then choosing a quest. Quests are stories of overcoming scarcity. If you want to go on a meaningful quest, you must be lacking in something. The protagonist cannot focus on everything and thus must choose and discard priorities to define a preferred quest.

Paradise doesn’t make for good fiction.

My dreams, my fantasies, my deepest visions of what I can be: I pull them from social context. I pull them from celebrities, from ads, from popular culture, and most generally from ideas that are easy to communicate and disseminate to large numbers of people. We all dream in pop culture language to some degree.

The choice is not “Fantasy: yes or no?” but rather “How much fantasy do we want in our lives?” Our minds shape and frame truth as much as track it. Few people would want, upon reflection, to live a life unadorned by the power of framing effects. Beneficial self-deception is common in human life. A lot of human achievement takes place only because we tell ourselves - often contrary to reason - that we are in fact smarter or wiser or better than other people. Let’s put down our polemic against living in our heads and let’s put down our bias against interiority. Let’s give our stories their proper due.

The more mixed the crowd, and the greater the number of dimensions of status and achievement, the greater the chance that unusual people will find a means of excelling or just surviving or fitting in. To put it another way, the mixing of populations lowers the cost of being unusual. It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.

In Japan there is explicit recognition of hobbyist obsession as a way of life. Tokyo is a paradise for people with unusual or highly specialized interests. Tokyo is the world’s biggest, richest, and most highly educated collection of consumers in one place. You’re supposed to obsess about things there and that’s part of the charm of the place. That’s why the Italian food in Japan is so good, even outside of the fine or expensive restaurants. The Japanese man cooking it probably had apprenticeship in Italy for a few years and he has been perfecting his technique ever since.

Advice on Upskilling - by Justin Skycak

2025-10-09T04:00:00Z

summary:

Super motivating book about effective learning and improvement. He’s a math, memory, and weightlifting expert from justinmath.com and MathAcademy.com, so the advice leans that way a bit, but applies to anything you want to learn.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Build a habit with some less effective but more enjoyable form of practice. Optimize for fun at the beginning to help you build a habit. Start simple, whatever gets the ball rolling. It will grow on you and seep into your identity Procrastinating builds up the dread. Just getting started makes it dissipate. Once you've got a good habit going, do everything you can to protect it.

Hardcore skills are always the answer. People want to make a big impact on the world and in their own lives. But desire is not enough. You can’t do anything big unless you have big skills. Hardcore skill development is also one of the greatest social mobility hacks.

Consuming is only helpful insofar as it enables you to produce.

Pursue a domain you love, but simultaneously get so insanely technically skilled at math and coding that you can apply them to your domain of interest in an innovative way. Deep domain expertise plus alien-level technical skills equals lots of interesting and rewarding work to do.

Learn the combination of: (1) Domain expertise to identify an important problem and envision a solution, (2) math and coding to build it, (3) communication to deliver it. Without (1) domain expertise you'll choose an unimportant problem or your solution won't really solve the problem (because you don't really understand the problem). Without (2) math and coding you'll be limited to whatever someone or something else (without domain expertise) can build for you. Without (3) communication skills your solution won't be understood and adopted: You'll mistake lack of traction for lack of merit when it's really just a failure to articulate value.

You can make serious progress climbing pretty much any skill tree if you just put in 30 minutes of focused effort every day. But it has to be fully focused, continually upping the level of challenge. Work intensely enough that you come out of each session seriously winded. Your brain feels like mush or your body feels like jell-o.

To get the equivalent of 30 minutes full-assed, you have to put in at least 2 hours half-assed. If you put in 30 minutes half-assed, you get the equivalent of 7.5 minutes full-assed, which doesn’t move the needle fast enough. What you expect to take 5+ years turns out to only take a single year or less if you train seriously, consistently, efficiently. Don't get discouraged by how long it takes people who don't take their training seriously.

The most superior form of training is “deliberate practice”: mindful repetition on performance tasks just beyond the edge of one’s capabilities.

Strain can be unpleasant. It’s taxing and it leaves you fatigued. You may feel weak, untalented, and dumb. You feel weak while exercising but you come back stronger. You feel dumb while studying but you come back smarter.

Ability is NOT something to be “unlocked” by curiosity and interest (which seems easy). It’s built by deliberate practice. Curiosity and interest “grease the wheels” but they don't actually move the wheels.

Confidence needs hindsight. If you feel confident, it’s not because the task in front of you seems easy It’s because you’ve been in situations before where tasks felt challenging relative to your abilities but you’ve always managed to come out successful.

Grinding through concrete examples gives you intuition that you will not get if you jump directly to studying the most abstract ideas. If you go directly to the most abstract ideas then you’re basically like a kid who reads a book of famous quotes about life and thinks they understand everything about life by way of those quotes. The way you come to understand life is not by just reading quotes. You have to actually accumulate lots of life experiences. You might think you understand the quotes when you’re young, but after you accumulate more life experience, you realize that you really had only the most naive, surface-level understanding of the quotes back then, and you really had no idea what the hell you were talking about.

A company's balance sheet can tell an incredibly interesting story if you have visceral experience with success and failure in business. But if you don't, then analyzing financials will make you feel like a robot checking whether numbers match semi-arbitrary conditions for being "good" or "bad".

If you’re pushing 25% of the time, then there would be a 4x multiplier by pushing 100% of the time. 4x speedup is the difference between a decade of work vs a couple years. If you’re pushing 90% of the time, then the multiplier is down to 1.1x. It’s basically max capitalization with a slight rounding error. That last turn of the dial from 90% to 100% is not going to change the overall outcome – all it will do is create regret in other areas of your life.

Practice is supposed to challenge you, but how hard is too hard? Focus less on feelings, and more on measurable progress.

Want to practice effectively? You absolutely must: 1) Have some concrete way of measuring your progress 2) Make sure that whatever you’re doing is actually increasing that progress 3) Make sure that the progress is increasing fast enough that you’ll reach your goal in a reasonable (but realistic) amount of time.

Get in this cycle: * Put in the work in a favorable practice environment. * Build up your ability. * What used to be hard becomes easy. * See the growth you've achieved. * Imagine how much more growth is in your near future. * Gain confidence in your present skills and future trajectory. * Gain motivation to keep on working hard.

Benjamin Bloom discovered this in the 1980s while studying the training backgrounds of 120 world-class talented individuals across 6 talent domains (piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, and neurology): + STAGE 1: Fun and exciting playtime. Students start to develop awareness and interest in the talent domain. Teacher provides copious positive feedback and approval, and encourages students to explore whatever aspects of the talent domain they find most exciting. Students are rewarded for effort rather than for achievement, and criticism is rare. + STAGE 2: Intense and strenuous skill development. Students are committed to increasing performance. Teacher becomes or is replaced by a coach, who focuses on training exercises where the sole purpose is to improve performance. Exercises are demanding, and coach provides constructive criticism to help the student perform the exercises properly. Positive feedback is provided in response to achievement. Effort is assumed. + STAGE 3: Developing individual style while pushing the boundaries of the field. Students are proficient in the foundational skills. They are so committed that they center their entire lives around the talent domain, no matter the sacrifice, and typically work with a world-class expert in the talent domain. Expert helps the student identify and lean into their individual strengths so that they can excel beyond perceived human capabilities. + However, there are several failure modes that one can run into when attempting to make the journey through these stages: + FAILURE 1: The permastudent perpetually avoids the leap into creative production, opting instead to “expand sideways” and acquire skills that are not foundational for their talent domain. + FAILURE 2: The wannabe jumps the gun on creative production before their foundational skills are in place. They build a portfolio of work that lacks substance and is made trivial by foundational knowledge. Not only is it cringe, but it also has high opportunity cost because all this time could be put to better use actually acquiring the foundational knowledge. + FAILURE 3: The dilettante cuts their journey even shorter than the permastudent – they never even make it past playtime, they never commit to serious foundational skill development in anything. The dilettante spends all their time in the land of diminishing returns, engaging in perpetual playtime across a large number of talent domains.

If you’re not measuring performance and taking actions to improve it, then you’re not seriously training. You’re just playing around.

Day-to-day variety can arise from focusing single-mindedly on one big mission.

One of the best career hacks for a junior is to knock out your work so quickly and so well that you put pressure on your boss to come up with more work for you.

Consistently hardcore people achieve extraordinary outcomes through extraordinary actions. These actions go beyond the ordinary and are often seen as crazy. Framed as love, this is familiar: everyone knows that love makes people do crazy things.

Why extrinsic motivation matters: People whose motivation is entirely intrinsic sometimes prioritize “fascinating distractions” over other things that would be more productive to their long-term happiness. Intrinsic motivation gets you working on interesting things with a unique perspective. Extrinsic motivation keeps you on the rails with your long-term goals and keeps you from falling victim to fascinating distractions.

For super-productivity, interleave a wide variety of productive work that you enjoy. You get tired, bored, and unproductive if you’re moving along one dimension for too long.

Fluency in consuming information is not a proxy for actual learning. You haven’t learned unless you’re able to consistently reproduce the information you consumed and use it to solve problems. That comfortable fluency you feel while following along is arising from the fact that the surrounding context is already on your mind – you’re not made to pull it from long-term memory. When you feel like you’re absorbing information while passively following along, what you perceive is information sitting in your working memory, not your long-term memory. If you want to test whether information is in your long-term memory, you have to actively attempt to retrieve it when it's not already at the front of your mind Switch over to active problem-solving immediately after consuming a minimum effective dose of information. Reviews should feel as mentally taxing as initial learning.

In weightlifting, you need to increase the weight to the point where you struggle to lift it, but you are able to overcome the struggle. That’s how you build muscle, and that’s also how you build long-term memory. Spaced repetition = “wait”lifting. Spaced repetition is so similar to weight training that you might as well call it wait training. You’re lifting a memory off the floor of long-term memory and raising it up into working memory. The fuzzier that memory, the harder it is to lift. The wait creates the weight. And just like successfully lifting heavy weight strengthens muscles, successfully recalling a fuzzy memory (lengthy wait) strengthens memory.

The typical approach to education involves maximizing other things like fun and entertainment while, as a secondary concern, meeting some low bar for shallowly learning some surface-level basic skills.

Every time you study, imagine the Grim Reaper is going to show up at the end of your session to quiz you on what you covered, and if there’s any question you can’t answer correctly, you die. Whatever study techniques you’d use in that situation, you better be using them already.

Learning is memory. Understanding amounts to memory that is well-connected and deeply ingrained. If someone is "just memorizing" as opposed to "deeply understanding," it really means they haven’t stored enough information in memory.

The most effective way to learn is to use memory-supporting training techniques. It’s easy to get confused, thinking: "Truly understanding something is different from just memorizing it, so learning doesn’t require memory-focused techniques like retrieval practice, spaced review, and interleaving (mixed practice). Those are about memorization, not true understanding." If that’s what you think, then you'll likely shirk the hard work required to build memory,

Cosmopolitanism - by Kwame Anthony Appiah

2025-09-28T04:00:00Z

summary:

So many interesting ideas and questions about relativism, beliefs vs desires, openness, authenticity, pluralism.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Cynics ~400 BC first coined the word “cosmopolitan”: citizen of the cosmos. It was meant to be paradoxical. A citizen belonged to a city to which he or she owed loyalty. Cosmopolitanism originally signaled a rejection of the conventional view that every civilized person belonged to a community among communities.

There is much to learn from our differences. We neither expect nor desire that every person or every society should converge on a single mode of life.

Hitler and Stalin launched regular invectives against “rootless cosmopolitans”. Anti-cosmopolitanism was often just a euphemism for anti-Semitism. Patriotism requires loyalty to one portion of humanity - a nation, a class - ruling out loyalty to all of humanity.

How real are values? What do we talk about when we talk about difference? Is any form of relativism right? When do morals and manners clash? Can culture be “owned”? What do we owe strangers by virtue of our shared humanity?

A cosmopolitan openness to the world: picking and choosing among the options you find in your search.

Words like “right” and “wrong” make sense only relative to particular customs, conventions, cultures.

What grounds modern relativism is a scientific worldview that makes a sharp distinction between facts and values.

Those who claim that they are just talking common sense are in the grip of an old theory.

Beliefs are supposed to reflect how the world is. Desires reflect how we’d like it to be. Beliefs are meant to fit the world. The world is meant to fit desires. So beliefs can be true or false, reasonable or unreasonable. Desires are satisfied or unsatisfied. Beliefs are supposed to be formed on the basis of evidence. Desires are just facts about us.

In an earlier philosophical language, desires would have been called “passions” from a Latin root meaning something you suffer, or undergo. Because passions are just things that happen to us, no evidence determines which ones are right.

When we act, we use our beliefs about the world to figure out how to get what we desire.

Because beliefs are about the world, and there’s only one world, they can be either right or wrong, and we can criticize other people’s beliefs for being unreasonable or simply false. But desires can’t be right or wrong, in this sense, because desires are simply not responses to the world; they’re aimed at changing it, not at reflecting how it is.

Much of what we ordinarily desire has beliefs built into it. This is the only way desires can be criticized: by criticizing beliefs they presuppose.

Desires set the ends we aim for. Beliefs specify the means for getting to them.

When we talk about what we take to be universal values, we’re talking about what we want everyone to want. If we say democracy is valuable, then we want everyone to want to live in a democracy. We might say that someone who wants everyone to want X “believes that X is valuable,” but that is still just a complex desire. I value kindness intrinsically, unconditionally. Even if you showed me that some acts of kindness would have effects I didn’t want, that wouldn’t persuade me to give up kindness as a value. It would only show me that kindness can sometimes conflict with other things I care about. To value something is to want everyone to want it. Values are naturally imperialist.

Positivism doesn’t motivate intervention, but it doesn’t motivate nonintervention. British officer trying to stop a suttee was told by an Indian man, “It’s our custom to burn a widow on her husband’s funeral pyre.” To which the officer replied, “And it’s our custom to execute murderers.” Toleration is just another value.

Care how other people think and feel about stories? People tell stories - discussed, evaluated, referred to in everyday life. Evaluating stories together is one of the central human ways of aligning our responses to the world.

If relativism about ethics and morality were true, then at the end of many discussions, we would each have to end up saying, “From where I stand, I am right. From where you stand, you are right.”

Living effectively in different worlds: Without a shared world, what is there to discuss? People think relativism will lead to tolerance. But if we cannot learn from one another what it is right to think and feel and do, then conversation between us will be pointless. Relativism of that sort is just a reason to fall silent.

Ghana’s atheists could hold their meetings in a phone booth.

It’s impossible to present data in language that isn’t infused with theoretical ideas. What it’s reasonable for you to believe, as you look out on the world, depends both on what you believe already and on what ideas you have been introduced to.

Everyone has his own taboo: the ruler, the royal, and the slave. The ruler’s taboo is disagreement. The royal’s is disrespect The slave’s is the revealing of origins.

People eat pigs but won’t eat cats. Since there are societies where people eat cats, we know it’s possible. The defense is that the very thought of it fills them with disgust.

We defend them as rational, yet these reactions are not really explained by the stories we tell. You might think that failing to respect your parents is a bad thing, but that it’s bad in a way that’s different from adultery; different, too, from sex with an animal; different, again, from incest. In Leviticus 20:9–13, all of them are deemed worthy of death.

Courage is an intelligent response to danger, not just ignoring it.

When we disagree, it won’t always be because one of us just doesn’t understand the value that’s at stake.

Golden Rule: When you do something to someone, what you do can be truly described in infinitely many ways. I have to know not just why I am doing what I am doing unto others, but also how the act will strike those others.

Kant argued that whenever you were trying to pick the right thing to do, you should identify a universal principle on which to act (he called it a “maxim”). Universalizing the maxim: Would you be happy if everyone had to act on that maxim?

Tragedy is not a clash between good and evil but between two goods.

Be able to agree about practices while disagreeing about their justification.

In medieval Spain, Jews and Christians lived under Muslim rule. It was possible only because the various communities did not have to agree on a set of universal values. These historical examples of religious toleration were early experiments in multiculturalism. Shared values help us live together. But we don’t have a shared theory of value or a shared story. As long as this settled pattern is not seriously disrupted, we do not worry much about whether our fellow citizens agree with us or their theories about how to live.

We do what we do because it is just what we do. Justifications come not when we are going on in the usual way, but when we are thinking about change.

What moves people is a gradually acquired new way of seeing things. In places where a generation ago gays were social outcasts and gay acts were illegal, gay couples are increasingly being recognized by their families, by society, and by the law. What has produced this change? Instead of thinking about the private activity of gay sex, people started thinking about the public category of gay people, and got used to it.

We should learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another. We don’t understand things. We just get used to them.

We can live in harmony without agreeing on underlying values. It works the other way, too: We can find ourselves in conflict when we do agree on values.

One of the effects of colonialism was not only to give many of the natives a European language, but also to help shape their purposes. The independence movements of the post-1945 world that led to the end of Europe’s African and Asian empires were driven by the rhetoric that had guided the Allies’ own struggle against Germany and Japan: democracy, freedom, equality. This wasn’t a conflict between values. It was a conflict of interests couched in terms of the same values.

Conversations across boundaries of identity - whether national, religious, or something else - begin with the sort of imaginative engagement you get when you read a novel or watch a movie or attend to a work of art that speaks from some place other than your own. Conversation not only means literal talk but also as a metaphor for engagement with the experience and the ideas of others. It doesn’t have to lead to consensus. It’s enough that it helps people get used to one another.

In Ghana, success in life depends on being enmeshed in a web of relationships. To get things done, you need to be someone or know someone with the social standing to work your will. Since most people don’t have that status, they need to find someone - a patron - who does. In a society like this, to ask someone for something is to invite him to become your patron. It’s a sign that you think he has the status to get things done. It’s a way of indicating respect. If someone hates you, he won’t ask you for things.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: “If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.”

Cosmopolitan curiosity about other people: We start with some small thing we two singular people share. Once we have found enough we share, there is the further possibility that we will be able to enjoy discovering things we do not yet share. That is one of the payoffs of cosmopolitan curiosity. We can learn from one another, or we can simply be intrigued by alternative ways of thinking, feeling, and acting.

Cross-cultural communication can seem immensely difficult in theory, when we are trying to imagine making sense of a stranger in the abstract. But when the stranger is no longer imaginary, but real and present, you may like or dislike him.

Homogeneity produced by globalization? Globalization is also a threat to homogeneity. Trade means travelers.

Different people require different conditions for their spiritual development. The same things which help one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another. A wide range of human conditions allows free people the best chance to make their own lives.

Trying to find some primordially authentic culture can be like peeling an onion. What people think of as traditional West African cloths are known as java prints, and arrived with the Javanese batiks sold, and often milled by, the Dutch. The traditional garb of Herero women derives from the attire of nineteenth-century German missionaries. A tradition was once an innovation. Should we reject it for that reason as untraditional? How far back must one go? Cultural purity is an oxymoron. People wear Levis on every continent. In some places they are informal wear; in others they’re dressy. You can get Coca-Cola on every continent. In Kumasi you will get it at funerals. People in each place make their own uses even of the most famous global commodities.

People die when their bodies die. Cultures die without physical extinction.

Islam is universal, but it has always been embedded in given cultures - the results of many influences. For fundamentalists, there is nothing in these cultures to be proud of, because they have altered the pristine message of Islam. Globalization is a good opportunity to dissociate Islam from any given culture and to provide a model that could work beyond any culture. Such neofundamentalists reject the culture within which their religion was embedded. The failure of Osama bin Ladin’s jihad may have turned many fundamentalists back to dawa - preaching and precept, exhortation and example. Quest for a universal community beyond cultures and nations. Individualized Islam of universal ethics that inverts the picture of cosmopolitanism.

Cosmopolitan commitment is to pluralism: There are many values worth living by. You cannot live by all of them. So we hope and expect that different people and different societies will embody different values.

Another aspect of cosmopolitanism is what philosophers call fallibilism - the sense that our knowledge is imperfect, provisional, subject to revision in the face of new evidence.

Ghana is a country where Christians, Muslims, and the followers of traditional religions live side by side.

If someone really thinks that some group of people genuinely doesn’t matter at all, he will suppose they are outside the circle of those to whom justifications are due.

Half Known Life - by Pico Iyer

2025-09-14T04:00:00Z

summary:

Travels in Iran, Jerusalem, Kashmir, Broome. Talks with tour guides. Writes some insights.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Mashhad festival: The anniversary of Imam Reza. Five million people had gathered from every corner of the Shia world - from Yemen and Pakistan and Beirut and Iraq, from all the provinces of Iran - to mark the auspicious occasion, at the shrine of the imam.

The Iranian film, “A Separation”: Every scene (in a straightforward-seeming story of a young couple in Tehran filing for divorce) disclosed a new detail or point of view that overturned the assumptions of the previous minute. There were so many sides to every question that one could not be sure of a thing or see how any issue could be resolved. That seemed to be the Iranian way: to undermine every certainty and recognize how every presumption was provisional. The beauty of films like A Separation, I realized, is that they hold you for two hours with supple and constant swerves, and at the end you’re farther from a clear conclusion than ever.

I moved to Japan in part because it was the most inward and subtle culture I’d met. The relation of surface to depth remains beguilingly uncertain there and I can never begin to imagine I can get to the bottom of things.

The devout driver who had taken me to the central shrine my first evening here had, when we arrived back at my hotel, refused to take payment for his four hours of showing me around. “Please,” I said. “No!” he protested. “This is friendship.” “I know. But this is your job as well.” “No. It is my honor. How can I charge a guest?” At last I pushed some of the money into his hand, knowing full well that he would feel cheated—and suffer—if I didn’t. My research had reminded me of the custom of ta’arof, or never saying exactly what you mean, and three-part refusals. But I’d barely guessed, when reading of Iran, how hard it might be in life to tell where custom ends and conviction begins.

Like many a mystic, Hafez professed to have no interest in names or distinctions: he was neither Christian nor Hindu nor Muslim nor Buddhist nor Jew, this teacher of Koranic studies wrote in one celebrated poem. Heaven was the place where such divisions fell away.

In Japan my neighbors are generally quite content to play their parts in the orchestrated pantomime that is public life, if it will help sustain a safe, clean, smoothly running harmony from which almost everyone can benefit. But my friends in Japan remain as brightly colored, as passionate, often, within their homes as they are self-effacing in the street.

Much of India has this feeling of a fictional, dressed-up England created by displaced Brits glad to be far from the land they knew.

Kashmir: “I am being rowed through Paradise on a river of hell.”

In Kashmir, hope and history are in hourly collision.

Jerusalem is like the family home in which everyone is squabbling with his siblings over a late father’s will. How could one ever solve the problem of a country in which two opposing groups both have fair claim to the land beneath their feet?

Peacemakers are irresistible targets for the violent.

Jerusalem was a parable that had turned into a cautionary tale, a warning about what we do when we’re convinced we know it all.

The musty deposits of 2,000 years of inhumanity, intolerance and foulness lie in Jerusalem’s reeking alleys.

Jerusalem: “Anything done to desecrate and defile the sacred has been done. It’s impossible to imagine so much falsehood and blasphemy.”

Israel t-shirt: “Guns ’N’ Moses”

Jerusalem: The lines were so clearly drawn that almost everything constituted a trespass. A riot of merchants and pilgrims, each one advancing his own vision of salvation.

Jerusalem is the center of a thousand clashing pasts, and all of them made up the nightmare from which it is longing to awaken.

Israel: “It’s not a problem. It’s an issue. A problem you can solve. An issue you have to live with.” “We’ve been coexisting, not always peacefully, for thousands of years. So long as no one tries to solve their problems, they’ll be okay.” “If I’ve left you feeling frustrated and confused, I’ve succeeded! Now you know what it’s like to be an Israeli.”

In Jerusalem, go to the rooftop of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

Dalai Lama never suggested that one belief system was truer than any other. Whenever someone asked him what to do after you’ve been disappointed in some dream (to bring peace to the Middle East, to reverse climate change, to protect some seeming idyll), the Dalai Lama looked over at the questioner with great warmth and said, “Wrong dream!” You have to analyze, research real causes and conditions and take the long view, he always stressed, before coming up with any plan. Pursuing an unrealistic dream was an insult to reality, as well as to dreamer and to dream.

To have all the answers might be proof that you weren’t asking the right questions.

Real faith might have less to do with a conviction that everything will turn out all right than with the simple confidence that something makes sense, even when everything goes wrong.

Joy, for a monk, is never the same as pleasure, because it has nothing to do with changing circumstance.

The Dalai Lama for more than thirty years is constantly in the thick of things, on the streets of India, where so many are in crying need, visiting Belfast and Jerusalem, going to the places where life and death seem overpowering. It was relatively easy to find paradise on top of a mountain or in a monastery, but he was never set away from us, never distant from our sorrow or confusion. “I want to serve where I am needed.”

Dalai Lama: Hardly anyone has suffered more: nine of the sixteen children his mother would bear died young, the government of the largest nation on earth called him a demon and he’d had to try to protect six million people from across a distant border for half a century. Yet no one I knew was better able to project confidence, or readier to smile and laugh. In all our time together, I always saw him avoid the otherworldly. The meaning of life, he said, lies in what we can do right now. When people came to him in search of blessings, he stressed that he was no miracle worker. “You bless yourself with your actions. For example, give money to a school.”

The more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer.

Death is not the opposite of life; it is, rather, the opposite of birth.

Waste Books - by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

2025-09-03T04:00:00Z

summary:

Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.

recommend: 10/10

my notes:

He called them his “waste books” after the name given to notebooks kept by accountants in England for their rough calculations and lists of transactions, which were later transferred to a journal and finally to a formal ledger.

There is never a time when we are not doing philosophy, since our common language is embedded with philosophical views and commitments with which we always operate.

To match versification to thought is a very difficult art, the neglect of which is responsible for much ridiculous verse. Versification and thought are related to one another as in everyday life savoir-vivre is to occupation.

The superstition of ordinary people originates in their early and all too zealous instruction in religion, where they hear of secrets, miracles, and acts of the devil and believe it probable such things might occur everywhere in anything. If, however, they were first taught about nature, they would more readily regard the supernatural and mysterious aspects of religion with greater awe.

Prejudices are acquired instincts. Through prejudice we can accomplish many things we would find too difficult to think through to the point of decision.

Tone lends meaning to a word. It opens the possibility of infinitely enriching language without increasing the number of words. A phrase pronounced in five different ways, each time with another meaning. Yet a third variable: the facial expression.

We call people insane when their concepts no longer correspond to our orderly world. Thus a careful observation of nature, or even mathematics, is certainly the most effective preventative of insanity. Nature is the guide rope by which our thoughts are lead, so they do not stray.

It is a common source of our misfortune that we believe things actually to be what they really only mean. Don’t believe things actually to be what they really only mean.

Passions and natural desires are the wings of the soul.

Be attentive. Experience nothing in vain.

Whatever you see, do, or read, it should always be brought to such a degree of clarity that you can at least answer the most general objections against it.

Growing wiser means becoming increasingly acquainted with the errors of feeling and judging.

Where must I turn my eyes to discover what no man has discovered before?

Things most often forgotten, places overlooked, and things accepted without question deserve most often to be investigated.

What we do not observe does not exist for us.

Whenever he had to reason, he felt like someone who had always used his right hand but was now forced to do something with his left.

To the wise, nothing is immeasurable and nothing insignificant. In minor everyday occurrences one can discover a moral principle just as readily as in the major ones.

In our too-extensive reading, a profound philosophy is often required to restore to our feelings their initial state of innocence. To extricate one's self from the detritus of alien ideas, to begin to feel for oneself, to speak for oneself, and, I might almost say, to exist for oneself.

Something that covers the distance between two ends of a grain of sand with the speed of lightning or light will appear to us to be at rest.

With history and knowledge, the beliefs of man also change. To advance in one and abide in the other is impossible.

Do you perhaps believe that your convictions owe their strength to arguments? Then you are undoubtedly mistaken, for if it were true everyone who heard them would have to be as convinced as you are.

Once we know our weaknesses, they cease to harm us.

Why they eat alone: because it is the right thing to do. But why it is right? They would not and could not say.

The actual possession of something sometimes gives us no greater pleasure than merely imagining we possess it.

One can repeat something in a way that it has already been said, remove it from human understanding, or draw it closer. The shallow mind does the first; the enthusiast, the second; and the true philosopher, the third. = The shallow mind repeats something in a way that has already been said. The enthusiast removes it from human understanding. The true philosopher draws it closer.

Observing most educated people, one finds they do nothing themselves except cut their nails and quills. Their hair is styled by others, their clothes made by others, their dishes prepared by others. All so they can observe the weather in their own heads. The man was such an intellectual he was of hardly any use in this world. All mind and theory. All head and not enough hand to sew on a button.

He had constructed for himself a certain system, which thereafter exercised such an influence upon his manner of thinking that onlookers always saw his judgment walking a few steps in front of his perceptions, though he himself believed it followed.

Many people know things in the way one knows the solution to a riddle after reading it or being told of it.

Cultivate the kind of knowledge that enables one to discover for oneself, when needed, what others must read or be told in order to know.

To do exactly the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.

A man of keen senses a shadow on the face appears blue or black. Another who judges in advance does not see this and takes the entire face to be flesh colored. It is thus essential to investigate correctly and compare what the senses show correctly.

Nothing is more difficult in philosophy than to take up an idea from the beginning, without already having in mind a certain end or purpose.

There is a great difference between still believing something and believing it again. Still believing that the moon influences plants reveals stupidity and superstition. But believing it again indicates philosophy and reflection.

If it were true, what in the end would be gained? Nothing but another truth. Is this of such great advantage? We have enough old truths still to digest.

Once people have gotten such ideas into their heads, they are not so easily removed. The best thing they can do is take a sound system of logic and go through their entire system of beliefs piece by piece until they have cleaned it up.

If mankind suddenly became virtuous, thousands would starve.

A book is a mirror: if an ape looks into it, an apostle is unlikely to look out. We have no words for speaking about wisdom to idiots. Whoever understands the wise is wise already.

We, the tail of the world, have no idea what the head is planning.

When we employ an old word, it often follows the channel dug in our understanding by the dictionary. Metaphors dig a new channel, and often break through entirely.

The metaphor is far more clever than its author. The author gives the metaphor its body, but the reader gives it its soul.

Among all the scholars I have known, the greatest thinkers I have known are those who had read the least.

I am often of one opinion while lying down and of another while standing.

That people who read so astonishingly much are often such bad thinkers may also have its origin in the constitution of our brain. It is certainly not all the same whether I learn a proposition without effort or if I finally arrive at it myself through my own system of thought. In the latter everything has its roots. In the former it is merely superficial.

One rule in reading is to condense the intention and main thoughts of the author into a few words and in this way to make them one's own. Whoever reads in this way is occupied and gains something. When one reads without comparison with one's own inventory of knowledge or without synthesizing it with one's own system of thought, the mind gains nothing and loses much.

What people call a subtle knowledge of human nature is for the most part nothing other than one's own weaknesses reflected back from others.

Whoever knows himself properly can very soon know all other men. It is all reflection.

Most men live more according to fashion than reason.

The flour is important, not the mill. The fruits of philosophy, not the philosophy itself.

Philosophy is a laudable science, yet nobody uses it for their happiness or that of others.

Quite a few people read simply to prevent themselves from thinking.

Strive constantly for clear concepts - not merely by relying on the definitions of others, but as far as possible by personal inquiry.

Repeatedly scrutinize things with the intention of discovering something others have not yet observed.

It is so easy to shut our eyes and so difficult to shut our ears.

The greatest discoveries were made by people who regarded as merely probable what others advanced as certain.

If only I could dishabituate myself from everything, so I could see anew, hear anew, and feel anew. Habit corrupts our philosophy.

The spider spins its web to catch flies. It does this before it knows flies exist.

If only children could be educated so that all things unclear were entirely incomprehensible to them.

With prophecies, the interpreter is often a more important man than the prophet.

Writing allows the thoughts and opinions of one man to reach posterity undistorted.

Tradition acquires something from every mouth. Speaking is always a translation.

As soon as I know I am being deceived, it is no longer a deception.

What am I? What shall I do? What may I hope and believe? All things in philosophy can be reduced to this.

Philosophers must consider and write about all things, even the most common ones. This more than anything else brings focus to a system.

If the New Testament accurately contains the precepts of the Christian religion, then the Catholic religion is hardly Christian. The Catholic religion received its present form in times of the grossest ignorance in which minds were fettered. Now man who is once again permitted to exercise reason is supposed to continue to adhere to it.

It is necessary to agitate all of our knowledge and then let it settle again in order to see how everything is arranged.

Writing is an excellent means of awakening the system sleeping within each of us. Anyone who has ever written will have discovered that writing always awakens something that, though it lay within us, we did not previously clearly recognize.

How did men ever arrive at the concept of freedom? It was grand idea.

Whoever has less than he desires must know he has more than he is worth.

The fly that does not want to be swatted is safest when it sits on the fly swatter.

Understanding something is no reason for believing that it is true.

In the end, everything leads to the question: “Does thought originate in feeling or feeling in thought?” This is the ultimate principle of religion. The answer to the question, “Is the power of feeling or the power of thought the ultimate reality?” indicates the final limit between theism and atheism.

No matter how simple an idea, it will always govern something and abound somewhere.

The more one knows about a subject, the more quickly one is able to make an abstraction from it.

He shoots everything down from the mobile ambush of a kind of floating philosophy.

People learn to regard things as their teachers and acquaintances do. That is why it would be quite useful for once to give instructions on how one can deviate from the rule.

Whenever I arrive at a new thought or theory, always to ask: Is this really as new as you believe it to be? This is also in general the best reminder never to be amazed at anything in the world.

Seek to see in everything something no one has yet seen or thought.

Ask in everything the question: Is this true? Then seek reasons for why one believes it is not true.

To sense something outside oneself is a contradiction. We sense things only within ourselves.

Wit is the finder, and understanding, the observer.

What odd chatter there would be in the world if we were to transform the names of things into definitions!

All mathematical laws we discover in nature are, despite their beauty, always suspect to me. They bring me no joy. They are merely for utility. In close proximity, nothing is true.

The vibration of the air first becomes a sound where there is an ear.

What makes the study of a profound philosophy so difficult is that in everyday life we regard a host of things as being so natural and simple that we believe it would not be possible for them to be any different, yet we have to recognize that we must first accept that these supposed trivial things are of great importance in order then to explain what is pronounced difficult about them.

What is really singular seldom remains unexplained for long. What is inexplicable is usually no longer really singular and perhaps never has been.

If we regard nature as a teacher and poor mortals as her pupils, we are inclined to make room for an altogether extraordinary idea about the human race: We are sitting all together in a class and possess all of the principles necessary for understanding what is said, yet we pay more attention to the chatter of other pupils than to the teacher's lessons. And indeed when someone next to us does take notes, we cheat from him, stealing some remark that he himself perhaps indistinctly heard, and supplementing it with our own orthographic and intellectual errors.

The prerogatives of beauty and those of happiness: the matter is quite different. To enjoy the advantages of beauty in this world, other people must believe that we are beautiful. Yet in the case of happiness, this is not necessary, for it is perfectly sufficient that we ourselves believe it.

Theorizing is excusable, for it is an impulse of the soul that can be useful to us as soon as we have accumulated sufficient experience. Thus all our current follies of theorizing could be impulses that will find their application only in the future.

In dreams we so often take our own objections for those of another. As for example when we dispute with someone, it surprises me that the same does not occur more often when we are awake. The state of being awake seems primarily to consist in our making a sharp and conventional distinction between what is in us and outside us.

Spectacles for the powers of the mind just as there are for the eyes.

To make a vow is a greater sin than to break one.

It is a danger to the perfection of our spirit to receive acclaim for deeds that did not demand the entirety of our powers. Thereafter one usually comes to a standstill. No man has ever yet done all of which he was capable.

I do not believe that so-called truly pious people are good because they are pious but pious because they are good.

To establish liberty and equality as many people now think of them would mean to declare an eleventh commandment through which the other ten would be abolished.

Books are printed by people who do not understand them, sold by people who do not understand them, bound, reviewed, and read by people who do not understand them, and now they are even written by people who do not understand them.

Comparison of a preacher and a locksmith: One says: “You should not want to steal”. The other says: “You should not be able to steal.”

The Socratic method sharpened: I mean torture.

Regarding things of a large scale, ask always: “What is this on a small scale?” And with the small: “What is this on a large scale? How does this appear on a large or small scale?” It is also good to make something as general as possible and explore from top to bottom the entire series of which it is a member. All things belong to such a series whose polar members no longer appear to belong together.

Doubt all things at least once.

We have fallen into such a deep rut that we always follow others.

Great men are reproached for not having done as much good as they could have done. They could reply: “Think of all the evil we could have done but did not do.”

Neither deny nor believe.

God is a sphere whose center is everywhere and whose surface is nowhere.

The defense of the monastic life is usually founded on an entirely erroneous concept of virtue. These people have about the same concept of virtue as those who wish to call madhouses “academies of science” have of science.

Hamlet said that there are many things in heaven and on earth that are not mentioned in our compendia. But then there are also many things in our compendia that can be found neither in heaven nor on earth.

Four principles of morality: philosophical: do good for its own sake, out of respect for the law religious: do good because it is God's will, out of love for God human: do good because it promotes your happiness, out of self-love political: do good because it promotes the welfare of society

English, French, German: the languages are all equally familiar to me. It is harmful in a psychological respect to have so many signs in our heads for the same thing.

The word “incomparable” shows what can become of words in the world.

What most clearly characterizes true freedom and its true use is its abuse.

We speak often of enlightenment and desire more light. But, my God, what good is all of this light when people either have no eyes or deliberately shut those they have?

We acquire the feeling of health only through illness.

The fewer needs one has, the happier one is.

Men are so glad to fight for religion and so reluctant to live according to its precepts.

How is whispering differentiated from speaking?

We so often speak of our persistence after death and so little about our existence before birth. We should not say after death but before and after life.

Man is ultimately so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested.

We truly do a disservice to human nature when we believe that in order to have an opinion we must know what opinion another had.

There are plenty of men who trade in the ideas of others. They find it a great merit to have discovered that a tenet thought new is already old. This is done with the laudable intention to harm and belittle living men.

Breakneck - by Dan Wang

2025-08-25T04:00:00Z

summary:

China is an engineering state, relentlessly pursuing megaprojects, while the United States has stalled because it’s transformed into a lawyerly society, reflexively blocking everything, good and bad.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

I didn’t take notes, but the gist is: (1) China is run by engineers. USA is run by lawyers. Therefore: China makes things and USA obstructs development. (2) CCP is scared of its citizens so it takes an engineering approach to them, which is harmful when applied to people. (3) China will thrive more if it stops fearing its people and gets out of their way. (4) USA generally gets out of your way. Lawyers protect the wealthy so they can go make things without fear of being thwarted.

Battleground: 10 Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East - by Christopher Phillips

2025-08-18T04:00:00Z

summary:

Summary of what’s been going on in West Asia since the 2011 Arab Spring. Great example of one book keeping you more informed than a hundred hours of daily news, since the book can summarize what was important in hindsight, showing outcomes and connections with what influenced or was influenced.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Media and politicians fall back on simplified explanations for the Middle East’s geopolitics. Off-the-shelf explanations are of little help to those trying to understand the real dynamics. This book is aimed at readers who are interested in understanding that complexity and looking for a place to start. It introduces the geopolitics of the Middle East by focusing on one key aspect: conflict. Not suggesting that the Middle East should be defined only by its conflicts. Conflicts show how a state or area’s local politics, informed by its history and the decisions of the ruling elite of the day, interact with outside forces, by an interaction between internal and external forces.

Chapters: 1 Syria: The Shattered Mosaic 2 Libya: Anarchy on the Mediterranean 3 Yemen: The Worst Humanitarian Crisis in the World 4 Palestine: The Vanishing Land 5 Iraq: The Broken Republic 6 Egypt: Fallen Giant 7 Lebanon: A Crumbling State 8 Kurdistan: The Struggle in the Mountains 9 The Gulf: Wealth and Insecurity 10 The Horn of Africa: A New Arena

Though the Middle East has certain unique features compared to other regions, notably its geographical location at a crossroads of three continents, its particular religious heritage, and its vast reserves of oil, reducing explanations for its fractures to these features is simplistic and inaccurate.3 It is far more helpful to explore how these characteristics have impacted the complex decisions being made, rather than using them lazily as a predetermined explanation.

The ‘Middle East’ was originally a colonial term, dreamt up by Britain to distinguish regions based on their distance from London: ‘the near east’, ‘the far east’, and the place in between, the ‘Middle’ East. Many would still identify themselves more with alternative regional groupings such as the Islamic or Arab world, or more local areas such as the Levant (eastern Mediterranean), Mashriq (the Levant plus Iraq), Gulf, or Maghreb (North Africa). There is a strong case for scrapping the term ‘Middle East’ altogether and replacing it with the less colonial ‘West Asia’.

The majority of the world’s Muslims live outside the Middle East.

This book is centred on the Middle East in the twenty-first century, particularly during the aftermath of the 2011 Arab Uprisings. Seemingly once a decade, seismic events appear to rock the foundations of Middle Eastern geopolitics, whether it be 9/11 in 2001, the 1991 Gulf War, or the Iranian Revolution of 1979. For all the upheaval, there is considerable continuity. That said, the 2011 Arab Uprisings did change enough to justify the ‘new Middle East’ subtitle of this book. The Middle East’s short-lived ‘Pax Americana’ was over, and a ‘post-American Middle East’ began to emerge. After 2011, the number of players interfering was considerably more than in the past. Conflicts attracted multiple external sponsors, with well over seven states intervening in the wars in Syria, Libya, and Yemen, with multiple outsiders vying for influence over the politics of Egypt, the Horn of Africa, Iraq, Kurdistan, and Lebanon, not just one or two dominant players as in the past.

In 1920 the victorious French and British stripped the Ottomans of their remaining Arab lands, creating instead a series of Western-style nation-states where once there were none: Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan. Artificial states with straight-line borders.

Syria had two thriving major trading cities, Damascus and Aleppo, but the ports they had previously relied on for trade were now in different countries.

UN Secretary-General António Gutteres called Yemen ‘the worst humanitarian crisis in the world’. In 2020 three-quarters of the population of 27 million needed humanitarian assistance and just under a third did not know where their next meal was coming from. North and South Yemen united in 1990. Yemen was already the poorest country in the Middle East long before its civil war. North Yemen was ruled by Arab nationalist military officers. South Yemen’s socialist leaders, in contrast, sought to radically remake society. They set up programmes to lessen the importance of tribalism and religion and to improve women’s rights, and developed one of the most progressive constitutions in the Arab world. Yet the government’s poverty and relatively short lifespan meant that these changes had only limited reach. Saleh gradually extended his power over all of united Yemen.

Saleh’s unwise decision at the UN to vote against authorising the US-led coalition to liberate Kuwait from Saddam Hussein in 1990 prompted fury on the part of the US and the Gulf states. The former cut aid to Yemen while the latter expelled up to 800,000 Yemeni workers.

The Houthis, or Ansar Allah, were formed in the late 1990s and early 2000s as a radical offshoot of a political-religious Zaydi party and youth movement. They protested, among other things, the marginalisation of the Zaydi Shia, the Saleh regime’s corruption, and its closeness to the US. The Zaydis form 30–35% of Yemen’s population and are mostly located in the far north, near the Saudi Arabian border. Zaydis’ leaders are descendants of the prophet Mohammad, were the rulers of northern Yemen until the monarchy ended in 1962.

Saudi Arabia joined Saleh in fighting the Houthis in the late 2000s. Saudi Arabia opposed the unification of the two Yemens in 1990, possibly fearing a united, more populous state to its south would be harder to control. In the 2000s, when Saleh was seeking support from Saudi Arabia for his wars on the Houthis, he persuaded Riyadh that the Zaydi militia were receiving money and weapons from Iran - their arch-rivals. With the Houthis’ march into first Sanaa and then Aden, Riyadh now worried that the whole of Yemen would be transformed into a pro-Iranian satellite. MBS therefore felt he had to get involved directly to sort out Yemen. MBS believed the whole campaign would be over within six weeks, but it became a quagmire that some have labelled ‘Saudi Arabia’s Vietnam’. Saudi intervention had the opposite effect to that desired regarding the Houthis and Iran: the invasion prompted the Houthis to deepen their ties with Tehran. The war also damaged Saudi’s international image, as it seemed to be bombing Yemen recklessly, causing untold civilian casualties, while its navy blockaded ports and so worsened the humanitarian crisis. Riyadh instead transformed a local civil war into a major international conflict, bringing in billions of dollars’ worth of firepower to rain down on the Yemeni people.

Thirty years after an optimistic unification, a formal or informal partition looks likely. Yemen increasingly resembles the long-running disorder of Somalia.

In 2023, China brokered a regional détente between Saudi Arabia and Iran. In 2020, UAE and Bahrain signed the Abraham Accords, normalising ties with Israel, later joined by Morocco and Sudan, further breaking the taboo about Arab states making peace with Israel before the Palestinian issue was settled. UAE was especially keen to access trade and defence relations with Israel, and later encouraged its allies in Sudan to sign up. Morocco, which had long enjoyed not-so-secret ties to Israel due to the substantial Moroccan Jewish community, took the opportunity to bring its relationship into the open.

In 2020 there were over 630,000 Israeli settlers living in more than 150 settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. All of these are in contravention of international laws against building on occupied territory, though Israel insists it is not ‘occupied territory’ since there was no internationally agreed sovereign, neither Jordan nor the Palestinians, before Israel captured the lands. A third of all settlers are in East Jerusalem.

As of 2021 there were 14 million Palestinians in the world, only 5.3 million of whom lived in the occupied territories. After the 1948 Nakba, refugees fled. 4 million living as permanent refugees in neighbouring states and the 1.8 million Palestinian citizens of Israel. During Israel’s war of independence, over 750,000 Palestinians fled but 150,000 stayed. They and their descendants now make up roughly 20% of Israel’s population. Jordan has treated its Palestinians most favourably, hosting the largest number. Jordan was the only Arab state to offer Palestinian refugees full citizenship. The Lebanese government not only denied the refugees citizenship but also prevented most from working or living outside of their squalid concrete refugee camps They are the most prominent group mentioned when the PA insists on refugees returning to Palestine.

Iraq is barely a hundred years old, but it was built on the site of some of the world’s oldest and most developed civilisations. Not far from Baghdad can be found the ruins of ancient Babylon, home to the most advanced science and learning during the ‘Islamic Golden Age’ of the eighth and ninth centuries. In 1258, the Mongols permanently destroyed the irrigation networks that had helped the region flourish for millennia. Thereafter Baghdad and its environs became something of a backwater, absorbed into the Ottoman empire but of marginal economic, political, or cultural importance.

London fused together three Ottoman provinces: Basra in the south, Mosul in the north, and Baghdad in the centre, to forge a new country, ‘Iraq’, which it ruled on behalf of the League of Nations, theoretically preparing it for independence. But Britain’s rule was self-interested and left a damaging legacy. Most of the inhabitants were Muslim, but with sizeable Christian and Jewish communities, but the Muslim majority was not homogeneous. Most were Arab, but the mountainous north was dominated by Kurds. Most of the Muslims were Shia, but Sunnis were the ruling elites.

Saddam ordered an invasion of Iran. The result was a stalemated conflict that dragged on for eight years, causing widespread death, destruction, and, ultimately, no territorial change. Having nearly bankrupted Iraq’s economy with one war, Saddam sought to solve his financial woes by launching another: invading and annexing the wealthy Gulf state of Kuwait in 1990. But this provoked international outrage, forcing Saddam’s retreat, but also destroying much of what was left of Iraq’s developed infrastructure. Saddam responded with a campaign of oppression against civilians that culminated with the gassing of up to 5,000 Kurds in the 1988 Halabja massacre.

Washington and its allies created a no-fly zone over the northern mountains. This prevented Saddam’s forces from entering the area, effectively cutting it off from the rest of Iraq for the next decade. Western forces offered the south no such support, however, and Saddam crushed the uprising there, leaving many Shias feeling both a deep sense of betrayal by the West and by their Sunni countrymen who had stayed loyal to Saddam. Anti-Western feeling was further fuelled by the sanctions that remained on Iraq for the decade after Desert Storm. The UN had forbidden any state to trade with Iraq, so no food, medicine or vital supplies were allowed to enter, and Iraq could not sell its oil to raise funds. More than the wars and Saddam’s brutal rule, the decade of sanctions accelerated Iraq’s decline and had a deep impact on the country’s national psyche.

Al-Qaeda’s slaughter of nearly 3,000 people on 11 September 2001, had nothing to do with Iraq, with whom the Afghanistan-based Jihadists had no direct ties. US-led forces invaded from Kuwait in March 2003 and captured Baghdad within three weeks. The end of Saddam’s dictatorship left a power vacuum. In the northern mountains, Iraq’s Kurds had been governing themselves since 1991 under the protection of the Western no-fly zone and transitioned to the post-Saddam era relatively smoothly. Elsewhere the situation was more chaotic.

The White House based many of its policies on the counsel of Iraqi exiles who had spent decades abroad and returned in 2003 to find the country unrecognisable. Ministries and museums, with decades of records, property deeds, and vital administrative documents essential for running the country, were torched. Thousands of competent administrators, doctors, and teachers fired overnight. It is a sad irony that, despite US claims, prior to 2003 there was no recorded Al-Qaeda presence in Iraq. Yet, after the invasion, branches did form to fight the occupation and attracted Jihadists from around the world.

Turkey, which borders Iraq to the north, became a significant partner to the newly autonomous Kurdish region, known as the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG). It greatly increased trade with the enclave, which boomed with energy wealth while the rest of Iraq stagnated.

Syria also interfered, cynically allowing Syrian and other Jihadists to pass through its territory to join Al-Qaeda’s insurgency. Though Damascus loathed Jihadism, it wanted to bog down the US occupation to deter Washington from turning to Syria after Iraq. Interestingly, Saudi Arabia did not get involved. Though it opposed Saddam, who had threatened Saudi oilfields after invading Kuwait in 1990, it urged its ally Washington not to invade, correctly predicting that it would benefit its regional nemesis, Iran.

Since 1979, Iran’s approach to the world has generally oscillated between hard-line and moderate wings of the establishment. The events of 9/11 occurred during an era when moderates held sway and Iran was trying to improve its ties with the West, prompting Tehran to help the US defeat Al-Qaeda and its defenders, the Taliban, in Afghanistan in late 2001. It therefore proved quite a shock to be labelled an ‘enemy to world peace’ by George W. Bush. The subsequent Iraq invasion triggered conservative hawks to become more ascendant in Iran.

Believing that influence in Baghdad was now vital to Iran’s interests, Iran poured energy and resources into Iraq’s post-war politics. It built close ties with Iraqi politicians. It cultivated the growth of Shia militias. It built a deep cultural presence in Iraq, promoting its image and ideology to ordinary (Shia) Iraqis. Iran genuinely did support long-neglected Shia religious sites, charities, and media, earning goodwill from many in the community.

UN sanctions squeezed the Iranian economy, crippling Iran’s finances further, to the point that frustrated voters elected moderates back into power in the form of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013. Obama’s 2015 deal between Tehran and the Western international community ended sanctions in exchange for Iran suspending its nuclear programme.

In early June 2014, just over a thousand fighters from the Sunni Jihadist group Islamic State in Iraq and Sham (Greater Syria) captured Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city. Inside they found a vast cache of money, weapons, and equipment, including 2,300 Humvees left by the Iraqi army, which had disintegrated and fled. A few days later its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, announced from Mosul’s Great Mosque that the territory he controlled, spanning eastern Syria and western Iraq were part of a new ‘Caliphate’, Islamic State, that sought to unite all Muslims under its rule. The declaration prompted a wave of Syrian, Iraqi, and international Jihadist volunteers to join this ‘Caliphate’. Meanwhile the weapons and money acquired enabled Islamic State to push deeper into Iraq and Syria, threatening both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Regional Government. Suddenly, this once marginal Al-Qaeda offshoot looked capable of sweeping through not only Iraq and Syria but the whole Middle East. Only a few years earlier, Al-Qaeda in Iraq had been close to collapse, but now was rebranded as Islamic State in Iraq. US and Iran campaigned against Islamic State separately, but with the same goal of destroying the so-called Caliphate. The Iraqi military could recapture Mosul. In 2016–17, it took nine months to dislodge the Jihadists and left the city devastated. After they were eventually ejected, the historic Great Mosque from which Baghdadi had declared his Caliphate had been reduced to rubble. By 2019, the last Islamic State stronghold had been captured.

In summer 2017, Kurdish leaders called an independence referendum, won by over 93% but dismissed by Baghdad as illegal. This shattered any illusion of Kurdish–Arab cooperation and unity that might have been present during the fight with Islamic State.

Despite having the fifth-largest oil reserves in the world, Iraq has an electricity grid that provides only 5–8 hours of power a day. Poor water management by the government (and Iraq’s neighbours) had prompted horrendous dust storms across Iraq that worsened health and contributed to the desertification of former agricultural areas. This was all especially felt in Basra, where a combination of little water, limited electricity for air conditioning and 50-degree heat in the summer made it the epicentre of the protest movement.

Egypt, far from emulating its past successes, is barely struggling to survive - dependent on neighbours and allies for economic support.

Egypt is the most populous country in the Middle East. Cairo, the largest city in the region, has 21 million inhabitants, more than double the size of London or New York. 95% of Egyptians live along the banks of the Nile and its delta, and the world’s longest river is the main reason Egypt exists.

A popular uprising overthrew the stagnant thirty-year dictatorship in 2011. A wave of optimism, fear, instability, and political activity was ushered in. Ultimately this ended in 2013, when the military deposed the elected Islamist government, establishing an autocracy even harsher than the one toppled two years earlier.

As elsewhere in the Middle East, the Ottomans’ decline in the nineteenth century brought European empires swooping in. First came the French under Napoleon, who briefly conquered Egypt in 1798 but were defeated by the British, allowing the Ottomans to reconquer. One of the Ottoman commanders, an Albanian called Muhammad Ali, emerged as the de facto ruler. London granted Egypt nominal independence in 1922, though it retained control over key aspects of defence and the Suez Canal. The hollowness of independence was exposed during the Second World War, when Britain once again dispatched its military to Egypt and then humiliated the king, Farouq, by surrounding his palace with tanks, demanding he appoint a new government of London’s choosing.

The Free Officers ultimately ended royal rule and British influence when they staged a bloodless coup in 1952. A few days later they sent Farouq into exile and within two years had Britain agree to withdrawing its last troops. The leading player among the Free Officers, soon to become president of the newly created republic, was Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser. To many, Nasser remains a hero who stood up to the West and gave Egypt and the Arab world back its pride. At home, Nasser smashed the old order. His socialist policies saw land requisitioned from the elite and distributed among the peasantry, industry and other enterprises nationalised, women’s rights improved, and increased access to healthcare and education.

When Britain made a last-ditch attempt to claw back influence in Egypt by invading the Suez Canal with France and Israel in 1956, it was forced into a humiliating climbdown when its ally, the US, insisted London withdraw.

Nasser embraced Arab nationalism, positioning himself as the Middle East’s Bismarck, promising to unite the Arab world that had been artificially divided by European empires. He was outweighed by later failures in the 1960s. Bankrupt, Nasser had to abandon both Arab nationalism and non-alignment. Nasser’s successor was another Free Officer, his vice president, Anwar Sadat.

Sadat launched a new war against Israel in 1973 that ended in stalemate but paved the way for a negotiated peace that saw Sinai returned and the Suez Canal re-opened. It also enabled Egypt to switch sides in the Cold War, ditching the Soviet Union for the US, Sadat’s assassination in 1981, when radical Islamists who felt betrayed by the peace treaty gunned him down during a military parade.

Sadat’s death ushered in what became the thirty-year reign of Hosni Mubarak. He continued on the domestic and international path set by Sadat: peace with Israel, alignment with the West, and capitalist autocracy at home. Yet though this proved stable in the medium term, it perpetuated a decline that had begun in the Nasser era, with Egypt becoming poorer, more unequal domestically, and increasingly diminished abroad.

All but one of Egypt’s presidents have been military men. Egypt experienced no army intervention for nearly sixty years after 1952. The flipside was that by granting the military so much wealth and status, it became fiercely protective of its privilege. This ultimately led the army to overthrow Mubarak in 2011, sacrificing the president to retain its own privileges. Senior officers lived in resort-style compounds in the suburbs of Cairo, separated from the rest of society. Due to conscription, they had access to up to a million men under their command to provide cheap labour for various business enterprises. These included army-run cement factories, farms, steel companies, water bottling plants, pasta plants, and of course defence industries. These activities grew even more after 2011.

Egypt’s population boomed, leaping from 27 million in 1960 to 87 million in 2010, leaving widespread unemployment, under-employment, and frustration. One of the main beneficiaries of this economic decline was the other major force in Egyptian politics: the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood were not heavily involved in the protests, but soon emerged as the main beneficiary of the new era.

An army man, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi. Sisi ushered in a new era of dictatorship and repression. A thousand Morsi supporters were massacred by the military during a peaceful sit-in in Cairo. Sisi amended the constitution to permit him to remain in power until 2030. He empowered the army even more than his predecessors, granting it near-complete immunity and autonomy from the law, while giving officers an even bigger slice of the economy.

Egypt’s population was much younger, more rural, under-educated, lacking in a sizeable middle class, and overly dependent on the state for sustenance compared to other countries that have seen successful democratic revolutions. Qatar and, to a lesser extent, Turkey supported the Brotherhood, while the UAE and Saudi Arabia backed Sisi’s coup.

For all its flaws, Egypt is far more stable than many of its Middle Eastern contemporaries, having avoided the civil wars of Syria, Libya, and Yemen, and the political chaos of Iraq and Lebanon. Since 2011, Egypt’s weakness has been its economy. The precarity of Egypt’s finances was exposed once again, first during the Covid pandemic and then the 2022 Ukraine war, from which Egypt imports much of its grain. This prompted Cairo to gratefully accept a $22 billion aid package from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and a newly rehabilitated Qatar. Once again Egypt’s weak finances had left it prey to outside leverage.

Over 60% of Egyptian men have sexually harassed women in public.

Lebanon: The Beirut blast was huge on 4 August 2020, the largest non-nuclear explosion in history. 218 people were killed, over 7,000 were injured. Ammonium nitrate stored there by government officials without proper safety measures for over six years.

Lebanon enjoys one of the most liberal political climates in the Middle East, but it also suffers from a deeply corrupt sectarian ruling elite. Lebanon’s great tragedy: It has the potential to be a beacon of freedom and prosperity, but has conflict and instability.

In the 1970s Lebanon erupted into a fifteen-year civil war between different religious and ideological factions. Lebanese remained divided, as this was built into the design of the post-war political system. Lebanon’s constitution recognises eighteen different religions among its 5 million or so inhabitants. Council has to include representatives of all the region’s religious groups. This singling out of religion as the key identity in politics was to cast a long shadow. France opted to partition the northern Levant, creating two new states: Syria and Lebanon. But the Lebanon it created was far larger than the tiny semi-autonomous enclave of Mount Lebanon. Non-Maronite groups resented France separating them from family, friends, and co-religionists in Syria – barely 100 km from Beirut France created a democratic constitution that made religion the primary political identity, distributing offices according to sect. The powerful president was always a Maronite, the prime minister a Sunni, the speaker of parliament a Shia, while Druze and Orthodox Christians were also to be represented in cabinet. This formula was retained and formalised when Lebanon was granted independence in 1943.

As Beirut became a hotbed of intellectuals and militants in the 1950s and 1960s, many Sunnis, Druze, and Orthodox Christians argued that Lebanon should abandon its colonially imposed sectarian system and create a true democracy based on one person one vote. Such voices were often aligned with the Arab nationalist movement growing across the Middle East at the time. They wanted to reverse France’s partitions, reuniting with Syria and, possibly, the rest of the Arab world. Sympathetic to the 110,000 Palestinians who had fled to Lebanon when Israel was created in the late 1940s.

In contrast, many Maronites, though not all, feared the Palestinians. These tensions boiled over into civil war between 1975 and 1990. The Shia Islamist government that came to power in Iran in 1979 declared Israel its enemy and sent militants to build a new Shia Islamist group in Lebanon: Hezbollah, soon Israel’s chief tormentor. With Washington’s approval, the war finally came to an end in 1990, with Syria permitted to deploy its army across Lebanon. The Taif Accord, as it became known, would shape Lebanon for the next thirty years. The head of Syrian military intelligence in Lebanon was effectively a governor, using Syria’s military presence to keep leaders in line while taking a cut from most economic ventures. Syria’s 29 years of military presence in Lebanon ended in 2005.

Syrian refugees: By 2014 over a million refugees had arrived, meaning a quarter of Lebanon’s population was now Syrian. But the government was a reluctant host. Wealthier refugees rented private accommodation while poorer arrivals lived in squalid informal tent cities. Political leaders often scapegoated them for various woes, prompting sporadic attacks.

Lebanon lira rapidly devalued from the pegged rate of 1,500 lira to the dollar in 2019 to 35,000 lira by 2022. Life savings were decimated. Within a few years over 80% of the population were below the poverty line – a sharp drop for an historically middle-class country Despite the scale of the crisis, the established elite proved nearly impossible to budge. Western governments and NGOs also faced the paradox that if they wanted to help the Lebanese survive the crisis, they had to work with the corrupt leaders who had caused it. Lebanon was created as a weak, sectarian state that has deeply entrenched generation after generation of elites who have little interest in changing that situation. Indeed, they have fought and killed to preserve it.

Kurdistan: The Kurds have a good claim to being the largest stateless nation in the world. Estimates suggest there are at least 30 million Kurds living in the Middle East. ‘Kurdistan’, the mountainous area where Kurds form the majority population, is substantial, stretching from western Iran through northern Iraq, northern Syria and almost all of south-eastern Turkey. Were all this territory ever to be amalgamated as a single independent Kurdistan, it would become the fifth-largest state in the Middle East. Historically, the Kurds missed out when Britain and France carved up the Ottoman empire after the First World War. While some Kurdish leaders lobbied for independence, instead the region was partitioned, with Kurds becoming a minority in four different states. At this point Kurdish nationalism was far weaker. However, this changed over the course of the 20th century as government discrimination and violence within all four states prompted Kurdish identity to harden, sparking several nationalist movements. Similar nationalism elsewhere has often led to secession and independence, but no such liberation came for the Kurds. Partly this was due to internal divisions. Kurds have multiple fault lines among themselves. They speak various different dialects. While 75% are Sunni Muslims, there are other religious groups, and significant ideological differences, with some nationalists favouring leftist, secular solutions, while others prefer conservative, tribal politics. Moreover, many who may be Kurdish by birth reject ideas of Kurdish nationalism altogether. A specific Kurdish identity did not emerge until the nineteenth century.

The division of the Kurds into four states meant nationalist movements developed distinctly in different places, based on the challenges for the Kurds of each country. Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, all of whom firmly reject any kind of Kurdish independence as it would mean losing valuable territory, have all sponsored Kurdish groups in others’ states to further their own agendas.

In 1923, Ataturk was a staunch secularist and wanted the Turkish language rather than Islam to bind his new country together. This meant trouble for the Kurdish speakers in the east. A systematic effort was made by Ankara to supress Kurdish identity with the goal of turning the Kurds into Turks. All references to Kurdistan were removed from official documents, Kurdish was banned from schools, and Kurdish place names were replaced by Turkish ones. Thousands of villages were cleared, and their inhabitants deported west, where the plan was for them to be outnumbered by, and integrated with, Turks. Thousands of Kurdish children, both boys and girls, were forcibly sent to boarding schools to be built into good Turks.

Saddam used killing squads, chemical weapons, aerial bombing, and mass deportation, against the Kurds, culminating in the infamous 1988 gas attack on Halabja. In total a further 100,000 Kurds were killed. When the Kurds rebelled again in 1991, after Saddam’s disastrous invasion of Kuwait, the international community were so fearful they’d be targeted by chemical weapons that they provided a protective no-fly zone. The result was Iraqi Kurdistan’s first experience of real autonomy: an internationally protected region finally outside Baghdad’s control.

Iran’s demographics are complex. Just over 50% of the population are ethnically Persian, with the remainder made up of sizeable Azeri, Kurdish, Baloch, Lurs, and other. Kurds make up around 10%, but what distinguishes them from most Iranians is not their different ethnicity and language, but their religion. Most are Sunni Muslims, compared to the 90–95% of Iranians who are Shia.

Syria was renamed the ‘Syrian Arab Republic’, suggesting little place for the 9% of the population who were Kurds. In 1962, over 120,000 Kurds had their citizenship removed.

Erdoğan promised reforms and improvements to Kurdish cultural rights in 2005, saying publicly that Kurds should be able to call themselves Kurds. Hi permitted the use of the Kurdish language in education, though only in private institutions for over-18s, and Turkey’s first Kurdish television channel was launched. Why did Erdoğan’s strategy fail? He didn’t deliver on his promises. The cultural measures introduced were half-hearted and piecemeal. The television station, for example, was dull and unwatchable. The Kurdish language was legalised, but key letters absent from Turkish remained prohibited, making something of a mockery of the legalisation. Erdoğan’s foreign policy became increasingly harsh towards Kurds abroad, which turned off Kurds at home. PKK’s youth wing declared autonomy in multiple Turkish Kurdish cities in late summer 2015. This outraged Erdoğan and he deployed the military once more. Over 600 people were killed in harsh urban fighting, and up to half a million displaced, but the Turkish military had retaken all the cities by spring 2016.

An attempted coup in June 2016 against Erdoğan by disgruntled military officers, bungled and quickly failed. Erdoğan used the plot as a pretext to repress multiple domestic enemies. Hundreds of thousands of state employees were dismissed, thousands of journalists were arrested, judges were dismissed, as were academics at universities. The result was a complete purge from Turkey’s state institutions of anyone suspected of not backing Erdoğan.

Freedom without Independence? The likelihood of an independent Kurdistan emerging looks as forlorn as ever. It has thus far failed to come into being for three main reasons: The Kurdish national movement started on the wrong foot Once Kurdish nationalism emerged, its leaders and movements made a series of self-defeating errors. Internal divisions have been greatly exacerbated by the machinations of different governments.

The importance of oil and gas to the world economy, and the desire of larger regional powers like Iran and Iraq to dominate those producing it, has made the Gulf a deeply insecure region. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Oman formed the GCC in 1981, partly to defend against Iraq and Iran. When Britain eventually departed in 1971, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE arguably owed their separate existence to London’s long presence.

Qatar also formally follows Wahhabi Islam, but enforces it less rigidly. It wasn’t a major fossil fuel exporter until the 1990s, when its huge natural gas reserves were tapped.

Bahrain has very modest oil reserves, meaning the ruling Al-Khalifa family have diversified the island’s economy to focus on finance. This has been partly successful but has not allowed Bahrain anywhere near the international freedom of other Gulf states, leaving it often reliant on neighbouring Saudi Arabia. The Al-Khalifas are Sunni Muslims, but most of their subjects are Shia. Bahrain’s leaders fear the Shia could revolt against them, a sentiment shared by the Al-Sauds, whose Shia minority live in the most oil-rich parts of Saudi Arabia.

Kuwait has a functioning parliament, though the ruling Al-Sabah family is rarely criticised, and an historical merchant class that continued to be influential even after oil was discovered. Kuwait often adopt neutral or mediating positions in the Gulf, eschewing the activism of Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Doha.

Oman likewise favours neutrality. It enjoys closer ties with Iran than most Gulf states, partially the result of the two states’ much longer history of cooperation across the Gulf dating back centuries.

When Britain withdrew from the Gulf region in 1971, the US gradually took over its role as protector. Two years later Saudi Arabia led an oil boycott against the US and other Western states to protest their support for Israel in the Yom Kippur/October war, almost quadrupling oil prices and pushing the US economy into recession. While most US troops left after Saddam’s defeat, the White House concluded agreements with all six GCC states in the early 1990s to secure a permanent military presence. They retain these bases today. This tied the GCC firmly to US primacy.

The 9/11 attacks had been precipitated by Al-Qaeda terrorists, mostly hailing from Gulf states – 15 of the 19 being from Saudi Arabia, and 2 from the UAE. One of Al-Qaeda’s core concerns was the presence of non-Muslim US troops on the sacred Arabian Peninsula.

The conservative autocrats of the GCC were furious with the United States. US President Barack Obama had facilitated the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, angering Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which believed Washington should stand by its partners and, privately feared the White House might similarly desert them in the future.

Riyadh and Abu Dhabi share a deep opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood. Qatar largely welcomed the uprisings. Al Jazeera, the Arabic news station established in Doha with Qatari backing, was instrumental in spreading the protests across the Arab world. It had close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose spokesmen and allies were given regular airtime on Al Jazeera. Doha was backing the opponents of its GCC allies, and pushing for different outcomes in the conflicts. But in Yemen, Doha joined the Saudi–UAE-led coalition a few months after the initial intervention. Despite its differences with allies elsewhere in the Middle East, Qatar signalled that on matters in the Gulf’s neighbourhood, GCC solidarity still held – for now.

The ‘Shale Revolution’ that massively increased the domestic oil supply of the US, as well as the growth of imports from Canada, mean the US now imports little oil from GCC states.

China’s interests in the Gulf were primarily economic. The GCC is China’s eighth-largest source of imports and exports. Saudi Arabia is China’s biggest trade partner, being a key market for Chinese construction firms as well as the single largest source of Beijing’s oil. Riyadh values its ties with China so highly that it accepts Beijing’s extensive ties with its rival, Iran, also a key BRI partner.

China makes great use of Dubai’s role as the world’s third-largest re-export hub. Over 4,000 Chinese companies are based in the UAE.

China is not necessarily a better friend than the United States, but it is a less complicated friend.

In 2015 a Chinese company signed a forty-three-year lease for the port of Gwadar in Pakistan – an early signatory to the BRI – 600 miles east of the Strait of Hormuz, opening the possibility that eventually the Chinese navy may have a base not far from the region. China has a sizeable Muslim minority and utilises Saudi Arabia to help manage it. The Hui Muslims of Ningxia province are tolerated, and Beijing uses its ties with Riyadh to underline this tolerance, such as securing pilgrimage spots to Mecca and Medina.

Qatar crisis rocked the Gulf from 2017 to 2021. Mohammed Bin Salman (MBS) was also heavily influenced by his counterpart in the UAE, Mohammed Bin Zayad (MBZ). MBZ was fundamentally opposed to the Brotherhood and was convinced that Qatar’s continued sponsorship risked inspiring Emirati Islamists to challenge his rule at home. In summer 2017, the blockade of Qatar began. Saudi Arabia closed Qatar’s only land border and forbade Qatar Airways from using its airspace. The four blockading governments ceased all economic activity with Qatar, Qatari citizens were expelled, while citizens of UAE and Bahrain were forbidden to express any support for Qatar on social media. Tamim sought ways to overcome the boycott, reaching deals with Iran, Turkey, and East Asian states to provide essential goods by air and sea. If the quartet had intended the blockade to weaken Qatar’s resolve, it failed. Qatar used its vast wealth, via its $300 billion sovereign wealth fund, to pay inflated prices to keep food and goods flowing, and the besieged population rallied around the young emir, strengthening his position. The blockade shattered the perceived stability of the GCC. Kuwait and Oman, meanwhile, remained neutral and tried in vain to mediate. Both were concerned that, should the quartet succeed in reducing Qatar’s independence, they might be next – especially Oman, which also enjoyed good ties with Iran. Trump reportedly only started trying to end the boycott when he realised Qatar was paying Iran $100 million a year to use its airspace, giving Tehran an income at a time when the White House was trying to cripple its economy with sanctions. Qatar made next to no concessions and the action was widely seen as a failure. Tamim immediately travelled to Saudi Arabia for a GCC summit, where the leaders all embraced – the club apparently restored. However, the episode had damaged GCC credibility.

In London alone, Doha owns such landmark assets as Harrods department store, the Shard skyscraper, the Savoy hotel, as well as 50% of Canary Wharf, 20% of Heathrow Airport and 14% of Sainsbury’s. Investing in Western and Asian economies has been a deliberate tactic by all the GCC governments, especially the wealthiest trio of Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar. These investments have dual purposes. On the one hand, they make economic sense, adding more assets to growing sovereign wealth funds – utilised expertly by Qatar to survive the blockade. But they also serve geopolitical goals. Making foreign economies reliant on Gulf largesse will make foreign governments more likely to support the incumbent regimes in the event of a domestic or international threat. Gulf states have also invested widely in the developing world, especially sub-Saharan Africa, purchasing extensive farmland to ensure ‘food security’: a guaranteed supply of food.

The Horn of Africa is one of the most beautiful and most violent regions in the world. It boasts stunning landscapes and rich culture: Ethiopia’s lush highlands and ancient churches Somalia’s golden beaches and medieval ports Eritrea’s rolling green hills and the forgotten Art Deco buildings of its capital, Asmara.

The Horn of Africa is dominated by an African superpower, Ethiopia, which has the continent’s largest army, second-largest population, and has itself interfered in its neighbours’ affairs for years, something that has been reciprocated. The Horn of Africa today consists of four states: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Djibouti, though a fifth territory, Somaliland, claims an independence from Somalia that is not recognised internationally.

Ethiopia has roughly 120 million of the 140 million inhabitants of the Horn region. Landlocked, blocked from the sea by the three (or four) smaller countries. Ethiopia is approximately two-thirds Christian. Unlike all other states in Africa, Ethiopia was not colonised. Ethiopian emperor Hailie Selassie persuaded the United Nations to integrate Eritrea into Ethiopia, frustrating the Eritreans. Armed resistance to Ethiopian rule began in 1961, eventually exploding into a full-blown war of independence that lasted 30 years. Selassie was deposed and, after considerable bloodletting, replaced by a Marxist military dictatorship, known as the Derg. 1991, the Eritrean war finally ended.

Fall of the Derg in Ethiopia: The brutal Marxist regime was increasingly unpopular, not helped by disastrous economic policies that contributed to the infamous famine of 1984. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) marched almost unopposed into Addis Ababa and toppled the Derg. This new government opted for federalism, giving considerable autonomy to Ethiopia’s various ethnic communities. This opened the way for both economic development and a reconciliation with the West.

The Somali state collapsed in 1991. Somaliland has remained de facto independent ever since. In Mogadishu, the regime was toppled by another rival clan, forcing the dictator to flee. But, unlike in either Ethiopia or Somaliland, these armed groups did not come with a political programme to establish a new government. Instead they ransacked the capital, leaving it in a state of anarchy. The power vacuum was filled by various local clan-based warlords. International players then made the situation worse by offering aid to the various warring bosses, in the hope of re-establishing order. Instead, Somalia became dependent on foreign aid and factions would fight for access to external funds.

Peace between Eritrea and Ethiopia proved fleeting. Though the new government in Addis Ababa had approved Eritrean independence as one of its first acts, a new war broke out in 1998. Disputes over a relatively minor piece of territory provoked horrendous fighting for two years, costing over 100,000 lives – more than died in Eritrea’s thirty-year independence struggle.

While Eritrea turned in on itself, Ethiopia continued to thrive despite the frozen conflict. Addis Ababa was quick to sign up as a partner in the ‘war on terror’, granting it access to yet more high-end military equipment denied to its neighbours. Israel helped the famous operation to evacuate 10,000 Ethiopian Jews during the 1984 famine and resettle them in Israel. In the 2000s, Israel took a renewed interest in the region, increasing its naval and covert presence, this time to counter Iranian activity in the Red Sea.

As elsewhere, the entry of one Middle Eastern power into the region created something of a domino effect, drawing others in to counter their rivals. Of all the Middle Eastern governments newly engaged in the Horn, the UAE was arguably the most prominent.

Mohammed Bin Zayed (MBZ): On the death of his half-brother in 2022, MBZ became ruler of Abu Dhabi and president of the UAE. He consolidated his rule by placing key allies, notably his full brothers, into prominent government positions. Dubai required a $20 billion bailout from Abu Dhabi after the financial crash of 2008/9, in exchange for which MBZ demanded greater control over security and foreign policy. MBZ had developed a deep opposition to Islamism in general and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, seeing little difference between its relatively moderate ideology and the more extreme Jihadism of Al-Qaeda or Islamic State. While personally religious, MBZ believed religion should stay out of politics. Abu Dhabi made economic openness and international trade central to its efforts, and a concerted effort to be more visible in international affairs, aided by a dedicated and skilled team of diplomats.

Ethiopia maintains thousands of troops in Somalia’s south-western provinces, officially part of the African Union force supporting the government. In 2016 Addis Ababa controversially lobbied the UAE to develop Somaliland’s Berbera port. The agreement, which granted the Dubai-based company DP World a thirty-year concession to develop the port and a 51% stake, also gave 30% to Somaliland and 19% to Ethiopia. The deal furthered Somaliland’s informal secession by granting it powerful external protectors. This was compounded by the $400 million construction of a road linking Berbera to the Ethiopian border, funded by the UAE and UK, granting Addis Ababa access to another port, and boosting Somaliland’s ability to survive without Mogadishu.

Since 1991, Ethiopia had enjoyed a degree of political stability. 42-year-old Abiy Ahmed was elected: Abiy promised domestic reform on assuming office, and immediately released thousands of political prisoners. He also promised peace with Eritrea, opening the way to UAE mediation. Abiy responded by dissolving the 28-year-old coalition in 2019, and forming a new one, ‘the Prosperity Party’, that excluded the TPLF. This aided peace with Eritrea as much of the animosity was between the TPLF and the ruling party of Eritrea.

Abu Dhabi injected $3 billion into Ethiopia’s economy in June 2018, and soon an agreement was reached between the two sides. Abiy’s warming to Eritrea and the Gulf mediators indicated a more open approach to foreign affairs. He dropped his predecessors’ hostility to Somalia. But Ethiopia was too big and powerful to be swayed by Middle Eastern rivalries and strengthened its ties with Abu Dhabi and Riyadh’s rivals Turkey, Qatar, and Iran as well.

Ethiopia: Such was Abiy’s growing clout that he was awarded the 2019 Nobel Peace Prize for his reconciliation with Asmara. However, acclaim for Abiy was soon tempered by the outbreak of the Tigray war in 2020. TPLF launched an insurrection against federal forces based in Tigray, prompting a massive counter-attack by Addis Ababa. A major conflict followed, killing up to 600,000 within two years. War crimes were committed on both sides. Abiy’s new partners in Eritrea joined the fight, attacking Tigray from the north. Abiy ultimately triumphed and the TPLF, facing a siege that triggered famine across Tigray, sued for peace. An African Union-brokered ceasefire was agreed in November 2022, which saw the TPLF agree to disarm and restore federal control to Tigray. However, the war had highlighted future problems, as other Ethiopian regions also protested Addis Abba’s centralisation.

Ethiopia gave little ground on its controversial Grand Ethiopia Renaissance Dam, which threatened to reduce the Nile water running into Sudan and Egypt.

Eritrea enforces national service for all Eritrean adults from school until the age of 40 for women and 50 for men. Some serve in the military, but many end up in labour battalions working on public infrastructure projects or for companies owned by party bosses. Flight from this modern slavery has made Eritrea one of the highest producers of refugees per capita in the world.

Djibouti has historically been something of an exception in the Horn, mostly avoiding the violence and instability that troubled its neighbours. Much of this was down to outside protection. It remained under French control until 1977. Ethiopia has also been a staunch defender, relying heavily on Djibouti’s port. China was permitted to open a base in 2017. Beijing had been using Djibouti port since 2008: Beijing’s first overseas naval base. Was part of a wider Chinese expansion in the region, with Djibouti playing a key role in its Belt and Road New infrastructure projects saw Djibouti’s public debt nearly double between 2016 and 2018, leaving it heavily indebted to Beijing.

Heirs to Forgotten Kingdoms: the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East - by Gerard Russell

2025-08-11T04:00:00Z

summary:

The subtitle says it best: “Journeys into the Disappearing Religions of the Middle East”. British author, fluent in Arabic and Farsi, goes deep into Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Pakistan to meet Mandaeans, Yazidis, Zoroastrians, Druze, Samaritans, Copts, and Kalasha. Fascinating bold anthropological adventure with insights into religion and history.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

In Iraq, Iran, and Lebanon, I encountered religious beliefs that I had never known of before: a taboo against wearing the color blue, obligatory mustaches, and a reverence for peacocks.

These religions were vestiges of the pre-Christian culture of Mesopotamia but drew as well from Indian traditions that had been transmitted to the Middle East through the Persian Empire, and from Greek philosophy.

They have held on to practices and traditions without change for more than a thousand years - sometimes preserving them for many millennia, under constant pressure to convert. Most of these groups, though, are now more vulnerable than ever, and this book aims to give them a voice.

Greek philosophy influenced the Middle East as much as it did Europe.

The Christians of Iraq a thousand years ago shared their church with Mongolians. They had a Chinese patriarch and a bishop of Tibet.

Apparent differences can conceal unexpected connections and commonalities.

Disprove the theories and beliefs of those who want to corral people into separate cultures and civilizations.

Some religious groups (such as the Yazidis and Assyrians, for example) enjoyed a high degree of autonomy for many centuries, outside the reach of governments.

There is a tendency to hold such groups collectively liable for the actions of anyone who has their religion. Hence the past attacks on the Armenians and Jews. The Samaritans, living on a mountain in the West Bank, try hard to avoid alienating either the Israelis or the Palestinians. The Yazidis of northern Iraq are being pressed to choose between Arabs and Kurds. The Egyptian Coptic Church has had to decide whether to back military or Islamic rule. Each choice makes enemies for the whole community, not just its leaders.

There is no quicker way to build a sense of group identity than to point to a common enemy who is wicked and powerful yet can be defeated.

Communism and nationalism: Both movements offered minorities a cause in which they could stand side by side with Muslims. With the decay of postcolonial nationalist movements, religious divisions became easier to exploit.

Lebanon, where a terrible civil war ended only about twenty years ago. Polling suggests that religious tolerance is higher than it is in many European countries.

In the Samaritan calendar the year is 3652, measured from the day when the people of Israel entered the Promised Land. In the Muslim calendar it is 1435, measured from Mohammed’s migration to Medinah. In the Zoroastrian calendar it is 1383, measured since the last Zoroastrian king was crowned.

Noah’s ark? Ancient Iraqi legends speak of a great deluge, and of a man called Utnapishtim who survived it in a great boat. The legend, which influenced the biblical account of Noah, was based on fact. Iraq’s low-lying cities were exposed to devastating inundations.

Iraq’s cities appeared as early as 5300 BC - three thousand years before Pharaoh Cheops built the Great Pyramid. Iraq’s cities were almost as ancient for him as Tutankhamun is for us.

Estimates of the Jewish population of Iraq go as high as two million by the year AD 500 - perhaps something like 40 percent of its population.

It was the Babylonians who first divided the sky into the twelve signs of the zodiac, choosing twelve to match the number of cycles of the moon in every year.

Diligent watchers of the skies saw early on - certainly by 1500 BC - that some stars behaved differently than others. They were brighter and moved through the sky in a different way. The observers called these lu-bat, meaning “wandering sheep.” The term was translated into Greek as aster planetes, meaning “wandering star”. Which in turn gave us our word planet.

Babylonian astronomers identified five planets - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They put the sun and moon in this group as well, making seven - and named each one after a god. They invented the week as a period of seven days, one for every planet god. We have inherited from the Babylonians the habit of naming the planets and the days of the week after gods.

For the Babylonians, one day in seven was an evil day, when activity should be avoided - which may have been the origin of the Sabbath day adopted by Judaism.

Iraq middle class until 1990 made up over half the population. After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, United Nations sanctions destroyed its economy. Per capita income declined by 85 percent.

History’s longest war: Hostilities between Rome and Persia continued, with intervals of truce, for nearly seven hundred years.

According to the Koran, “people of the book” - including Christians, Jews, and the so-called “Sabians” - deserved special tolerance. Polytheists, on the other hand, were generally thought to deserve death if they did not convert. It was not clear to which of these categories the Harranians belonged. Then they spotted the reference to “Sabians” in the Koran and latched on to it: they declared that they were the Sabians, and in doing so won another three hundred years of peace.

Ancestral customs included a ban on eating camel or rabbit meat, and on eating meat from any animal of a different sex from oneself: women ate the meat of female animals and men the meat of male animals.

The Alawite holy books list many figures from history as having been the human equivalents of God’s celestial servants: Mohammed and Jesus, but also Plato and Alexander the Great. The greatest of them, in their tradition, is Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed. He was a glimpse or image of God, and the closest thing to God on earth. It would be right to exalt Ali by saying that he was God, but wrong to limit God by saying God was Ali. The Alawites actually say “the image is God but God is not the image,” a phrase that resembles that used by Nestorian Christians in a text dated to AD550: “The Messiah is God but God is not the Messiah.”

When Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon it provoked a theological crisis among Alawite scholars. Like the Harranians, they believed that the moon was a physical manifestation of a spirit that stood in the heavenly hierarchy as an intermediary between God and man - but how could that be true if it was a lump of rock, and not even the only moon in the universe but one of many?

Kurmanji, the Kurdish language, which has for a hundred years survived consistent efforts by the Turkish government to suppress it.

When the charismatic Mustafa Kemal, called “Ataturk,” was trying after World War I to shape the decaying remnants of the Ottoman Empire into the modern state of Turkey, he felt that his new country’s diversity was a source of weakness and division. He attempted to suppress the many local and regional identities, and in some cases succeeded - but not with the Kurds. He and his successors banned Kurmanji in schools, but it survived (and the ban has now been lifted).

On Turkish soil, “Kurdistan” was a forbidden word, suggestive of separatism and the breakdown of Turkey into its separate ethnic parts. In Iraq, I found that people said “Kurdistan” as often as they could. Iraqi Kurds used it emphatically, assertively, as though it had a magic force, as though its use were the source of their freedom and growing prosperity. Iraqi Kurds are enjoying unity without uniformity.

It is in the areas where Kurdish is spoken that a foreigner is safest. On a map I saw during my visit showing a red dot for every violent attack in the past year, Kurdistan was an empty space.

Sufi preachers who converted people on the frontiers of Islam often gave themselves flexibility to accept aspects of their converts’ old beliefs, sometimes grafting Islamic names onto them and reshaping them so that they could sit alongside Muslim practices.

The Yazidis’ view of God is a very abstract one - nothing can be said of God with any certainty, they say, except that he exists.

The Druze in Lebanon believe that it was the peacock, not the serpent, that was the tempter in the Garden of Eden. Some Zoroastrians in Iran believed that the peacock was the one good thing that the devil made, as a way of showing that he had the power to do good if he so chose.

Houses painted in pastel colors with metal poles sticking out of their roofs, ready for when the next story would be built for the next generation.

Like many of the Yazidi intellectuals I spoke with, he was fascinated by the history of his own religion. I was getting used to every Yazidi giving me a slightly different account.

The Yazidis’ original contribution to Western life: for this is the custom that, thanks to the cult of Mithras, has become our handshake.

The word “magic” comes from the name for the Zoroastrian priests, the Magi. The distinction between black and white magic (one evil, the other good) parallels the difference between Angra Mainyu and Ahura Mazda. And the animals that accompany a practitioner of black magic, such as snakes, toads, and of course cats, are all creatures of Angra Mainyu.

It was after the Greeks encountered the Persians that the Greek philosopher Plato suggested souls went to reward or punishment after their death, depending on what they had done in their lives. Religion had been fundamentally changed. Nietzsche, looking back at these events, judged that “Zarathustra created this most portentous of all errors - morality”.

Islam offered an escape from the Zoroastrian caste system, in which priests and warriors were at the top. The lower castes were taught less about the religion and were quicker to abandon it, as is apparent from the high proportion of priestly families among those who have remained Zoroastrian.

Iran was in those days mostly Sunni rather than Shi’a. It became majority Shi’a only in the sixteenth century. Yet it seems more than a coincidence that this fallen empire has ended up with a version of Islam that has embedded within it a sense that all is not right with the world - that the true order of things has been inverted.

Shi’a Islam began with twelve imams, who were meant to be the successors to the Prophet Mohammed. They were all descended from Mohammed. One of the points on which the Shi’a insist is that the rulers of Islam must be from the Prophet’s family. Only the first of these Shi’a imams was accepted by the majority of Muslims, and many of them died amid accusations of foul play. For the Shi’a this embedded in their faith a contempt for worldly governments and a pious hope that the last of the twelve imams would one day return as the Mehdi - the equivalent of the Jewish and Christian Messiah - to usher in the end of the world. The Avesta, too, prophesied a Messiah. This Zoroastrian concept appears to have predated both the Jewish belief in the Messiah and the Muslim belief in the Mehdi. Some scholars think that it inspired them both. Though the idea of a historical figure rising from the dead to rescue his people is one that might appeal to any society whose past was greater than its present.

Greek science was so much revered in Persia that even after the West had adopted newer ideas, the Persians continued to follow the Greeks. Into the nineteenth century, anyone going to a doctor in Persia would have had his or her humors analyzed, based on the prescriptions of the second-century Greek doctor Galen. The astronomy that Iranian clerics were still being taught at the start of the twentieth century was that of Ptolemy, a second-century Greek scientist.

Shiraz, a city where in the 1840s a conservative Muslim sayyid called Ali Shirazi declared himself to be the Mehdi and won a hundred thousand followers before he was brutally put to death by the authorities, who regarded him as a blasphemer. His followers called themselves the Babis, because Shirazi was the “Bab,” the mystical gateway to God. Their customs, some of which showed clear Zoroastrian influences. The secrecy was justified: Iran’s nineteenth-century government slaughtered thousands of Babis. The Babis’ religion eventually morphed into Baha’ism. In recent years the Baha’i leaders have been imprisoned and their followers systematically harassed, excluded from government jobs, and sometimes arrested on the grounds that they are apostates from Islam. Since the Islamic Revolution, two hundred Baha’is have been killed.

Hafez is Iranians’ favorite poet. Hafez’s Diwan is one of the two books that every traditional Iranian family owns - the other being the Koran.

In Zoroastrian tradition Zarathustra gave the saint-king Vishtaspa wine to drink, which put him into a trance. In that trance he ascended to heaven and glimpsed the glory of God. Herodotus said that the Persians made a decision only if they had considered it twice - once when sober and once when drunk. When I first read this, I assumed it was a joke - but in fact it makes sense. If wine gives a special kind of mystical insight, then it would seem to be a good idea to get drunk before making decisions.

Parsees, descendants of Zoroastrian refugees who had left Iran a thousand years before for Gujarat.

Zoroastrians, too, have a holy book, which, along with belief in a single God, is traditionally a prerequisite for toleration under Islam. The “people of the book” are spoken of highly in the Koran, and in Iran the Zoroastrians are counted among their number. The regime derides them, however, because of their reverence for the sacred fires in their fire temples, alleging that they “worship fire.”

Participants would go home and wash themselves with bull’s urine. The ammonia this urine contains makes it a good disinfectant, and apparently after years of storage it loses its smell.

In 2004, the Zoroastrians themselves estimated their numbers in the United States at ten thousand and in Canada at five thousand. Numbers in Iran itself have declined, though official statistics do not show this, because however badly the Zoroastrians are treated, the Baha’i fare worse, and so many Baha’is have begun to register themselves officially as Zoroastrians.

Though Lebanon’s fourteen-year civil war officially ended in 1989, the various religious groups whom that war pitted against each other still eye each other warily. The war wounded one in four Lebanese and killed one in twenty. All groups committed atrocities. All suffered them.

Lebanon, whose five million people are divided between eighteen recognized sects and religions, offers the closest thing to religious equality that exists in the Middle East: The constitution declares that “the State respects all creeds”. People are more tolerant of religious diversity than most others in the world. The reason for all this variety, though, is a virtuous one: These groups were safer in Lebanon than in most other places, because it consisted largely of mountainous areas that government forces could enter only with difficulty. Meanwhile, its location on the Mediterranean Sea made Lebanon part of both West and East.

Pythagoreans believed in reincarnation, and this drove them to purify the soul, which was immortal, and neglect the body, which they viewed as only its temporary casing. They identified themselves to each other through secret phrases and symbols deriving from their fascination with numbers and geometry.

An event some historians regard as the end of antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages: In the year AD 529 the Academy of Plato closed its doors for the last time. The Byzantine ruler Justinian, a devoutly Christian emperor, decided that the existence of the Academy was an insult to his religion and to his imperial power. In Athens, he ordered, “no one should teach philosophy nor interpret the laws.”

Philosophers had sometimes been treated as prophets or even gods. The mysterious mathematician Pythagoras, Socrates’s teacher, was regarded as a miracle worker, able to see the future and be in two places at once.

The Druze’s relationship with Islam was like that of Mormons with Christianity. They have their own revelation and philosophy that mainstream Muslims would consider unorthodox.

The pentagram was a particularly significant symbol for the Pythagoreans, and one they could use to identify themselves to other members. It interested them because it is made of ten triangles - ten being a number that to them signified perfection, and the triangle being an emblem of Pythagoras’s famous theorem. Pythagoreans believed that numbers, and the geometrical projections of numbers, were the building blocks of the universe. So when there was a pattern in geometry or mathematics, they read into it moral and practical messages. Two was the number for a woman, and three was the number assigned to a man, and so five was the number for marriage. Four represented justice because it could be equally divided twice over. So the three-, four-, and five-inch sides of the triangle spelled out a message written into the mathematical fabric of the universe: “Man must behave justly in marriage.” Pythagorean husbands were renowned for their faithfulness to their wives.

Druze number around a million people, of whom half or more are in Syria and the remainder split between Israel (120,000) and Lebanon (250,000).

Druze laypeople live essentially as they choose, provided they help defend and maintain the community and marry within it. But they are not allowed to know what their religion teaches. This is why they are known as juhhal (literally, “the ignorant ones”). Only the initiates - who are also known as sheikhs or uqqal, and who dedicate themselves to lives of contemplation and poverty - know the religion’s teachings in full.

The Druze leader was keen to demonstrate that the Druze were orthodox Muslims.

He made no apology for not telling me more. “It is about privacy, not secrecy,” he said. “Doesn’t a woman have privacy in her home? We’re asking for the same privacy for our beliefs.”

A famous painting by Raphael shows all the philosophers ancient Greece in one imaginary scene, with Aristotle and Plato standing side by side at the center of them all. Aristotle is pointing down toward the earth and Plato up toward the heavens. The picture neatly sums up the difference between two schools of thought. Aristotle’s philosophy focused on the material world: the modern word “physics” derives from the title of one of his books. Plato saw the material world as a mere shadow of the world of ideas.

Every journey in Lebanon is a religious education, because the country’s different religions all tend to advertise themselves. Shop names in one Druze town: Wisdom Pharmacy and Enlightenment Hospital.

Freemasonry: The Freemasons believed that they carried on the traditions of the masons who built Solomon’s Temple. Brother Haskett thought that the Druze were the real thing - the masons’ actual descendants.

The Druze in Israel (now numbering a little over 120,000) were separated from their brethren in Lebanon when national borders were imposed on the region after World War I.

The Muslim scholar al-Ghazali argued that philosophy was self-contradictory. It could not explain God and therefore could only lead those who studied it to skepticism.

Fortified by the belief that death would quickly lead to rebirth: Going into battle, Druze soldiers would shout, “Who wants to sleep in their mother’s womb tonight?”

Pythagoras was the first to delineate the musical octave, spotting that pleasing harmonies operated according to mathematical formulae. He believed that the planets made music as they rotated across the sky, and that a person who concentrated long enough and knew what to listen for could hear the “music of the spheres.”

Druze believe that the world is part of God in the same way as the dream is part of the dreamer.

The Ten Lost Tribes of Israel must be the most found of all lost people.

Modern Hebrew, was actually devised from the 1880s onward as a simplified version of biblical Hebrew by a scholar called Eliezer Ben Yehuda. Ben Yehuda’s son was brought up, at his father’s insistence, to speak only Hebrew - a tough rule, because it meant that no other children could understand him.

Samaritans saw themselves as keeping to the letter the ancient traditions that their southern neighbors the Jews had abandoned. They saw the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as an unholy innovation by King David, who is a figure they particularly dislike. To this day, no Samaritan is ever given the name David.

Jesus’s meeting with the Samaritan woman by Jacob’s Well and the parable of the Good Samaritan show a friendlier attitude toward the Samaritans. At one point Jesus was accused of being a Samaritan himself. Perhaps because of this, Christianity attracted Samaritan converts early on.

This mountaintop village, which they called al-Loz (meaning “the almond trees”), and a street in a suburb of the Israeli capital, Tel Aviv, were the two remaining places where the world’s 750 Samaritans could still be found.

At one point Jews and Muslims both prayed in the same direction, toward Jerusalem, before Muslims turned toward Mecca instead.

Several verses of the Koran teach respect and tolerance for Jews. Muslims and Jews generally regarded each other as more thoroughly monotheistic than Christians because both groups rejected the idea that Jesus was God incarnate, and they refused to depict God in any kind of image.

Samaritans had not forgotten that they were descendants of Joseph, who had been betrayed and sold into slavery by his brothers. The Samaritans had inherited his grievance and thus resented the Jews.

The Samaritan Torah is slightly different from the Jewish one. Its version of the Ten Commandments does not include any ban on using the Lord’s name in vain, but it does include a commandment to build an altar on Mount Gerizim. Benny argues that the Samaritan Torah is the more authentic version. His people preserved the text better over the centuries, as he sees it, because they stayed in one place, scrupulously copying the precious scriptures from old scrolls onto new ones.

“We are trying to be a kind of bridge between Palestinians and Israelis,” Samaritans were the one issue the Palestinians and Israelis could agree about.

First-century evangelists first brought Christianity to Egypt. Those Egyptians who remain Christian are known as Copts. Estimates of their numbers vary widely, from four million to twelve million. Because of a split in the Christian Church in the fifth century over the nature of Christ, Copts have since then developed their own distinctive brand of Christianity. Copts have kept or even toughened many of the rules that European Christians have relaxed.

I was in love with Arabic. It was my key to a world hidden in plain sight. It admitted me into places where otherwise I could not have gone, let me read books and poetry that dated back over a thousand years - for it had changed little during that time, being the sacred language of the Koran - and opened up conversations I never could have had without it. The language also had an extraordinary system to its design. Take three letters, and it formed a root. That root, like a musical motif, could be treated in one of twelve different ways, each one changing its meaning in a subtly different way. The result was a language as sweetly mathematical as a Bach motet.

Egyptian courtesy: Exaggerated compliments, half-meant invitations, and gargantuan hospitality. One particular exchange that the priest had with a flower merchant summed it up for me. After a lengthy negotiation over price, the flower seller declared: “Of course, I would like you to have them for free.” Nimbler at this than I would ever have been, the priest had an equally insincere compliment ready in reply: “You know, I only came here for the pleasure of seeing you.”

A devout Copt should pray seven times a day, avoid drinking alcohol, and never smoke. Copts fast not only during Lent but also during Advent and at other times of the year - 210 days of the year in total.

Egyptians believe themselves to be the most religious people in the world.

Egyptians are asking, ‘Who am I? Am I Arab or Egyptian?’”

The pharaoh Akhenaten, father of Tutankhamun, was the first known monotheist in history. He abolished all gods except his beloved Aten, the sun god.

Native Egyptians came to be given their own special label, to distinguish them from the Greek settlers who owned most of the land and ran the administration. They were called Aiguptioi - from which the words “Egypt” and “Copt” are both derived.

Nasser saw himself as an Arab, not an Egyptian. The title of his biography is not The First Egyptian but The Last Arab. For more than a decade the name “Egypt” vanished from the map, as Nasser changed the country’s name to the United Arab Republic and sought to unify it with Syria.

In 1956, after Israel joined with Britain and France in a secret conspiracy to destabilize Egypt and seize the Suez Canal, Nasser stripped many Jewish Egyptians of their citizenship. He went on to expel thousands from the country, and nationalize - that is, confiscate - their businesses.

One Egyptian banker, a Muslim, told me that the attitude toward the Copts was one “that you might have toward a younger brother - a half brother, really. Someone you know is there, but you’d really rather he wasn’t.”

For some Copts the answer was emigration, made easier for them by their relatively high levels of education and a favorable attitude from Western governments. Between 1993 and 1997, 76 percent of requests from Egyptians for permanent emigration to the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand were made by Copts. Emigration to the West is the Copts’ preferred way out. In the United States there are more than two hundred Coptic churches and an estimated three-quarters of a million Copts.

Summer 2007: when foreigners were heading for Kabul: they were mostly burly, muscular characters with North Face backpacks.

Hindu Kush, a great mountain range that runs along the eastern borders of Tajikistan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan and separates those countries from China. They are really part of the Himalayas. Though they are called the “Roof of the World,” it is more apt to think of them as a wall or a rampart: Many times over, they have been the furthest point eastward that any people has reached. These mountains are to human cultures what coral reefs are to marine life: rich and diverse.

Kafiristan went unvisited and came to be called the “dark spot on the map of Asia.”

The Kam often had vendettas against each other, but a neat custom enabled them to dodge these if they wished: A man needed only to pretend to hide from his would-be killer, who then pretended not to see him.

In 1895 three military units loyal to Abdur Rahman advanced on Kafiristan. The territory that Abdur Rahman conquered was eventually renamed Nuristan, the “land of light,” to celebrate its forced conversion.

The last pagans of Pakistan. These people were the Kalasha. They survived the forced conversion of their Kafir cousins in the high mountains.

The mehtars of Chitral were under British protection and Abdur Rahman could not enter their territory. It is for this reason, too, that their valley is in Pakistan, which annexed Chitral in 1969.

The mountains, however, have also protected them from almost all invaders, and their valleys can still be peaceful even when there is chaos and violence just a few miles away.

I decided to venture into the Hindu Kush from the other side. From Beijing, I traveled by train and road west through China’s troubled province of Xinjiang and into a northern province of Pakistan called Hunza. The area was in many respects very similar to Afghanistan, but free of danger. I could ride the local minibuses, go shopping in the markets, and talk freely to people (in a little Dari, and mostly English widely spoken because the region has no single universal language).

Pakistan is a country stitched together in 1948 from a collection of provinces - including Chitral - that had little but religion in common. Constant tension with India also helped create a feeling that being more Islamic was the same as being more patriotic. Widespread corruption created a sense that only the pious could be trusted to run things honestly. Pakistan is a country of contradictions. It was founded by a liberal Shi’a Muslim, but in the past twenty years, four thousand Shi’a have been killed.

If I ask Kalasha people, ‘Why do we do this thing?’ or ‘Why do we follow that tradition?’ they will only say, ‘That was how our grandparents did it.’ They don’t know what it means.

They regarded adultery, for the most part, as a matter of general hilarity. When a man and a married woman were caught making love, the tribe would come to watch and laugh. The man did not find it nearly as amusing, as he would have to pay the cuckolded husband a heavy fine. The woman did not pay a penalty.

A blasphemy law has been deployed oppressively against the country’s minorities, and religious extremists have carved out areas of virtual self-rule in the Pashtun areas near Chitral, where they are challenged only by controversial, lethal US drones. Pakistani politicians who see a whole range of difficult constituencies that they must buy can see one that is cheap: religious fundamentalists will give their support for free if they are given influence over education and the morality of the people. All that is needed is to mortgage the future. A vein of tolerance can still be found in Pakistan wherever the fundamentalists have been kept out. Chitral had long been largely cut offfrom the rest of Pakistan by its topography and by the British-drawn border, which put part of the valley in Afghanistan.

Both Mongolia and Tibet have alphabets based on the Syriac script introduced by Iraqi Christian missionaries more than a millennium ago.

There are more speakers of Aramaic in metropolitan Detroit than there are in Baghdad: over a hundred thousand Iraqi Chaldeans live in the city.

Large-scale emigration from the Middle East began in the late nineteenth century, driven by growing poverty and land shortages in Lebanon and Palestine, as well as Ottoman oppression and conflict. Most of the migrants were Christian, and Latin America was a favored destination because it both encouraged immigration and offered plenty of economic opportunities. As a consequence, it attracted the lion’s share of Arab Christian migrants, with some startling results: Today, 5 percent of Latin America’s population is ethnically Arab. There are more Christians of Palestinian descent in Chile than in Palestine. Eight presidents of South and Central American countries have been of Middle Eastern descent. The world’s richest man (Carlos Slim Helú, a businessman), one of its best-known singers (Shakira), and the actress Salma Hayek all have Lebanese ancestry.

Michigan that has a higher proportion of Arab Americans than any other state. Their history is explained by the Arab American Museum in Dearborn, a city where 20 percent of the population are Arab. A majority of Arab Americans are Christian.

Now nearly 3.5 million Americans have roots in the Arab world, according to the Arab American Institute.

He was a Christian Palestinian living in a largely Jewish neighborhood. He had married a non-Arab woman. He had chosen to live in a Jewish neighborhood in part as a challenge to the voluntary segregation most immigrants practiced. “Peer pressure controls kids. And they had Jewish friends, which made me happy - that we can coexist.”

“We are melting,” Yusif agreed, quoting a line of Palestinian poetry.

Druze had much trouble explaining themselves in the overtly religious culture of America. “It’s like the Chinese system - we have traditions but no rules.”

A Druze sheikh once offered some consolation to a worried expatriate mother whose daughter had left the religion. “When your child dies, she will be reincarnated back in Lebanon as Druze again.”

Middle Eastern émigrés from these smaller religions find common ground with Jews - especially because the latter practice their traditions and customs in private, keeping their identity and community alive but outwardly assimilating into secular society.

They had no nostalgia for the Middle East. “There are more rights for prisoners here than for free men there.”

A knowledge of history can help us see that any civilization is at its most successful where it is most open to others and the ideas of others.

Focusing on extremism only when it turns violent ignores the fact that violence comes at the end of a long process of radicalization, which begins with the encouragement of anger and hatred.

Knowledge, Reality, and Value - by Michael Huemer

2025-08-01T04:00:00Z

summary:

Perfect introduction to academic philosophy. Real philosopher’s definitions. Differs from the more self-help style philosophy I love. Great examples of clear thinking.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

People do not acquire concepts by hearing definitions. We acquire concepts by seeing examples. (You acquire the concept “green” by seeing examples of green things, not by someone trying to tell you what green is.)

A proposition is the thing that you believe, not the belief itself. “We will colonize Mars” and “Nous allons coloniser Mars” are not the same sentence, but they express the same proposition.

Valid or invalid: An argument is said to be valid (or “deductively valid” or “logically valid”) when the premises entail the conclusion. That is, it would be impossible (in the sense of contradictory) for all the premises to be true and the conclusion to be false. Note: This is not the ordinary English usage of “valid”; this is a special, technical usage among philosophers. Virtually all philosophers use the word this way, so you have to learn it.

Sound or unsound: An argument is said to be sound when it is valid and all of its premises are true. (In this case, of course, the conclusion must also be true – you can see that if you understood the definition of “valid”.) An argument is unsound whenever it is invalid or has a false premise.

Be explicit, and say things correctly.

Freedom isn’t a concept. Freedom is an absence of constraints.

One way of characterizing rational beliefs is to say that they are the beliefs that are likely to be true, given the experiences and information available to you at the time.

Forming irrational beliefs makes you morally to blame if you act on those beliefs and there is a bad outcome. By contrast, forming rational beliefs insulates you from that kind of blame. If you think rationally, and you do the thing that is right according to your rationally formed beliefs, then you are not morally to blame if things go wrong.

Belief can have practical consequences down the line. Irrational beliefs can also have an impact on your belief-forming methods, causing you to adopt less rational methods of forming beliefs in the future. Suppose you accept, purely on blind faith, that there is a God. This might lead to your adopting the more general belief that blind faith is an acceptable way of forming beliefs. But once you accept that, you are liable to form all kinds of false beliefs, because there are so many false beliefs that could be adopted by blind faith.

You have to start from some rational background beliefs in order to reason about what beliefs are likely to cause harm.

A rational thinker is not a person who strives to base his beliefs on objective evidence rather than on his emotions. Having feelings does not make you irrational. Believing that the world must be a certain way because of your feelings does make you irrational.

Objectivity is a disposition to resist bias, and hence to base one’s beliefs on the objective facts. The main failures of objectivity are cases where your beliefs are overly influenced by your personal interests, emotions, or desires, or by how the phenomenon in the world is related to you, as opposed to how the external world is independent of you.

Neutrality is a matter of not taking a stand on a controversial issue. It is generally false that both sides are equally good. You should not refuse to evaluate issues. Treat the other side fairly, even while defending your side. Treat intellectual debate as a mutual truth-seeking enterprise, rather than as a personal contest. As a rational thinker, you want your beliefs to be true, so you should welcome the opportunity to discover if your own current view is wrong.

Failures of objectivity are very common, and they often lead us very far astray. Objectivity is the main thing we need to make progress on debates in philosophy (and religion, and politics). The human mind is not really designed for discovering abstract, philosophical truths. Our natural tendency is to try to advance our own interests or the interests of the group we identify with. We tend to treat intellectual issues as a proxy battleground for that endeavor.

Factors that make someone biased about a topic are also the factors that make them knowledgeable about it. If we discount “non-objective” perspectives, that could mean throwing out the perspectives of the most knowledgeable people. Examples: Suppose your company is hiring a new employee, and one of the candidates is a friend of yours whom you have known for ten years. You would probably be more knowledgeable about the candidate than anyone else at your company, while at the same time being the most biased. Suppose you are involved in a discussion about war, and you are a veteran of a past war. You would probably be the most knowledgeable person present about what wars are like; but you would also likely have the most biases, because the experiences that gave you that knowledge also gave you strong feelings. Suppose you are in a discussion about racism, and you are a member of a minority race. Then you are likely to be especially knowledgeable about what it is like to be a member of a minority, including how often such minorities experience discrimination. But the same experiences that gave you that knowledge are likely to have given you personal, emotional biases on the subject.

Collect information from the most sophisticated sources, not (as most people do) the most entertaining sources. That usually means looking at academic sources, rather than popular media.

Challenge yourself to try to think of reasons why your own views might be wrong. When you give an argument, try to think of evidence against your own conclusions. Withhold judgment on that issue until you understand the rational reasons on the other side.

Dogmatic people have beliefs that are overly persistent and insufficiently receptive to disconfirmation. We underestimate appropriate belief revision.

Use weak, widely-shared premises. A “strong” claim is one that says a lot; a “weak” claim says not very much. For instance, “All politicians are liars” is a strong claim; by contrast, “Some politicians are liars” is a much weaker claim. In general, the more controversial claims you make, and the stronger the claims are, the more likely that your argument is wrong. So try to build arguments that use the weakest, least controversial premises possible. Don’t claim more than you have to.

Appeal to ignorance: Concluding that something is the case merely because we don’t know anything to the contrary. Authors sometimes try to lure you into this mistake by writing things like, “There is no reason why X would be true” (hoping that you’ll infer that X isn’t true) or “There is no reason to doubt X” (hoping you’ll infer that X is true).

Appeal to the people: Inferring that something is true from the fact that it is popularly believed.

False Analogy: An argument by analogy that’s no good, because the two things being compared are not really comparable. “The government should be able to exclude foreigners, just as I can exclude strangers from my house.” The house might not be analogous to (not a fair comparison to) the whole country (perhaps because the government does not own the whole country in the same way an individual owns a house).

If a belief is to be justified, the belief must at least be very likely to be true. If a belief is highly probable, then any alternative to it (whether “relevant” or not) must be highly improbable.

Your ideas are determined by what things you have actually perceived and interacted with, that caused you to form your ideas. This is known as the causal theory of reference.

Probability theory: The way a theory gets to be probabilistically supported is that the theory predicts some evidence that we should see in some circumstance, we create that circumstance, and the prediction comes true. More precisely, evidence supports a theory provided that the evidence would be more likely to occur if the theory were true than otherwise. The theories that we consider “falsifiable” are those that make relatively sharp predictions: That is, they give high probability to some observation that is much less likely on the alternative theories. If those observations occur, then the theory is supported; if they don’t, then the theory is disconfirmed (rendered less probable). “Unfalsifiable” theories are ones that make weak predictions or no predictions – that is, they don’t significantly alter the probabilities we would assign to different possible observations. They allow pretty much any observation to occur, and they don’t predict any particular course of observations to be much more likely than any other. On this account, “falsifiability” is a matter of degree. A theory is more falsifiable to the extent that it makes more predictions and stronger predictions. A highly falsifiable theory, by definition, is open to strong disconfirmation (lowering of its probability), in the event that its predictions turn out false. But, by the same token, the theory is open to strong support in the event that its predictions turn out true. By contrast, an unfalsifiable theory cannot be disconfirmed by evidence, but for the same reason, it cannot be supported by evidence either. Suppose that you have two theories to explain some phenomenon, with one being much more falsifiable than the other. Suppose also that the evidence turns out to be consistent with both theories (neither of them make any false predictions). Then the falsifiable theory is supportedby that evidence, while the unfalsifiable theory remains unsupported. At the end of the day, then, the highly falsifiable theory is more worthy of belief.

Moral realism says that there are objective moral facts, which we can know.

Plausibility comes in degrees: Among propositions that are initially plausible, some are more plausible (they are more obvious, or more strongly seem correct) than others. So, if you have an inconsistent set of propositions that each seem plausible, you should reject whichever proposition has the lowest initial plausibility.

Foundationalists think that there are certain items of knowledge, or justified beliefs, that are “foundational”. (also called “immediately justified”, “directly known”, “self-evident”, “non-inferentially justified”).

Foundational justification is, by definition, justification that does not rest on reasons. In other words, sometimes you can rationally believe something in a way that doesn’t require it to be supported by any other beliefs. Foundationalists think that some justification is foundational, and all other justification depends on support from foundational beliefs.

Think about how you actually form beliefs when you’re pursuing the truth. You do it based on what seems true to you. Now, there are some cases where beliefs are based on something else. For instance, there are cases of wishful thinking, where someone’s belief is based on a desire: You believe P because you want it to be true. But those are not the cases where you’re seeking the truth, and cases like that are generally agreed to be unjustified beliefs. So we can ignore things like wishful thinking, taking a leap of faith, or other ways of forming unjustified beliefs. With that understood, your beliefs are based on what seems right to you.

I don’t think one first needs grounds for thinking one’s appearances are reliable. I think we may rely on appearances as long as we don’t have grounds for thinking they aren’t reliable. If you require positive evidence of reliability, then you’re never going to get that evidence, for the reasons given by the skeptic.

Phenomenal Conservatism says that we are entitled to presume that whatever seems to us to be the case is in fact the case, unless and until we have reasons to think otherwise.

In the middle ages, everyone knew that the Sun orbited the Earth. What this really means is something like: “People in the middle ages would have described themselves as ‘knowing’ that the Sun went around the Earth.” They didn’t genuinely know it, though. --- Mr. Lucky has gone down to the racetrack to bet on horses. He knows nothing about the horses or their riders, but when he sees the name “Seabiscuit”, he has a good feeling about that name, which causes him to confidently believe that Seabiscuit will win. He bets lots of money on it. As chance would have it, Seabiscuit does in fact win the race. “I knew it!” the gambler declares.

If we seem to observe something, it is very lame to simply say, “Oh, that’s an illusion” and move on. Rational people assume that what we seem to observe is real, unless there is evidence to the contrary. They don’t assume that whatever we seem to observe is illusory until proven real.

To say that someone either “should” or “should not” do some action seems to imply that they have a choice about whether they do it. There’s no sense in saying that I should do x if I cannot do it, or I cannot avoid doing it, or I have no control over whether I do it. So those who deny free will would seemingly have to disagree with the judgment “I should not stick this fork in my eye.”

An argument is an attempt to give one’s audience a reason for believing a certain conclusion.

To criticize a view, you don’t have to prove that it’s false. It’s also a good criticism if you can show the view to be unjustified.

Being more self-aware: If you are aware of the factors influencing your emotions and desires, you are less likely to fall prey to influences that you would not endorse. This is why it is good to reflect periodically on why you make the choices you do.

The unobservability of souls makes it possible to account for any intuitions about personal identity. They seem to be ad hoc posits designed to let us maintain whatever views we want about identity of persons, while making no definite predictions about persons or anything else. Perhaps the soul is also mysterious in the sense of being poorly understood. But there is no reason to assume that poorly understood things don’t exist.

I find this “objection” empty. I think it’s basically just a negative emotional reaction masquerading as an argument.

Identity is intrinsic, not extrinsic.

You might think “murder is wrong” is an objective ethical truth. This would be to say that murder is wrong regardless of anyone’s attitudes toward it. It’s wrong independent of whether we approve or disapprove of it, like or dislike it, etc. If our society has a sudden change of conventions and people start approving of murder, murder won’t become morally okay. Rather, our society will just be wrong. That’s what it means to say that murder is “objectively” wrong.

Introspectively, moral judgments seem exactly like beliefs, and not like emotions or desires.

Intuitionists like to compare ethics to mathematics. This does not mean that ethics is exactly like mathematics in all ways. If that were true, this wouldn’t be a comparison. Ethics would just be mathematics.

An intuition is a mental state that you have, in which something just seems true to you, upon reflecting on it intellectually, in a way that does not depend upon your going through an argument for it.

It is rational to assume that things are the way they appear, unless and until one has specific reasons to doubt this. This is the foundation of all reasonable beliefs. That includes the beliefs that we get from perception, memory, introspection, and reasoning, as well as intuition.

Intuition is just like reason, observation, and memory in this respect: You can’t check its reliability without using it.

Discussion of hypothetical examples is not like real life decision-making. In real situations, you should always look for ways out of a dilemma or ways of avoiding having to confront a hard issue. But in discussing hypothetical examples, we’re trying to illuminate a specific theoretical issue. Thus, in discussing hypotheticals, one should never try to avoid the dilemma or avoid addressing the hard issue that the example is trying to present. One also should not bring up possible consequences that are not related to that issue.

Absolute deontology, or absolutism, holds that there are certain types of action that are always wrong, regardless of how much good they might produce or how much harm they might avert.

Categorical Imperative (1st version): Always act in such a way that you could will that the maxim of your action should be a universal law.

In Kant’s view, morality gives us categorical imperatives. It’s not that we must behave morally if we want something else to happen; we just have to behave morally, period. “The maxim of your action” is a rule that explains what you’re doing and why. An action is wrong if you couldn’t universalize the maxim.

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end, never merely as a means.

Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end, never merely as a means. This offers an explanation for the difference between the Trolley Problem and the Footbridge case. In the Footbridge case, it is wrong to push the fat man off the bridge, since doing so would treat the fat man as a mere means to saving the other five. By contrast, in the original Trolley case, diverting the trolley does not treat the one person on the right-hand track as a means. The person on the right track isn’t a means to saving the five at all. You can see that because if the one person were not present, you would still divert the trolley, thereby saving the five on the left track in exactly the same way. The fact that your plan works just as well if the one person is not present shows that he is not a means to achieving the goal.

Doctrine of Double Effect says that it’s worse (harder to justify) to intentionally harm someone than it is to harm someone as a foreseen side effect of one’s action. When you intentionally harm someone, the harm to the other person is either the end that you’re aiming at or a means to that end. When you harm someone as a mere side effect, the harm isn’t aimed at, neither as a means nor as an end, even though you might know it’s going to happen. The DDE is often used in military ethics to distinguish between acceptable collateral damage and war crimes. If you deliberately target civilians, that’s a war crime. It’s widely regarded as immoral, even if the war is otherwise just.

Deontological: You have a right to something when: (1) other people are obligated to give you that thing (in the case of a positive right), (2) or to not interfere with your having that thing (in the case of a negative right). This obligation is understood deontologically: People have to respect your rights even if slightly better consequences would follow in a particular case from violating your right.

Rights are agent-centered constraints. This means you yourself don’t violate any rights. So if you could violate a right and thereby prevent someone else from violating two rights, you shouldn’t do it.

Moderate deontologists (as I call them) hold a middle ground position between consequentialism and absolute deontology. They think that some kinds of actions normally should not be performed, even if they produce better consequences. However, in some extreme cases it is permissible to perform them, to prevent something vastly worse from happening.

Because it accommodates common sense ethical intuitions, a pluralistic view posits more than one distinct moral principle.

All ethical theories are problematic in one way or another.

Suppose there’s a used car dealer who obtains all his cars by murdering innocent people and stealing their cars. No one specifically told him to do this, but everyone, including you, knows that this is how he in fact gets his cars. It would be uncontroversially wrong to buy a car from this dealer. This illustrates the principle that if it’s wrong to do something, it’s also wrong to pay other people for doing it.

Voters as Mad Scientists - by Bryan Caplan

2025-07-15T04:00:00Z

summary:

Fun philosophical essays about political irrationality. I love the way he thinks, so I'm happy to read his thoughts on almost anything, just to hear his thought process.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

If voters actually understood policy: Selfish voters would choose the policies best for themselves. Unselfish voters would choose the policies best for society.

Unselfishness is worse for society than selfishness. A mad scientist thinks he’s got the cure for what ails you, but all he’s got is a syringe full of cyanide. An unselfish mad scientist would insist on helping you whether or not you paid, even if you screamed “No!” He’d say: “You’ll thank me once you’re cured.”

What to hate about politics: Hyperbole: People should speak literal, measured truth. Innumeracy: People should focus on what’s quantitatively important, not what thrills the masses. Overconfidence: People shouldn’t make claims they won’t bet on, and shouldn’t assert certainty unless they’re willing to bet everything they own.

Strive to be fair to out-groups. Scrupulously monitor in-groups, to counteract our natural human inclination to do the opposite.

Popular views are often wrong.

In politics, words speak louder than actions.

Psychologists are deeply skeptical about mere words. They carefully measure and compare the divergence between what people say and what they do.

Why say, “I can’t” when the truth is “It’s too costly for me” or “I don’t feel like it”? Because “I can’t” sounds better. People lie when the truth sounds bad.

“I’ll do my best.” Unless you devote 100% of your resources to success, you haven’t really done your best. Also false: “We’re doing everything in our power” “I’ll stop at nothing” “We have no choice” Because you’re doing somthing that seems wrong, and you don’t feel like justifying your action as the lesser evil.

My skeptical take on addiction – and mental illness generally: “I can’t stop drinking” directly parallels “I can’t come to your party.” Of course you *can* refrain from drinking alcoholic beverages.

When we let Social Desirability Bias rule our diction, there’s a grave danger our literally false words will corrupt our thinking.

If what sounds good conflicts with what works well, we usually respond with hypocrisy: we say what sounds good, then do what works well. In politics, words rule.

From the viewpoint of any individual voter, elections are surveys.

We’re ashamed to admit how much convenience matters for our quality of life. The market mercifully sells us the convenience we want without judging us. Government, in contrast, takes us at our word.

When someone expresses views with a calm mood, you consider them more reliable than someone who expresses views with hysteria. This is justified. Comparing the mood reasonable proponents would hold to the mood actual proponents do hold. For many popular positions, the reasonable mood is virtually invisible. Restrictionists hunt for horrific immigrant outliers, then use these outliers to justify harsh treatment of immigrants in general.

Most people are too irrational to change their minds on anything important. But most people who change their minds on important issues nevertheless do so irrationally. Many apostasy stories discuss people rather than ideas: “I had a falling-out with my fellow believers, so I stopped agreeing with them.”

The status quo is deeply immoral, and would remain so even if there were many moderate changes in the right direction.

The fact that there are people more extreme than you is revealing. You must think there’s some reason why it’s wrong to be any more extreme than you are. What precisely are those reasons?

He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.

If someone can correctly explain a position but continue to disagree with it, that position is less likely to be correct. If ability to correctly explain a position leads almost automatically to agreement with it, that position is more likely to be correct.

Whenever I say the words “I bet,” my mind starts to imagine losing scenarios.

When predicting, I start with long-run averages, and presume the “latest news” is distracting trivia. Assume the future would resemble the past. As usual, it did. I spurn hyperbole. Human beings adore superlatives, but superlatives rarely apply to the real world. So when I notice someone treating hyperbolic poetry as literal truth, I rush to wager against it. Step back, calm down, look at the numbers, and target thinkers who say, “This time it’s different.”

The overwhelming majority of recent events are sound and fury, signifying nothing. Serious thinkers don’t base their worldview on what happened yesterday, or last week, or last year.

While the public often likes crazy policies, they resent the disastrous consequences of those crazy policies. Issue X is complicated. Perspective Y’s position on X is not complicated. Therefore, Perspective Y is wrong about X.

Many people who could have won material dominance invest their lives in acquiring rhetorical dominance instead: intellectuals, activists, and religious leaders are all prime examples. Why do they bother? Because man does not live by bread alone. Material dominance gives you luxuries, but rhetorical dominance makes you feel like you’re on top of the world.

If I can’t be persuasive without tricks, I choose to be unpersuasive.

If only one religion was allowed, the Government could become arbitrary. If only two, the people would cut one another’s throats. But with a multitude, we all live happy and in peace. Numerical superiority can turn even the nicest groups into a mortal danger. Welcoming everyone is a great way to turn everyone into a minority. And while that hardly guarantees safety, it’s less menacing than the status quo.

People vote for whoever respects them more.

If your overall reaction to business progress over the last fifteen years is even mildly negative, you are impossible to please.

We have more privacy than ever before in human history. You can now buy embarrassing products in secret. You can read or view virtually anything you like in secret. You can interact with over a billion people in secret.

Hating corporations is like hating your parents.

In democracy, if the median voter is a fool, everyone has to live under foolish policies

Advocates of government action typically make extreme claims. They make extreme claims about how awful things will be if government does nothing. And they make extreme claims about how much better things will be if government heeds them.

What if any public figure who refuses to bet large sums on his literal statements becomes an instant laughingstock? What happens? Political hyperbole ends. Hysterica doom-saying and promises of utopia vanish from public discourse. No one serious could afford them!

First World welfare states provide a popular rationale for restricting immigration from countries where absolute poverty is rampant: “They’re just coming to sponge off of us.” Given the rarity of absolute poverty in the First World and the massive labor market benefits of migration from the Third World to the First, it is therefore likely that existing welfare states make global absolute poverty worse.

if history’s Great Names get too much praise, it’s easy to imagine current thinkers reducing their effort in abject frustration: “I’ll never match the glorious achievements of Adam Smith, so why bother?”

Limited government helps everyone in the long-run, but immediately hurts the ruling party.

Islam Explained - by Ahmad Rashid Salim

2025-07-14T04:00:00Z

summary:

On this subject, I preferred the book What Everyone Needs to Know about Islam but since I read that three years ago, I was ready for another refresher on the subject, as I'm spending time in Muslim countries.

recommend: 6/10

my notes:

Any shortcomings in this work are mine, and any goodness you see in this work is a reflection of your state.

Islam is derived from the Arabic root s-l-m, which contains the meanings of peace, serenity, submission, and surrender.

Understand and align with the Divine Will. That, in turn, leads to experiencing peace both in the heart and in human interactions.

The Qur’an professes one of the names of God to be as-Salaam (the Source of Peace).

Humans have direct access to God through prayer, worship, revelation, and reflection.

Abraham, alongside his son Ismail, built the sacred Ka’ba, a cube structure in the city of Mecca. Abraham and Ismail are both considered important prophets in Islam.

There is no room for the worship of anything but God.

Everyone is born pure and sinless.

Adam is the first in the line of prophets.

The chief archangels in Islam are: Gabriel (who brings revelation from God to prophets) Michael (tasked with providing bodies and souls with nourishment) Azrael (tasked with taking the soul from the body).

Angels do not possess any independent power or agency. Angels are the record keepers for the actions of humankind.

124,000 prophets were sent to different people and places. God’s messengers do not commit any sin and do not fall into temptations, confusions, or contradiction. Obedience to them is deemed mandatory.

Muslims are judged according to what they know, rather than all that there is to know.

Be in this world as a traveler.

The life of this world is the field of action.

Islam does not believe that there is absolute predestination or absolute free will, but that life has areas of both.

Five Pillars Declaration of Faith: 1. SHAHADAH: declaration of faith 2. SALAT: daily prayers 3. ZAKAT: almsgiving 4. SAWM: fasting 5. HAJJ: pilgrimage

Community of believers: ummah

Daily prayers: salat FAJR : dawn, two units DHUHR : noon, four units ASR : afternoon, four units MAGHREB : evening, three units ISHA : night, four units

Prior to prayer, a ritual washing - called an ablution: Washing the face and arms Wiping the head Wiping the top of the feet to the ankles

Bowing or prostrating to anything or anyone else would contradict prayer.

Masjid literally means a place of prostration - the act of placing the forehead on the ground.

Call to prayer: adhan The adhan’s lines vocalize the following: God is the Greatest; There is no god but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God; Hasten to Prayer; Hasten to Success; Hasten to the best of actions; God is the Greatest.

Muslims will gather at the mosque for a special congregational prayer performed on Fridays that takes the place of the noon prayer. This prayer includes a sermon recited by the scholar of the mosque. The sermon is equivalent to two units of the noon prayer. The sermon has a number of parts, including reminders to be conscious of God, requests for forgiveness for those present, remembrances for those who have passed, and prayers for all It also refers to socio-ethical-political matters that impact the community and offers guidance and encouragement.

The issue of poverty is not one of resource scarcity but rather of wealth not being properly managed and utilized to benefit wider society. Thus, zakat is seen as a religious act that has an immediate impact on social and economic order. Sadaqah is voluntary charity that is not confined to any exact calculation like zakat.

Greater Jihad is to overcome the ego and temptations. Lesser Jihad is the effort to ensure the safety and protection of one’s family, religion, and society. Jihad does not mean “war” and cannot be used to oppress, harm, or generate injustice.

Fast during the month of Ramadan. Islamic calendar is a lunar calendar, so each year the start of Ramadan changes on the Gregorian calendar. Ramadan is the time in which the first Qur’anic verses were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad. One shifts from the consumption of food and satiating the senses toward an inward realm. The end of the month of Ramadan is marked by one of the major holidays in Islam, Eid al-Fitr, “festival of the breaking of the fast.” To celebrate Eid, visit relatives and friends, prepare special sweets and treats, wear new clothes, and give money to children. Sensitizing yourself to the plight of the poor and needy - those who cannot eat or drink whenever they desire.

Those on hajj can help those Muslims not on hajj by praying for them or making specific supplications on their behalf - forgiveness, health, marriage, safety, etc. Walking around the Ka’ba is called tawaf . The circumambulation is done seven times.

A famous tale that illustrates Muhammad’s high character is the story of the repair of the Ka’ba. After years of neglect, the structure of the Ka’ba was in disrepair and the Meccans had agreed to rebuild it. When the reconstruction was finished, a dispute arose about which tribe would have the honor of placing the black stone back onto the Ka’ba. The disagreement became heated, and one of those present said that the next person to arrive would be called on to settle the dispute. Muhammad soon arrived and was informed of the situation. Muhammad counseled for the stone to be placed on a cloak and for members of each tribe to hold an equal part of the cloak. Once raised, the cloak was brought to the Ka’ba. Muhammad put the stone back, but each tribe shared in the act.

This (Ka’ba cloak) caught the attention of a wealthy matron, an older woman named Khadija. She hired Muhammad to lead a caravan and later asked for his hand in marriage. At the age of 25, Muhammad married Khadija, aged 40. They had six children - two boys and four girls. Both of the boys died in infancy, but the girls survived.

A cave in Mount Hira was the focus for his meditation. Islamic tradition holds that inside this cave, Muhammad received the first revelation of the Qur’an and was tasked as the Final Prophet of God. At this time he was 40 years of age. Received his first revelation of the Qur’an on Mount Hira 610 CE: Start of his public preaching 619 CE: The year of sorrow. Deaths of his wife Khadija and his uncle Abu Talib 620 CE: Isra’ wal Mi’raj or The Night Journey 622 CE: The Hijrah or migration from Mecca to Madinah - marks the start of the Islamic calendar 622 CE: The Charter of Madinah is drafted, ensuring religious and social freedom for all inhabitants 624 CE: Battle of Badr - a turning point against the Meccan tribes 630 CE: Muhammad and his followers gain control of Mecca without violence - his enemies and the inhabitants of the city are forgiven 632 CE: The Farewell Pilgrimage - the Prophet informs the Muslims that he will soon depart this world 632 CE: Muhammad dies in Madinah

Muhammad continued to receive the revelation of the Qur’an over a span of 23 years. The first occasion of revelation coincides with the Islamic month of Ramadan.

Subsequent marriages of the Prophet were entered into to bring affiliation with different tribes, prevent war, and create kinship. None of the other women he married conceived children.

“The evil of the whispering, elusive tempter” Islam’s view on Satan can be summarized with that fourth verse. Satan is a category of “temptresses to evil and wickedness,” intent on derailing humanity from the realization and worship of God. The Qur’an describes Satan as “an enemy to mankind”. Satan does not have independent power over humankind, but rather entices, seduces to wrongdoing, and pushes humans to deviate from righteousness and God-consciousness. Because Satan is deceptive and a sworn enemy of humankind, Satan acts as a necessary challenge for humanity, thereby helping them develop the capacity to withstand temptations and incitements.

The first two people to accept the Islamic faith and the prophethood of Muhammad were his wife Khadija and his cousin Ali.

Year 622 CE: In Yathrib, the Prophet established the first mosque and saw his role extend to contexts such as judge, mediator, ruler of a diverse people, and military commander. Muhammad’s focus was on the maintenance of a harmonious society. This period is highlighted by the signing of a charter or constitution known as the Charter of Madinah, as the city was now renamed to honor the Prophet. The document established Madinah as a plural and multireligious society, ruled by justice and fairness. The charter committed to ending war and conflicts between the different tribes, including Jews and other groups. The Prophet was winning over new converts and was intent on establishing a society highlighted by justice and compassion. In Madinah, new revelations enlightened the Prophet, informing him that Muslims can fight those who fight them. Although the verses related to fighting allowed Muslims the right to defend themselves and Madinah against outside forces, there were strict rules and requirements regarding combat and ensuring that these battles were defensive battles.

In 632 CE, Muhammad informed the community that he would not live for much longer and announced that his cousin and son-in-law, Ali, would be the leader of the Muslims after Muhammad’s death.

Shi’as believe that the Prophet Muhammad, following God’s command, announced to the community that Ali was to be the leader ( mawla ), of the community after him. They hold that this leadership ( imamate ) includes both political and spiritual authority. They hold that the lineage of leadership continued in the family of Muhammad. Sunnis, on the other hand, maintain that the Prophet did not necessarily mandate Ali as his successor, leaving the issue for the people to decide. They contest that mawla means “friend,” differing from the Shi’a interpretation. They maintain that the community selected a number of individuals as the caliphs or rulers. The Shi’a-Sunni disagreement appeared immediately after Muhammad’s death.

Sufism, or Tasawwuf, is the inner, mystical teachings of Islam. It is not a separate school of thought, such as the Shi’a and Sunni, but an orientation toward a more subtle experience and understanding of Islam. The term derives from the word meaning “pure” or “wool.” Sufism emphasizes the purification of the heart, asceticism, and the inner realities of Islamic teachings. Sufis are historically profound contributors to Islamic art, literature, and music.

Shi’as pray with their hands open, while some Sunnis pray with their hands crossed on their stomach and others pray with their hands open.

Shi’a-majority populations are in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Lebanon, Iraq, and Iran.

The Qur’an is a collection of chapters - 114 in total - composed of verses. Chapters are called surahs Verses are called ayahs A chapter can range from three verses to 286 verses.

Chapters of the Qur’an are not arranged chronologically in the order in which they were revealed. Chapters are categorized as either Meccan or Madinan. Meccan chapters tend to be shorter and deal with the general principles of faith: belief in the Oneness of God, the Day of Judgment, doing good, etc. Madinan chapters are more attuned to the specifics of the faith: fasting, prayer, charity, issues dealing with law, and similar matters.

Every Muslim learns to memorize chapters and verses from the Qur’an in Arabic.

The most commonly recited verses of the Qur’an are the seven verses that form the opening chapter. Three verses of chapter 112 are also recited daily. Other shorter chapters, such as 97, 103, 108, 113, and 114, are widely known and recited.

The Qur’an has not been changed and will never be changed or altered.

The Qur’an includes verses that are “clear” as well as those that are “allegorical” The language of revelation carries multiple layers of meaning and nuance that are not found in the same way in other languages.

Every letter of the Qur’an recited counts as 10 blessings and also leads to the forgiveness of 10 sins.

The body of commentary and explication aimed at explaining the Qur’an is known as tafsir. Approaches to tafsir can range from the very literal to the mystical and nuanced.

Ritual ablution is required before Muslims may touch the text of the Qur’an. The Qur’an is generally wrapped in a scarf or other fabric and placed on the highest shelf. When first holding the Qur’an, Muslims do so with two hands and kiss the book as a sign of care and recognition of its sacredness.

The first verse of the Qur’an, “In the name of God, the Compassion, the uniquely Merciful,” is recited invarious aspects of daily life such as getting up, starting an activity, or eating food.

Individuals specialize as reciters by studying the art of tajwid (Arabic for “beautification”). The Qur’an should be recited in a methodic and melodic voice.

Detailed examples of how and when Muhammad did certain things is gathered as Sunnah: the “art of action.” His sayings: the hadith. These two categories, in addition to the Qur’an, form the most important sources for Islamic law and religious life

Unlike the Qur’an, not everything that is reported in Sunnah to be valid in the way that the Qur’an is. There are those who interpret the Sunnah literally and consider the same material as essential, while others look at the intent and spirit of the Sunnah and how they would materialize today. There’s a clear distinction between the Qur’an as divine revelation - and the hadith as words or sayings attributed to the Prophet.

A man who fills his stomach while his neighbor is hungry is not a believer.

Laws of Islam came to be codified under the Shari’a. “Shari’a” can be translated as “the path leading to water.” Water purifies both literally and figuratively. It is also the source of life. Thus, the Shari’a is both the determination of practical laws that are morally binding and a purifying agent. The Shari’a is by nature pluralistic and considers social norms and customs when arriving at legal conclusions. Muslims who become expert jurists, or mujtahid, have independence in their legal conclusions. As long as their method is sound and aligns with the science of jurisprudence, their conclusion is valid.

The Shari’a may return results in several categories beyond binary right and wrong. These are: OBLIGATORY RECOMMENDED INDIFFERENT (neither sinful nor of any particular merit) REPREHENSIBLE (better to avoid, but not in the category of sin) FORBIDDEN

Earning an income through honest work to provide for one’s family is considered worship, as is playing with children or smiling with one another.

Muslims are encouraged to attend the funeral and burial of other Muslims.

Interest is considered unlawful in Islam. Loans and credit exist in Muslim society, but loans are interest-free. Islamic banking has a number of considerations that incorporate a refusal of usury, avoidance of speculation, mutual agreement, clarity of terms between parties, and a requirement to engage only in ethical fields and industries.

Wash hands before and after eating and say “Bismillah” before a meal.

The Arabic word for festival is eid. EID AL-FITR: The completion of the fast of Ramadhan EID AL-ADHA: linked with God’s testing of the Prophet Abraham when he is informed that he will need to sacrifice his beloved son, the Prophet Ismail. To mark this festival, Muslims sacrifice an animal - usually a sheep or lamb - and distribute the meat, particularly to the needy. The sacrifice of the animal is intended to convey the killing of the ego.

In regular interactions and social settings, a Muslim’s character, intelligence, and skills should be prominent, not their bodily form.

In the words of the Qur’an: “There is no compulsion in religion”

Asian 21st Century - by Kishore Mahbubani

2025-07-08T04:00:00Z

summary:

A collection of his essays around the subject of Asia thriving, but too often comparing with America, and rehashing his other book “Has China Won?”

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

A healthy society requires more than just democratic elections. It needs to raise the living standards of its people. The fruits of the economy must be shared across the entire population, and not just the top one percent, as in a plutocracy.

World population (2025): Asia 57% Africa 18% Americas 10% Europe 9% Oceania 0.5%

The past 40 years of have been the best 40 years in 4000 years of Chinese history.

45% of Americans have family members in jail or prison.

Social Progress Index of 2020: out of 163 countries, USA, Brazil, and Hungary are the only three countries where people have become worse off.

Societies with the highest levels of trust in both government and business today are China, Indonesia, India, and the UAE.

US throttled Huawei, so Chinese tech companies avoid dependence on America for key components, and are instead making their own.

ASEAN consistently and quietly delivers peace to one of the most Balkanized regions in the world. ASEAN is the fifth-largest economy in the world.

Ethical power enjoys a key advantage.

By 2020, the per-capita income of Bangladesh (US$ 1968) became larger than that of India (US$ 1900).

China’s total trade with the world ($4.5 trillion) is more than five times that of India ($800 billion). The population of ASEAN is half that of India, yet the total trade of ASEAN ($2.8 trillion) is more than three times that of India.

China has become more capitalist than the US.

India and Pakistan fought their last major war in 1971. China and Vietnam have been suspicious of each other for 2000 years. But since the mid-1990s, trade between Vietnam and China has grown 3000 times.

The Chinese haven’t fired a shot in 40 years, since the end of the war with Vietnam in 1979, whereas even during the last year of the presidency of Barack Obama, a peaceful man who won the Nobel Peace Prize, America dropped 26,000 bombs on seven countries.

Fossil Future - by Alex Epstein

2025-07-04T04:00:00Z

summary:

Fascinating. I highly recommend this if you want to practice changing a long-held belief. It argues that because fossil fuels are still the most cost-effective energy, essential for human flourishing, and billions of people are suffering for lack of cost-effective energy, we should not discourage their use. While I don’t care much about this specific subject, I loved learning about the knowledge system that takes (1) raw research, (2) summarizes it, (3) disseminates it to the public and decision-makers, and (4) evaluates what actions we should take — but each of steps 2-3-4 can distort the expert knowledge from step 1.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

Fossil fuels are a uniquely cost-effective source of energy. Cost-effective energy is essential to human flourishing. Billions of people are suffering and dying for lack of cost-effective energy.

When what we’re told the “experts” think is very wrong? It is not because most of the actual expert researchers in a field are very wrong about their field. It is because the system we rely on to tell us what experts think is significantly distorting what actual experts think.

Whenever we hear about what the “experts” think, we need to keep in mind that most of us have no direct access to what most expert researchers in a field think. We are being told what experts think through a system of institutions and people that performs four crucial functions: (1) engage in expert research about the world (2) synthesize the essentials from expert research (3) disseminate essential expert knowledge to the rest of us (4) help evaluate what actions to take on the basis of expert knowledge.

The foundation of any knowledge system is its researchers: people or institutions that engage in highly specialized research about different aspects of the world. New research is challenging, error-prone work. There is significant uncertainty and disagreement. To spot a very common distortion of research: Cherry-picking the controversial new conclusion of some researchers and portraying it as the view of all expert researchers. Take the common occurrence of a confident new claim that “scientists have found” — leaving the impression that all qualified scientists are on board

Researchers in any field generates a near-limitless amount of specialized knowledge. To be made useful to as many people as possible, it needs to be synthesized: organized, refined, and condensed. Synthesizers can make major mistakes with even the best of intentions. Manipulation of synthesizing bodies is far more destructive. Because synthesizers are so influential, they are major targets for companies, activist organizations, and power-seeking politicians who want to change policy in their favor.

Once synthesizers do their job, however well or poorly, the essentials of their syntheses need to be disseminated. Disseminators are the institutions and people that disseminate the essentials of synthesized research to the general public and decision makers, including policymakers. The dissemination of synthesized research is frequently distorted. The massive distortions of the UN’s IPCC synthesis reports by disseminators are due to a combination of the difficulty of dissemination and the motives of disseminators.

Evaluators are the institutions and people who help us evaluate what to do about what disseminators tell us is true about the world. We should absolutely listen to the factual conclusions of qualified scientists regarding their area of expertise. But those scientists are not qualified to tell us what policies to adopt, because determining what policies to adopt always involves considerations from multiple fields. The “listen to the scientists” refrain is almost always used to get us to accept a given policy evaluation without critical thinking.

We want to avoid not “climate change” but “climate danger”. We want to increase “climate livability” by adapting to and mastering climate, not simply refrain from impacting climate.

Failure to consider the full context: opposing something on the basis of its side-effects without considering its massive benefits. Exclusively focused on the negative side-effects of coal and oil, while the role of coal and oil in radically extending lives and increasing opportunity for literally billions of people is ignored.

Over 3 billion people use almost no energy, including electricity. The unempowered: almost 800 million people have no access to electricity. 2.4 billion people, mostly part of the unempowered world, use primarily wood and animal dung to cook and to heat their homes 1.5 billion people use at least one third as much electricity as the average American. Almost 3 billion people are between unempowered and empowered.

When I’m considering an argument, I want to familiarize myself with the best version of that argument. I went directly to the source: the leading experts. Designated experts are individuals and sometimes institutions, often but not always researchers in a particular field by background, whom a knowledge system designates and prominently features as public spokespeople for the best expert knowledge and evaluation on some issue. Designated experts are frequently quoted and consulted because they are considered the people who have synthesized the best research and can both explain it clearly to us (dissemination) and help us decide what to do with it (evaluation). As hybrid synthesizer-disseminator-evaluators, they embody the mainstream knowledge system at a given time on a given topic.

Nuclear energy harnesses a naturally stored, concentrated, and abundant form of energy. It has a track record of producing relatively low-cost, extremely reliable electricity around the world. Nuclear energy emits no CO2 and has the best safety track record of any form of energy. Since the advent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 1975, no new nuclear power plant in the U.S. has been conceived and completed.

What we are told the “experts” think is very wrong. Not because all researchers are wrong — far from it — but because the people our knowledge system is designating as experts, along with the knowledge system itself, are engaging in an indefensible method of evaluation: calling for the elimination of something based on its side-effects without considering its massive, life-or-death benefits.

Experts predicted catastrophic global cooling. This claim became popular in the late 1960s and through the 1970s when, despite rising CO2 levels, the world was cooling due to other climate variables. Predictions of rapid, catastrophic global cooling the mainstream knowledge system’s disseminators promoted confidently. The Guardian, 1974: SPACE SATELLITES SHOW NEW ICE AGE COMING FAST New York Times, 1978: INTERNATIONAL TEAM OF SPECIALISTS FINDS NO END IN SIGHT TO 30-YEAR COOLING TREND IN NORTHERN HEMISPHERE

Water quality has gotten far better around the world — thanks in large part to fossil fuels. Water-pumping systems and water-purification systems.

While we have no desire to make animals suffer, we prioritize the countless lives that animal testing saves. Advancing human flourishing serves as the standard by which we evaluate what’s good.

Anti-human policies — such as slavery, racism, religious dictatorship, communism, and Nazism. Nazi Germany supported the extermination of Jews, not because it was unaware that extermination would kill many people, but because its goal and standard was the opposite of human flourishing: the triumph of one group of people, Aryans, and the subjugation of Jews and other non-Aryan groups. Anti-human goals often win widespread adoption by being disguised as somehow pro-human.

Animal welfare can mean both: (1) pro-human concern with the welfare of animals, such as opposition to unnecessary cruelty and (2) anti-human concern with the welfare of animals, such as the animal-equality opposition to testing them for medical research. Many people embrace “animal welfare,” thinking that they’re just embracing opposition to unnecessary cruelty, but end up in practice supporting the whole animal-equality agenda, including opposition to animal testing for medical research.

Eliminating human impact, not advancing human flourishing, is the primary moral goal driving our knowledge system in the realm of energy. Eliminating human impact is an anti-human moral goal. Human beings survive and flourish by impacting nature.

From a human flourishing perspective, we embrace massive, pro-human, productive impacts on nature, such as building homes, roads, and factories. We want to eliminate or minimize only anti-human, self-destructive impacts on nature, such as pollution or the needless destruction of the most beautiful parts of nature.

The widespread elimination of the lifesaving, malaria-destroying compound DDT. This compound has saved 500 million lives from malaria death. But it has been largely eliminated from the poor world by way of pressure from rich nations that were up in arms about reports that DDT has a side-effect of thinner bird eggshells. Countless millions of people have died to eliminate our alleged impact on eggshells. (The impact-on-eggshells claim also proved to be wildly distorted.)

Seeking to eliminate some form of human impact, which is considered to be the epitome of morality.

Going from factual conclusions to evaluations of what policies to pass always involves some method of evaluation. The goal we are operating on determines what we focus on and what we don’t focus on — what we are looking at and thinking about and what is “out of sight, out of mind.” When our goal is eliminating human impact, human flourishing is barely considered.

Every expectation and prediction involves assumptions about cause and effect. False expectations or predictions are always based on false assumptions. An effective way of identifying false assumptions behind predictions is to ask: What expectations are at work in these predictions? What false assumptions are behind those expectations?

Delicate nurturer assumption: False assumption that Earth, absent human impact, exists in an optimal, nurturing “delicate balance” that is as stable, sufficient, and safe as we can hope to expect. Earth is not a naturally nurturing “delicate balance” but rather a naturally (1) dynamic, (2) deficient, and (3) dangerous place that we must massively impact if we are to survive and flourish.

Consider instead: “Improving our environment” instead of “saving/protecting the environment”. “Improving our world” instead of “saving/protecting the planet.” Improving requires massive, intelligent, productive impact. Think about our surroundings from a human-centered perspective — as a human environment. Think of potential global climate change from human impact as a change not from safe to dangerous but from dangerous to dangerous. End the self-righteous plague known as the “sustainable development” movement, by which the empowered world spreads anti-impact, anti-development policies in the unempowered world.

A zero-degree day is a negative in most places for most purposes, but with modern homes built, insulated, and heated with fossil fuels, it barely causes an inconvenience. In unempowered places it can mean rapid death.

The 1911 heat wave was possibly the worst weather disaster in New England’s history, with estimates of the death toll as high as 2,000. Over the last two decades found that deaths from cold have been many times more numerous than deaths from heat. The Great Frost of 1709 swept across Europe. Two thousand Swedish soldiers died in a single night, and the cold and subsequent famine killed an estimated 600,000 in France.

In most places around the world wildfires are decreasing, despite a warmer planet and longer wildfire seasons — and this can be traced directly to fossil-fueled wildfire-mastery abilities, including fire suppression. California’s and Australia’s problems are the result not of an inability to master wildfires but of anti-impact policies that make mastering wildfires illegal.

And unempowered world, drought-related deaths, once the leading form of climate-disaster death, have gone down by an incredible 99 percent in the last century. Flood-related deaths have decreased by over 99 percent since the peak of reported flood deaths in the 1930s. A flood that hit Europe in 1362 is estimated to have killed up to 100,000 people, and the central China flood of 1931 by some estimates took the lives of close to four million.

The average person on Earth is 50 times less likely to die from a climate-related disaster than they were in the 1°C colder world of one hundred years ago. Climate-related disaster deaths have plummeted by 98 percent over the last century, as CO2 levels have risen from 280 ppm to 420 ppm and temperatures have risen by 1°C.

If you want to make the world a better place, one of the best things you can do is fight for more fossil fuel use — more burning of oil, coal, and natural gas. The negative climate impacts of fossil fuels will be far outweighed by its benefits. Billions of people will have the opportunity to flourish, to pull themselves out of poverty, to experience higher environmental quality and less danger from climate.

The Myth of the Rational Voter - by Bryan Caplan

2025-07-03T04:00:00Z

summary:

A critical look at democracy. I love the way he thinks so it’s fun to hear his thought process even though I’m not that interested in this subject.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Democracy fails because it does what voters want, instead of what they need. For example: The median voter would be better off if he received less protection than he asked for. But competition impels politicians to heed what voters ask for, not what is best for them.

Faith means not wanting to know what is true.

Demagoguery is the natural condition of democracy. Demagoguery is the winning strategy as long as the electorate is prejudiced and credulous.

The public has severe doubts about how much it can count on profit-seeking business to produce socially beneficial outcomes. They focus on the motives of business, and neglect the discipline imposed by competition. Profits give incentives to reduce production costs, move resources from less-valued to more-valued industries, and dream up new products. This is the central lesson of The Wealth of Nations: the “invisible hand” quietly persuades selfish businessmen to serve the public good.

Business profit appears to be a transfer but benefits society. Business philanthropy appears to benefit society but is at best a transfer.

If you put the question directly, “Is higher productivity better than lower productivity?,” few people will answer in the negative. Yet policy changes are often sold as ways to “create jobs.” But we can also create jobs by seeing to it that each worker is less productive. Then more labor will be required to produce the same bill of goods.

For an individual to prosper, he only needs to have a job. But society can only prosper if individuals do a job well.

To progress is to increase the ratio of effort to result. In 1800, it took nearly 95 of every 100 Americans to feed the country. In 1900, it took 40. Today, it takes just 3.

People would rather feel compassionately than think logically.

You do not worry about how to spend the hours you save when you buy a washing machine.

Blaming the present, and admiring the past, is strongly rooted in human nature.

Pessimistic bias to account for superstition: “Where real terrors are wanting, the soul finds imaginary ones.” There swells louder and louder the cry that the evils are so great that nothing short of a social revolution can cure them.

It is a rare person who seriously considers, “Maybe others disagree with me because they know more than me.”

It is irrational to be politically well-informed because the low returns from data simply do not justify their cost in time. Because the expected personal benefit of voting is roughly zero, a rational, selfish individual chooses to be ignorant.

Suppose a robber has a 50% chance of being caught lifting $1,000 from a cash register. If the punishment is a $1,000 fine, crime pays: Heads, the thief wins; tails, he breaks even. Legal systems cope with this problem by making a convicted criminal much worse off than he would have been if he had obeyed the law. In economic jargon, the law imposes “probability multipliers” — making sentences tougher as the chance of being caught declines. An ignorant electorate can use the same strategy to control politicians. Voters do not need to pay much attention to politics; they only need to vow revenge if they catch their leaders misbehaving. You learn that a congressman uses the franking privilege to send personal mail — give him a year of jail. A cabinet member mutters a racial epithet on tape — demand his resignation. But a democratically elected leader (currently) can break all his campaign promises without risking a day in jail or a one-dollar lawsuit. Heads he wins, tails he breaks even: a recipe for constant abuse.

Labor Econ Versus the World - by Bryan Caplan

2025-07-02T04:00:00Z

summary:

Good collection of philosopical essays around governance of labor and jobs. I love the way he thinks so it’s fun to hear his thought process even though I’m not that interested in this subject.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Markets where people trade vaguely-defined products for cash tend to be acrimonious. When products are vague, the side paying cash often feels ripped off, and the side receiving cash often feels insulted. In most markets, sellers strive to standardize products to preempt this acrimony. In labor markets, however, this is inherently difficult because every human is unique. As a result, employers often lash out at workers because they feel cheated, and employees often resent employers because they feel mistreated. These problems are amplified by the fact that our jobs are central to our identities. So when we feel mistreated by a boss (or by co-workers the boss fails to control), we experience it as a serious affront.

An abusive horse trainer flees from the state fair, leaving his mistreated equine behind. Man said, “Look. I just want the horse to have a good home or be food.” (!!what?!) Minimum wage argument says, “Look. I just want the worker to make $15 an hour or be unemployed.” Health insurance mandates say: “Look. I just want the worker to have free medical care or be unemployed.” Firing restrictions say: “Look. I just want the worker to have complete job security or be unemployed.”

Urge governments to redouble their efforts to fight unemployment. Every government imposes a vast array of employment-destroying regulations. Minimum wages, Licensing laws, Pro-union laws, Mandated benefits – especially mandated health insurance.

Good managers rise to the challenge. Managers manage their workers, forging them into effective teams despite their disparate abilities, personalities, and backgrounds. It’s an uphill battle, and you have to keep running just to stay in place. But good managers kindle the fire of teamwork, then keep the fire burning day in, day out.

Employers reward educational success because of what it shows (“signals”) about the student. Good students tend to be smart, hard-working, and conformist – three crucial traits for almost any job. When a student excels in school, employers correctly infer that he’s likely to be a good worker. What precisely did he study? What did he learn how to do? Mere details. As long as you were a good student, employers surmise that you’ll quickly learn what you need to know on the job.

Credentials pay more in the developing world than they pay in the developed world.

Most of what we teach in college is so otherworldly that you’re only likely to use it on the job if you become a college professor yourself.

Which would you choose? Princeton education without the diploma, or a Princeton diploma without the education? If you have to ponder, you already believe in the power of signaling. By contrast, if you were stranded on an island and had to choose between knowledge of boat-building and a boat-building degree, you wouldn’t ponder. When you face the labor market, it’s important to be impressive. When you face the ocean, all that matters is skill.

You need a college degree to convince today’s employers to give you the same jobs your parents or grandparents got right out of high school. The more degrees proliferate, the more you need to stand out.

Higher education receives hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer support every year – a classic sign that it fails the market test.

There’s one libertarian view per libertarian.

If people think your group is bad in some way, the marginal benefit of counter-stereotypical behavior is probably unusually big. If taxis are reluctant to pick up young, black males, then young, black males probably have an unusually large marginal benefit of wearing a suit. Discrimination is a reason to try harder, not a reason to give up.

When you prepare for an uncertain future, it’s prudent to: 1. Try to make a reasonable forecast using available information 2. Focus more on broadly useful skills instead of narrow specialties 3. Have back-up plans 4. Expect to periodically retrain to adjust to changing circumstances. But yet people say a college degree helps prepare you for the future? A traditional academic education focused on literature, history, science, and foreign languages? Yes, it’s hard to figure out which occupation students will have in the future. How is that a reason to prepare students for occupations they almost certainly won’t have?

If you live in the First World, there is a simple and highly effective formula for avoiding poverty: 1. Finish high school. 2. Get a full-time job once you finish school. 3. Get married before you have children. Researchers call this formula the “success sequence.” 97% of Millennials who follow what has been called the “success sequence” — that is, who get at least a high school degree, work, and then marry before having any children, in that order — are not poor by the time they reach their prime young adult years (ages 28-34). Though in poor countries, even able-bodied adults often find that the success sequence falls short.

Underlying moral principle: You shouldn’t blame people for problems they have no reasonable way to avoid. Nor should you blame them if they can only avoid the problem by enduring years of abject misery. The flip side, though, is that you should blame people for problems they do have a reasonable way to avoid.

No one buys attempts to shift blame for individual misdeeds to “society.” Suppose, for example, that your spouse cheats on you. When caught, he objects, “I come from a broken home, so I didn’t have a good role model for fidelity, so you shouldn’t blame me.” Not very morally convincing, is it? Similarly, suppose you hire a worker, and he steals from you. When you catch him, he protests, “Don’t blame me. Blame racism.” How do you react?

The greater the risk your behavior will lead to dire consequences for yourself, your dependents, or bystanders, the more irresponsible your behavior. The richer you are, the easier it is to avoid or remedy such consequences – and the less likely a given action qualifies as irresponsible. When a childless single courts danger, he risks his future. When a married parent courts danger, he risks not only his own future, but the future of his spouse and his kids.

Cutting subsidies for imprudent behavior makes the behavior’s unpleasant consequences happen sooner, potentially deterring even the highly impulsive.

The First Law of Wing-Walking: Never let hold of what you’ve got until you’ve got hold of something else. In practical terms: Happily settle for your first tolerable job offer… but only temporarily. Once you’re secure in your new position, at least keep your eyes open for a better opportunity. Something’s bound to come along eventually – and when it does, you can bargain with confidence. Virtually any job yields valuable experience and career connections. As a result, you have more than happenstance on your side. Month after month, year after year, the odds tilt more and more in your favor – especially if you strive to impress your whole social network with your professionalism. The Second Law of Wing-Walking: Once you’ve got something better within your grasp, grab it and move forward. Good workers get stuck in bad jobs because they’re too complacent to search for a better job.

Almost everyone would be better off if students in the bottom half of their class began full-time apprenticeships after elementary school. If you hate sitting still and you’re old enough to work, you should probably leave school and learn a trade. If C, D, and F students started apprenticeships right after elementary school, they would spend their teenage years in a peer group where hard work and a can-do attitude are the path to high status. This would work wonders for underachievers, especially macho teen males, who currently gravitate to idleness and crime.

Don’t Be a Feminist - by Bryan Caplan

2025-06-30T04:00:00Z

summary:

Don’t let the title distract you. This is not a book about feminism but a brilliant philosophy book about genuine justice. A collection of simple applicable essays applying logic, economics, and empathy to every-day situations. Clear and surprising thoughts.

recommend: 8/10

my notes:

If it were really true that women were paid, say, 20% less than equally productive men, every business would have a no-brainer get-rich-quick strategy: Fire all your men and replace them with women, cutting labor costs by up to 20%. If this strategy really worked, it would have swept the economy ages ago. Why complain about unfairness when you can become a billionaire by counteracting it?

If a child blames his behavior on cartoons, we roll our eyes. We should be even more dismissive of those who try to shift the responsibility for people’s career and family choices onto “society.”

Men are simply more likely to obsessively focus on success in anything. Even though anyone can edit Wikipedia, about 90% of Wikipedia editors are male.

Feminists predictably resent women who use their “I’m not one of those feminists” attitude to bond with male co-workers and mentors. This suggests to me that the “I’m not one of those feminists” strategy works. Use it.

Before passing a new law, one should always ask: Can we accomplish the same end by repealing – or liberalizing – an existing law?

Left-wing grievance studies are too drenched in obscure academic jargon to reach the common man. Right-wing grievance studies, in contrast, attempt to speak to the masses in their own language. This sharply increases the probability that politicians will eventually make their brand of antipathy and self-pity the law of the land.

The most important policy issue on Earth: immigration. If your idea of freedom is gleefully denying the vast majority of humanity the right to live and work where they please, I am not on your side.

All forms of political action are, selfishly speaking, a complete waste of time. You’re one person out of billions. Selling your soul to identity politics is astronomically unlikely to noticeably change public policy.

The time you devote to politics is time you aren’t devoting to personal advancement.

Ramping up your side’s identity politics often has the perverse side effect of inspiring rival groups’ identity politics.

Sermons on Inclusion spoke as if human beings naturally value their cultural heritage. Lots of people turn their backs on the religion of their birth. Lots of people never feel – or lose interest in – their ethnic heritage. Lots of people dissent from “their” political culture. Many refuse to be ruled by the circumstances of their birth.

Discrimination creates profit opportunities. If most employers dislike workers in group X, depressing their wages below their productivity, employers who feel differently can profit by hiring them. If most workers dislike workers in group X, employers can profit by giving the disliked workers “a firm of their own.” Market forces help neutralize bigotry’s effects. With the right incentives and strategies, intolerance can be both prevalent and impotent.

Firms that don’t hire on the basis of merit don’t last.

Prideful Worker Effect: workers who say they want a job, but refuse to do any job for which they’re genuinely qualified.

“You’ve got to keep trying” “We all fail, but you can’t give up hope” “There’s no harm in asking.” These questions are the expression of a valuable social norm: Encourage the discouraged.

Convince an employer to hire you = Convince a stranger to love you. When the stakes are this high, failure is scary. Discouraged Workers silently endure deep feelings of uselessness. Discouraged Suitors silently endure deep feelings of loneliness.

Compare the selection filter you apply to potential friends to the selection filter you apply to the romantic partners of your friends.

People with low IQs are aren’t just less productive; they’re also more impulsive. A lack of foresight, which is often associated with low IQ, raises the attractions of the immediate gains from crime and lowers the strength of the deterrents. The threats of apprehension and prison may fade to meaninglessness, because they are too abstract, too far in the future, too uncertain.

Welfare shelters people from short-run feedback. Welfare makes it profitable for the poor to behave in the short term in ways that are destructive in the long term. Welfare subsidizes mistakes. We tried to provide more for the poor and produced more poor instead. We tried to remove the barriers to escape from poverty, and inadvertently built a trap.

Barbers could afford to live in this neighborhood back when this neighborhood was in the middle of nowhere. So the right question to ask yourself is: Can barbers still afford to live in the middle of nowhere? Thanks to developments like the Internet, today’s “middle of nowhere” is far more stimulating than the poshest neighborhoods 50 years ago.

My conservative friend is chronically angry about (a) immigration and (b) affirmative action. The irony is that the immigration restrictions he so passionately favors are affirmative action for native-born workers.

Advocates of standard affirmative action see the low percentage of minorities that employers would hire in a free market. They respond by bullying employers to hire more minorities. Advocates of immigration restrictions, similarly, see the low percentage of natives that employers would hire in a free market. They respond by bullying employers to hire more natives.

Immigration restrictions are vastly harsher than standard affirmative action policies. The dream of standard affirmative action policies is proportionality: If blacks are 13% of the population, blacks should have 13% of every job in the country. The dream of immigration restrictions is total exclusion: If natives are 5% of the world population, natives should have 100% of every job in the country. (My note: that 13% vs 5% is cheating because the 13% is not of the world but in the country.)

Conservatives usually think that “oppressed minorities” should spend a lot less time complaining about unfair treatment and a lot more time improving their skills and work ethic. Fair point, but the same holds for native-born Americans who complain that immigrants are taking their jobs. Employers aren’t saints, but they have a strong financial incentive to hire the best person for the job. If they don’t think that person is you, they’re probably right.

Cruise workers’ lives are hard compared to what Americans are used to. But their lives are quite good compared to what they can expect back in their home countries. If you stopped cruising out of moral indignation, your behavior would make it harder to get a job on a cruise ship, which means that more people will be stuck in their native countries earning one-tenth as much.

We evacuate disaster victims. The moral and practical logic of evacuation doesn’t stop at national borders. (Logic rarely does). Letting people leave dangerous countries is only common sense. The fewer people who experience a disaster, the better. Immigration restrictions prevent refugees from saving themselves when there is still time.

Saving perfect strangers may be a matter of charity. But letting strangers save themselves with the willing assistance of people other than yourself is a matter of justice. The top reason countries restrict immigration is to stop native employers, merchants, and landlords from consensually trading with foreigners without government permission.

“History will judge you,” and “You are on the wrong side of history.” The underlying assumption of these warnings is this: What historians think in a century is a very strong predictor of what’s actually true. This is a reasonable claim for narrow factual matters. The passage of time doesn’t just give historians more opportunities to collect evidence. It also cools their emotions. This is why I’d far rather read history than news.

Christopher Columbus appeared in Lisbon in 1477 an Old World slave trade was thriving. In his famous letter on his first voyage he informed Ferdinand and Isabella he could, with their help, give them “slaves, as many as they shall order.” On his second voyage Columbus loaded five hundred Indian slaves aboard returning caravels. He launched the transatlantic slave trade, at first in Indians and from west to east. Columbus was not just a brutal slaver; he was a pioneer of slavery.

For the Americas, both North and South, the Mexican Revolution was the greatest demographic catastrophe of the twentieth century. Exceeded only by the devastation of Christian conquest, colonization, and accompanying epidemics, nearly four centuries earlier. Mexico is a middle-income country, but given its proximity to the U.S., gravity alone should have turned it into a peaceful, First World country by now. Violence remains a grave problem to this day. The legacy of the Mexican Revolution is one of the better explanations for why a peaceful, prosperous Mexico has yet to emerge.

“There’s a lot of pickpocketing in the world. You’ve personally done nothing to stop it. That makes you a pickpocket!” You don’t have to crusade against pickpocketing to avoid being a pickpocket.

Skills should be practiced well beyond the point of initial mastery, leading to automaticity. Overlearning is one of the best ways to attain true Transfer of Learning. When you’re a novice driver, you can easily get into trouble if you have to drive an unfamiliar car. But once you have so much driving experience that you no longer need to think about driving, your competence generalizes to almost any automobile. Extend the idea of overlearning to moral reasoning. People learn but fail to overlearn. As a result, their knowledge is inert. If you explicitly test them, they can spit out the right answer. But they frequently forget or ignore their knowledge in relevant situations. For example, a person may know the moral principle, “Everyone has a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” yet support slavery.

Hold governments to ordinary moral standards. It’s wrong for a private individual to physically attack other people who are behaving peacefully. It’s wrong for a private individual to take other people’s property without their consent. So why is it OK for government to do these things?

Generalize narrow moral principles to situations where they’re entirely inappropriate. If you only apply moral principles when other people encourage you to do so, how much about right and wrong do you really know?

Read Mike Huemer’s The Problem of Political Authority.

We almost never have ethical arguments about when it’s morally permissible for them to do terrible things to us. I’ve never heard a debate about: 1. When is it morally permissible for them to deliberately drop a nuclear bomb on our civilians? 2. When is it morally permissible for them to launch an attack that they expect will lead to ten civilian deaths for every target killed?

Calculate the number of innocent people murdered on an average day. Do you plan to be outraged every day for the rest of your life? Did you think I should be upset simply because our community is temporarily fixated on this specific crime?

Familial favoritism is a deep and ineradicable part of the human psyche, thanks to many millions of years of evolution. Nationalism – and expansive tribal identities more generally – pretends to be equally fundamental, but it’s largely cheap talk. People happily give tons of free stuff to their children. But you need coercion to make people surrender more than a pittance to their “fellow citizens.” To ask people to stop favoring their own children goes utterly against human nature. To ask people to stop favoring their countrymen is a modest, eminently do-able request.

Everyone knows that “It would help my son” is not a good reason to commit murder, break someone’s arm, or steal. Nationalism, in contrast, is widely seen as an acceptable excuse for horrific crimes against outgroups. Do you plan to murder hundreds of thousands of innocent foreign civilians? Just say, “It will save American [German/Japanese/Russian/whatever] lives” – and other members of your tribe will nod their heads. Do you want to deprive millions of foreigners of the basic human rights to sell their labor to willing buyers, rent apartments from willing landlords, and buy groceries from willing merchants? Just say, “It’s necessary to protect American jobs.”

Nietzsche was playing fast and loose with the truth. To call him a “philosopher” is a misnomer. He barely offered arguments and made minimal effort to anticipate or respond to thoughtful criticism. Nietzsche was a great poet.

Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil? Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. Money works so long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another.

Write Your Social Desirability Bias (SDB) Autobiography: “Actions speak louder than words” is an intellectual vaccine against Social Desirability Bias. Voters’ Social Desirability Bias is the key ingredient that makes democracy so inefficient. Social Desirability Bias drives a wedge between public policy and ugly truths about trade-offs and incentives.

If you really want to improve your group’s image, telling other groups to stop stereotyping won’t work. The stereotype is based on the underlying distribution of fact. It is far more realistic to turn your complaining inward, and pressure the bad apples in your group to stop pulling down the average.

Human beings are naturally biased in favor of the groups they identify with. Psychologists call this “in-group bias.” Once you recognize this human failing, your moral priority should be bending over backwards to treat out-groups justly. No nationalism I’ve ever heard of even tries to do so. Instead, nationalisms embrace in-group bias.

What motivates the critics to attack libertarianism time after time? Libertarians, unlike mainstream conservatives, openly defend many unpopular views. Intellectuals who want to loudly champion popular views have to engage libertarians because there’s hardly anyone else to argue with. Libertarian arguments, though mistaken, are consistently clever enough to get under the critics’ skin. The purpose of the criticism is not shielding the world from bad ideas but giving the critics some intellectual catharsis. Libertarian arguments are good enough to weigh on the critics’ intellectual consciences. They attack libertarians to convince themselves that we’re wrong. And they keep attacking us because they keep failing to fully convince themselves.

If governments know they’ll have to apologize when they repeal bad policies, maybe they’ll be more cautious about adopting bad policies in the first place. If the government justified a bad policy with hyperbole, willfully overstating the probability and severity of bad outcomes, then we deserve a giant blubbering apology.

If they deeply cared about the poor, they would give away all their extra income. But almost no one does that. Then almost no one deeply cares about the poor.

Ignore the news unless it affects you personally. Dry statistics are OK, but avoid any information source that tries to engage your emotions.

Any non-oblivious person has to choose between daily misery, or personal happiness in a world of woe. Try to be happy despite the shortcomings of society and the universe. If you postpone happiness until society gets its act together, you’ll be waiting for a lifetime.

How Evil Are Politicians? - by Bryan Caplan

2025-06-27T04:00:00Z

summary:

Little essays of empathetic economics doggedly applied to topics around governance. Such a clear thinker. I love how he thinks, and how it inspires me to think and write too.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

Ordinary people have no obligation to devote their lives to the study of moral philosophy and social science. But anyone who wields political power over thousands of human beings – much less millions – absolutely does. Anyone in a position of power has a greatly elevated moral obligation to act with extreme moral trepidation at all times.

Political systems reward politicians for seeming good by conventional standards.

What economics teaches is not that greed is good, but that good incentives transform this questionable motive into awesome results. Greed plus property rights plus competition plus rationality plus reputation is good. Greed alone is film noir.

Demagogue: political leader who tries to get support by making false claims and promises and using arguments based on emotion rather than reason. Demagogue: political leader who seeks support by appealing to popular desires and prejudices rather than by using rational argument. Demagogue: political orator or leader who gains favor by pandering to or exciting the passions and prejudices of the audience rather than by using rational argument.

When the truth sounds bad, people bend the truth. When all straightforward answers sound bad, similarly, people refuse to answer. And since politics revolves around sounding good rather than doing good, politicians habitually dodge hard questions.

During World War I, who was worse – the Germans or the Russians? The two sides were moral approximates. The very fact that people have strong emotions about recent and ongoing conflicts is a strong reason to discount their judgment. When a conflict is recent or ongoing, we usually lack a great deal of not-yet-released relevant information. Democrats and Republicans will angrily protest being lumped together because in their eyes, the differences between their parties are “huge.” In 200 years, how big will these “huge differences” look to historians? During the Wars of Religion, Catholics and Protestants mutually called each other servants of the Antichrist. Now can plainly see that both sides were unhinged.

Governments that vocally proclaim their compassion for the meek commit a grossly disproportionate share of mass murder. Bleeding-heart rhetoric is disguised hate speech.

People often resent first, then rationalize said resentment later.

While extreme power-lusters are a small fraction of humanity, they are a large fraction of successful politicians. We are awful at the detection of extreme power-lusters. When we hear flowery words, our impulse is to take them at face value, instead of remembering, “That’s just what a power-luster would say – and politics is packed with power-lusters.”

Most people don’t know enough social science to begin to weigh policies’ overall consequences. So they mentally substitute easier questions like, “Would I be happy if employers gave low-skilled workers a raise?” Moral reasoning is hard, so most people do little moral reasoning. Instead they perform a mental substitution. Rather than wonder, “What’s morally right?,” they ask, “What’s socially acceptable?” This seems fairly harmless, but how do you know whether your society is evil?

Evil test: Would it be all right if someone did that to you? Ordinary people in these societies could easily figure out that their societies were deeply evil – and they should at least have covertly strived to avoid complicity.

People routinely break stupid laws. Those who say they always follow the law don’t actually study the body of laws to ensure they don’t accidentally break one.

Censorship is not to suppress the truth – which has little mass appeal anyway. Censorship is to monopolize pretty lies. Only the powers-that-be can freely make absurdly self-aggrandizing claims. People like to say and think whatever superficially sounds good. Censorship allows rulers to exploit this mental flaw. If no one else can make absurd lies, a trite slogan like, “Let’s unite to fight for a fantastic future!” carries great force. Truthful critics would have to make crowd-displeasing objections like, “Maybe competition will bring us a brighter future than unity?” “Who exactly are we fighting?” “Precisely how fantastic of a future are we talking about?” Dictators make One Big Political Lie mandatory. Free speech lets a Thousand Political Lies Bloom.

Proponents of government action are prone to hyperbole because it’s rhetorically effective. You need wild claims and flowery words to whip up public enthusiasm for government action. Sober weighing of probability, cost, and benefit damns with faint praise – and fails to overcome public apathy.

How anyone can get a good job: Happily settle for your first tolerable job offer, but only temporarily. Once you’re secure in your new position, keep looking for a better opportunity. Something’s bound to come along eventually – and when it does, you can bargain with confidence. Virtually any job yields valuable experience and career connections. As a result, you have more than happenstance on your side. Month after month, year after year, the odds tilt more and more in your favor – especially if you strive to impress your whole social network with your professionalism.

The tension between socialism and self-help: The power-hungry don’t want people to think they’re able to fix their own problems. If individuals can help themselves by doing a good job, learning new skills, making friends, and keeping their eyes peeled, what do they need rulers for?

I blame people very freely. I blame people for being impulsive, lazy, conformist, stubborn, hot-tempered, hostile, and naive. I blame people for being too dogmatic. I blame them for being so open-minded their brains fall out of their heads. If determinism were true, then moral blame would never be justified.

When I blame people for their problems, Democrats and liberals are prone to object at a fundamental level. One fundamental objection rests on determinism: Since everyone is determined to act precisely as he does, it is always false to say, “There were reasonable steps he could have taken to avoid his problem.” Another fundamental objection rests on utilitarianism: We should always do whatever maximizes social utility, even if that means taxing the blameless to subsidize the blameworthy.

A successful politician who broke ranks with his party would probably lose his job. But he could easily find alternative employment that didn’t require him to spurn the poor, scoff at climate science, and makeup stories about WMDs. Stop heinous activity, keep your upper-middle-class lifestyle. Quite reasonable. If you can blame politicians for lying, why can’t you blame alcoholics for lying to their families about their drinking? If you can blame leaders for supporting bad policies because they don’t feel like searching for another job, why can’t you blame able-bodied people on disability because they don’t feel like searching for another job?

Unless you’re willing to bite the bullet of involuntary organ donation, “good overall consequences” are insufficient to morally justify war.

If your targets perceive your behavior as inappropriate, mean, or downright evil, people who previously bore you no ill will now start looking for a chance to give you a taste of your own medicine.

Preparation for war often causes war by frightening and provoking.

Anyone who says “By any means necessary” is, by implication, saying, “If it takes 80 million deaths for us to win, then so be it.” But thankfully few have the stomach for it. If your ideas are bad, hypocrisy makes them less bad.

Michael Huemer is my favorite living philosopher.

A large society is likely to have rationalists. Free speech allows these truth-seekers to ask thoughtful questions and propose reasonable answers, even if the thoughtful questions are awkward and the reasonable answers are scary. While the rationalists are likely to remain the minority, free speech preserves their existence. Free speech lets the best and brightest produce and consume truth, even if most people hold the truth in disdain.

Immigrants work hard to make a better life for themselves and their families. Immigrants contribute far more to the world than they could possibly have done at home. All complaints leveled against immigrants also apply to many natives: Native women who enter the workforce make life harder for native men competing for the same jobs. Low-income natives with children cost taxpayers money. Anything immigrants do makes their critics angry. Critics are angry when immigrants work, and angry when they’re on welfare. Critics are angry if immigrants are visible, and angry if immigrants keep to themselves. Critics are angry if immigrants increase housing prices and angry if immigrants reduce housing prices.

Decent folk should be uncomfortable with democracy. Why? Because most voters are nationalists, and nationalist voters consistently do to foreigners what low-income voters almost never do to the rich: Strip them en masse of their basic rights to work, reside, and travel. Why? For the flimsiest of reasons, like trapping millions of foreigners in dire poverty and bloody repression probably makes our safety net somewhat stronger.

Taking offense when a speaker intends no offense is rude. If someone happens to step on your emotional toes, civility impels you to suppress the urge to take it personally.

Free goods are almost automatically inefficient. Unless the marginal social cost of the product miraculously happens to be zero, setting a price of zero leads to socially wasteful behavior.

Belt and Road - by Bruno Maçães

2025-06-26T04:00:00Z

summary:

Exploring implications of a vague Chinese plan to interconnect infrastructure with most countries. Written 2016-2018, making future predictions about times now passed. I got a few insights.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Fortune is hard to recognize as it comes, and hard to grab once passed.

So what is the Belt and Road? It is a name and little more than a name. Concepts such as “the West” come the closest. Belt and Road is the name for a global order infused with Chinese political principles and placing China at its heart.

Belt and Road: nine arrows crisscrossing Eurasia in all directions: six economic corridors on land and three sea routes whose final goal is to create a new global economy and place China at its center. An interconnected system of transport, energy and digital infrastructure would gradually develop into industrial clusters and free trade zones and then an economic corridor spanning construction, logistics, energy, manufacturing, agriculture and tourism, culminating in the birth of a large Eurasian common market. Belt and Road is mainly about economic cooperation, including building factories, roads, bridges, ports, airports and other infrastructure as well as electric power grids, telecommunications networks, oil and natural gas pipelines and related projects. It’s designed to stimulate and better integrate China’s domestic economy as well as enhance Beijing’s influence abroad.

Belt and Road is meant to encompass the whole world and the totality of human life. Xi called it a “community of shared destiny.” The traditional concept of Tianxia (天下): Relations between units or actors determine the obligations corresponding to their network ties. Relations are based on mutual benefit. Once established they should take precedence over individual choices.

Belt and Road is certainly not one project. It is an idea, a concept, a process, better captured through a metaphor, not an exact description. It includes Latin America, the Caribbean and Australia. It could perhaps more appropriately be named — were it not to convey an expansionist slogan — Land and Sea.

The traditional opaqueness of Chinese politics and of the Chinese state was once a useful shield, a means of staying out of the limelight. Now it is a way to magnify Beijing’s reach: that we know so little about what China is doing seems to show that it is present everywhere.

By increasing investments abroad, China hopes to find more profitable outlets for its foreign exchange reserves — most of which are in low-interest-bearing American government securities — while creating new markets for Chinese companies.

It addresses China’s dependence on a global system it could not shape or control.

October 2013: Xi Jinping said China should be more proactive in promoting diplomacy with its neighbors. It was the moment when “striving for achievement” replaced “keeping a low profile”. Instead of China opens up to the outside world, the world opens itself to China.

Urumqi in Xinjiang is closer to the borders of Europe than to Beijing or Shanghai.

China needs to import 600 million tons of crude oil and 300 billion cubic meters of natural gas annually. Belt and Road can develop trade and energy routes along historically disadvantaged regions, thereby reducing China’s vulnerability to an American naval blockade of the Malacca strait in case of conflict. In 2016, 80% of China’s imported oil passed through the Indian Ocean and Malacca Strait into the South China Sea. If a maritime crisis or a war were to happen, these routes could be cut off.

China has started to see interdependence as an opportunity. Less afraid of political and cultural globalization because they can be shaped according to a Chinese model. Western alliances are described by Chinese as “tiny circle of friends” leaving everyone else excluded.

The world does not move from harmony to conflict but from conflict to harmony — from the West to the Belt and Road.

China closed a key border-crossing with Mongolia a week after the Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, visited the country. Hundreds of truck drivers for the mining conglomerate Rio Tinto were stuck at the Gants Mod crossing in south-eastern Mongolia in freezing temperatures.

When the idea of a “harmonious world” is presented as the inevitable endpoint of historical development, it becomes uncompromising and oppressive.

Wang Huning, the philosopher-king behind Xi, arguably the intellectual creator of the Belt and Road.

Most of the countries along the routes of the Belt and Road did not have the money to pay for the projects with which they were involved. Beijing regards financing mechanisms as a critical part of the initiative, the motor of the engine.

Horgos International Cooperation Center is a free trade and free movement zone built across the border between China and Kazakhstan. Goods sold inside the Cooperation Center may be carried across the border free of tariffs. People too may circulate inside the area without having to transit a border post. The border between the two countries has in fact been rendered just as invisible as, say, that between Belgium and the Netherlands. China sees Kazakhstan as its gateway to Europe and has encouraged the speedy development of some of the most emblematic local projects. In May 2018 China and the Eurasian Economic Union signed a free-trade agreement in Astana.

Russia’s decision to endorse the Belt and Road changed the parameters of the project. It gave the green light to China’s ambitions for countries such as Kazakhstan and Georgia.

Pakistan is the gateway to the Indian Ocean, because the strategic alliance between the two countries goes back decades. A central priority is the construction and development of Gwadar city and port. Gwadar lies in a privileged strategic position, with a claim to becoming a new Chinese coastal city.

Bypassing the Malacca strait by building a canal through the Kra Isthmus in Thailand — around 100 km long and 25 meters deep, it would take ten years to build — could be an even greater game changer.

Ethiopia, a country of 100 million inhabitants where China wants to move some of its low-end manufacturing, such as footwear and apparel. For that purpose, it has financed and built a new fast railway linking Addis Ababa and Djibouti.

There is no way to enter the global market without adopting the standards everyone else is using, unless one develops new standards and manages to get them widely accepted. The return on investment for a port in Sri Lanka or a rail line in Thailand matters less to Chinese officials than the ability to push participating countries to adopt Chinese standards on everything from construction to finance to data management.

From the outset, the fear that time would wear off the consensus around the initiative encouraged Xi Jinping and his circle of advisors to run greater risks and make the Belt and Road so critical to the Chinese leadership and the Chinese Communist Party that it can no longer be abandoned. Enshrined in the Party Constitution, it stands above criticism. Setbacks will be downplayed and every success magnified.

Xi: “We are now facing a historic opportunity that happens only once in a thousand years. If we handle it well, we will prosper. But if we screw it up, there will be problems, big problems.” This is the scope of China’s current ambition. The Belt and Road will succeed to the extent that it helps propel China’s rise to its last stage, its denouement or, so to speak, the announced terminus of its prophetic history.

If Japan had grown into the second largest economy in the world without disturbing the status quo — while reinforcing it as a matter of fact — the same could perhaps be expected of China.

China is putting forth a clear challenge to the existing liberal order. A different system carrying different values, virtues, and principles. China now offers an alternative model with an increasingly global appeal. It would replace a model whose failures have become all too obvious.

Will China succeed in reshaping global order or will the order fracture into two opposing and irreconcilable visions?

To move closer to Western values or to attempt to imitate the West in different areas would be tantamount to abdicating China’s edge, opting to compete on territory defined by the West and therefore on terms clearly tilted in its favor. China has no need for Western culture, ideas and values.

Standing up + getting rich + becoming powerful. Ways to divide the histories of the Party and the Republic, referring respectively to: Mao Zedong era (standing up) Deng Xiaoping era (getting rich) Xi Jinping era. (becoming powerful)

Just as every individual has a right to privacy, CCP also has a right to privacy.

Has China Won? - by Kishore Mahbubani

2025-06-23T04:00:00Z

summary:

Singapore diplomat’s insights into the China-USA relationship. Very pro-China with sound reasoning.

recommend: 6/10

my notes:

America and China represent the struggle between free and open societies and closed authoritarian systems. If this statement is correct, all free and open societies should feel equally threatened by the Chinese Communist Party. Of the world’s three largest democracies, two are Asian: India and Indonesia. Neither the Indian nor Indonesian democracies feel threatened in any way by Chinese ideology. Neither do most European democracies feel threatened. Unlike the Soviet Union, China is not trying to challenge or threaten American ideology. By treating the new China challenge as akin to the old Soviet strategy, America is making the classic strategic mistake of fighting tomorrow’s war with yesterday’s strategies.

CCP actually functions as the Chinese Civilization Party.

Chinese strategy was guided by the Chinese game Go, not Western chess. In Western chess, the emphasis is on finding the fastest way to capture the king. In Go, the goal is to slowly and patiently build up assets to tip the balance of the game in one’s favor. The emphasis is on long-term strategy, not short-term gains.

For over 200 years, Western civilization vastly outperformed the rest of the world, allowing it to overturn the historical precedent. From the year 1 to 1820, China and India were always the largest civilizations in terms of economic strength. The past 200 years have therefore been an aberration. One reason the West can no longer dominate the world is that the rest have learned so much from the West. They have imbibed many Western best practices in economics, politics, science, and technology. As a result, while many parts of Western civilization (especially Europe) seem exhausted, lacking drive and energy, other civilizations are just getting revved up.

While the world has had many ancient civilizations, the only ancient civilization to fall down four times and rise again is China. The past thirty years under CCP rule have been the best thirty years that Chinese civilization has experienced since China was united by Qin Shi Huang in 221 BCE.

In contrast to America’s stagnation, China’s culture, self-concept, and morale are being transformed at a rapid pace. The most explosive period of China’s growth took place after it joined the WTO in 2001. Its GDP exploded from US$1.2 trillion in 2000 to US$11.1 trillion in 2015.

Chinese firms enjoyed a better playing field outside China than the one China provided to foreign firms inside China.

Under the WTO’s agreements on intellectual property, developed countries are under ‘the obligation’ to provide incentives to their companies to transfer technology to less developed countries.

There is no credible calculation that suggests that U.S. GDP would be more than one percent higher even if China had acceded to every American economic request.

What led to a great country like China suffering a century of humiliation at the hands of smaller Western powers? Why did the Chinese economy, which was on par with the rest of the world from the year 1 to 1820, fall so far behind? A huge Chinese philosophical assumption that China was a great self-sufficient Middle Kingdom that did not need to engage the world. As the Chinese emperor Qianlong famously told Lord Macartney, China had everything it needed. It didn’t need the rest of the world.

“If all we do in response to China’s ambition is to try to double-lock all our doors, I believe we will lock ourselves into mediocrity.” China should understand well the point he’s making. China locked itself into mediocrity when it cut itself off from the world

If China emerged as the most business-friendly great economic power, it would provide a huge boost to globalization. In so doing, China would be strengthening the very force that has propelled China’s spectacular economic rise.

Now it is China, not America, that is taking the lead in building a new multilateral architecture, including the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). America opposed both these initiatives. This didn’t stop many of its key friends and allies from joining them. The UK, Germany, India, and Vietnam joined as founding members of AIIB, which is proving itself to be a better-governed institution than the IMF and the World Bank. Its standard of corporate governance is higher and more transparent.

US pulled out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), to which six countries, namely America, the UK, France, Germany, Russia, China, and Iran, had agreed. In walking away from the JCPOA, America is violating international law.

USA didn’t just walk away from the JCPOA. It also announced that it would impose sanctions on any country that continued to trade with Iran on the basis of these agreements. The “legal” route that the US administration took to punish countries for trading with Iran was by sanctioning their use of the US dollar in these cross-border payments. This created a legal dilemma for the other five signatories of the Iran agreement. Under international law, their companies were allowed to trade with Iran. However, if the companies trading with Iran used the US dollar to do so, these companies would have had to pay massive fines in American courts. To solve this legal dilemma, France, Germany, and the UK decided to set up the Instrument in Support of Trade Exchanges (INSTEX), “a new channel for non-dollar trade with Iran to avert U.S. sanctions.” In symbolic terms, INSTEX represented a huge shift in the international system. For the first time, three major allies of America (France, Germany, and the UK) have created an alternative to the US dollar-based payment system. It could one day serve as a model for two future potential adversaries of America (China and Russia) to set up an alternative global channel of payments that would bypass and undercut the global role of the US dollar. Jenga, a block-stacking game. Sometimes all it takes to bring down a complex construction is to remove one block.

Future historians will undoubtedly be puzzled by the strong conviction of American policymakers that a smaller and younger republic could decisively influence the political evolution of a state that was four times larger in population and with a history that was almost ten times longer.

The Chinese see their history through their own lenses. Over the course of the past twenty-two hundred years, China has been divided and broken up more often than it has been united and cohesive. Each time, central political control from the capital breaks down, disorder results, and the Chinese people suffer a host of deprivations, from starvation and famine to civil war and rampant violence. In Chinese political culture, the biggest fear is of chaos. Given these many long periods of suffering from chaos — including one as recent as the century of humiliation from the Opium War of 1842 to the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 — when the Chinese people are given a choice between strong central control and the chaos of political competition, they have a reflexive tendency to choose strong central control.

In the Western mind, any undemocratic political system that deprives citizens the ability to choose or remove a leader is by definition evil.

Max Weber wrote: It is not true that good can only follow from good and evil only from evil. Often the opposite is true.

Relative to its peers around the world, the Chinese governing class generates more good governance (in terms of improving the well-being of its citizens) than virtually any other government today.

A democratically elected Chinese government would have been under great political pressure to do what USA did: withdraw from the Paris agreement and remove all constraints from China’s rapid economic development. Instead, a nondemocratic CCP could do long-term calculations on what would be good for China and the world. On this basis, China decided to stick with the Paris Agreement.

The more powerful China has become, the less it has intervened in the affairs of other states. Of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China is the only one that has not fought in any foreign wars, away from its borders, since World War II. America, Russia, the UK, and France have done so.

The assumption in the West is that the Chinese people must feel oppressed. However, the Chinese people don’t compare their condition with that of other societies. Instead, they compare their lot with what they experienced in the past. And all they can see is that they have experienced the largest explosion of personal freedoms ever experienced in their history. When I first went to China in 1980, the Chinese people couldn’t choose where to live, what to wear, where to study, or what jobs to take.

134 million Chinese people each year freely choose to return home from their vacations.

The least advantaged in China have a far greater chance to improve their living conditions than their counterparts in America.

Is it wise to believe that there is only one road for all societies to travel on if they want to grow and progress?

India is an open society with a closed mind, whereas China is a closed society with an open mind.

When it comes to analyzing political systems, American analysts tend to veer toward a black-and-white view of the world: open or closed society, democratic or totalitarian society, liberal or authoritarian.

China has one of the most intelligent governments in the world. The Chinese Communist Party recruits only the best graduates in China.

A Chinese nation-state was forged under the leadership of the Communist Party and the guidance of Marxism. However, it had far more to do with Chinese nationalism, with the reassertion of China’s former glory and future modernization, than with the universal principles of communism.

Beijing is now one of only two cities in the world where the process of starting a business is completely free.

The population of all developed countries only makes up 1.1 billion whereas China has 1.3 to 1.4 billion.

The long history of China has taught the Chinese people a vital lesson: when the country has weak leaders, it falls apart.

Democracy is the rule of the mob — literally demos (mob) and kratos (rule).

If economic and political conditions in the African continent don’t improve in the twenty-first century, Europe can expect tens, if not hundreds, of millions of Africans to knock on its doors. If Europe wants to preserve its own long-term interests, it should make the development of Africa, in partnership with China, an immediate priority.

It is currently in China’s national interest to see Japan remain an American ally. If America walks away now from its commitment to defend Japan, Japan would have no choice but to strengthen its capability to defend itself.

China and Japan have had some two thousand years of relations, and the really troubled relations involved only half a century, from 1894 to 1945.

Japanese democracy is reassuringly calm and stable (reflecting the Japanese emphasis on harmony in interpersonal relations and its Confucian heritage). Indian democracy is loud and rambunctious, reflecting the spirit of the argumentative Indian.

India has, as a matter of principle, refused to participate in the BRI because in the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, China and Pakistan will build a road through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, a region claimed by India in its border dispute with Pakistan.

Indians have the highest median household income in America at US$119,858 (2018). The elite-to-elite connectivity between America and India is higher than that between America and any other country.

Southeast Asia is close to China geographically; its largest internal waterway is called the South China Sea. But despite the geographic proximity, nine of the ten Southeast Asian states have an Indic cultural foundation. The one Southeast Asian state that has a Sinic cultural base is Vietnam, which treasures its independence from China the most since it was occupied by China for almost a thousand years.

Chinese leaders find it easier than American leaders to deal with a diverse world, as they have no expectation that other societies should become like them.

No B.S. Ruthless Management of People and Profits - by Dan Kennedy

2025-06-21T04:00:00Z

summary:

His cantakerous-old-man style is refreshing. Super pragmatic. I have no employees now so most of it was moot but it was a refreshing and slightly inspiring read.

recommend: 4/10

my notes:

“Deeper understanding”, meaning you, the guy handing out the paychecks, have to more deeply understand the gentle, fragile, difficult-to-motivate, complex individuals entrusted to your care. Gee, sounds like you’re running a day-care center. Not mentioned anywhere in this brochure: managing people for profit. Millions of dollars and hours are wasted on this sort of thing. Everybody’s in meetings and group discussions and quality circles and deeper-understanding retreats when they should be working.

If you occasionally accept occasional unacceptable behavior, it’s only a matter of time before you are routinely accepting routine unacceptable behavior.

Absolutely no evidence whatsoever that a manager liked by the employees creates more productivity or more profitability for the company.

Everywhere else I’ve seen the “care and feeding of” approach taken, it has ruined productivity and profits.

When you come to work, you should be in a workplace, and you should work hard, fast, and intensely. You should be laser-beam focused. You should be under pressure of urgency.

If you can’t or won’t manage yourself, what makes you think you should or can manage others? If you can’t or won’t measure, daily, your progress toward specific goals, how will you persuade anybody else to do so? If you won’t hold yourself ruthlessly accountable, how dare you hold anyone else accountable? “Sloppiness” is not a privilege or perk of being the boss or the owner.

My book, No B.S. Time Management for Entrepreneurs might better be titled Self-Management.

A problem with Gerber’s concepts in the E-Myth. Gerber calls his system “the franchise model.” In his model you create all the systems and give them to your employees. That means that all of your business’ improvement is dependent on you! I hate to break this to you, but you just ain’t that smart.

Personal Deveopment Interviews: When that interview is running properly, the interviewer (you or your managers) will be talking about 20% and the subordinate will be talking 80%. The person being interviewed should leave pumped up, ready to go after every interview. Your job, as the interviewer, is to make sure they are pumped up, ready to go, and achieve their objectives. The only time they should leave a Personal Development Interview disappointed is if you’re ready to fire them. I own four businesses and conduct PDIs with the six people who report directly to me. I meet with each person, every other week, for about 20 minutes. So, on average, I spend one hour a week in PDIs.

The ultimate truth of owning, training, and racing horses is: They ALL go lame. As the saying goes, it’s not a question of if. It’s a question of when. With the horses, they mostly go lame physically. But some go lame psychologically. They lose their personal passion for competing; they lose their will to win. Or they become overly picky about the conditions required for their peak performance. So it is with your employees, associates, partners, and vendors. At some point, every single one of them will go lame.

A man’s got to know his limitations. I had basically gone lame. I was bored, irritable, and tired with the many business functions. I’d gone lame and I needed to be sent packing. Since there was nobody to fire me, I fired myself.

I sold him the business via a formula involving a purchase price, a consulting fee, an ongoing royalty, and opportunities to create new joint ventures, and we reduced and narrowed my responsibilities almost entirely to those things I’m not only exceptionally skilled at but also enjoy and have a passion for doing. As soon as we got the lame guy (me) out of the way, the business began multiplying.

I subtitled this book “Ruthless Management of People and Profits.” I did not specify other people. Ruthless self-assessment is the most difficult of all entrepreneurial tasks.

The worst number in business is one. One of just about anything is a bad thing. If you are going to have one who performs “x” duties, and they are essential duties, you need two. With two, you are the boss, and you can, if and when need occurs, be ruthless. With one, you are not a boss at all. You are a hostage. Cross training means everybody is trained in everybody else’s job. Job sharing means two part-time people doing one full-time job.

Hire slow, fire fast.

If you wanted to do something—anything—successfully and you had no instructions, no role model, no road map, no mentors, all you needed to do was look around at how the majority was doing that thing, then do the opposite—because the majority is always wrong.

Exceptional people can thrive with bad leadership, mediocre leadership, or no leadership at all, too.

I don’t care what you can’t do. I want to hear what you can do. Any idiot can create a long list of reasons something can’t be done. The genius is in figuring out how something can be done.

Short stock in any entity where the CFO becomes the CEO. CFOs love numbers, not products or businesses. They love rigid order, not entrepreneurial chaos or spirit.

Michael Gerber, the famous E-Myth guy, says most business owners spend way too much time working in their business rather than on their business. A decade ago, I agreed with him 100%. Now I don’t. His observation is sometimes true. It’s a sin many business owners do commit. However, there are just as many who sin by not working in their businesses at all. Some even avoid working in or on their businesses! If you dislike your business so much or are interested in it so little that you avoid being there, working in it, working on it, then sell it, give it away, or burn it down.

I went around to the communities to personally experience the sales presentations. Guess what we never saw or heard? The sales presentation delivered as it was supposed to be. Not once. You could fire them all but then, what do you replace them with? You just are not going to find a small army of voluntarily compliant salespeople. The only way to get compliance is to compel it. Success very, very rarely occurs on the honor system.

“the Good Enough Spot:” Figure out what your customers value most vs. value least in a relationship with a business like yours.

Never go to bed with someone whose troubles are greater than your own.

Bonuses should buy something that you can clearly and definitively measure. Bonuses should encourage profitable behavior, encourage education and self-improvement, encourage doing difficult or uncomfortable things. They are not gifts or obligations. They are tools.

Ideas have a way of losing their power as their owners lose passion and enthusiasm for them over time. They dissipate. If you feel a need to be a bit more prudent and methodical, at least set a relatively short time frame. That first weekend, bolt yourself away with all the information you can assemble, build the complete to-do list in steps, assign completion times to each step, list obstacles to overcome, people to find, build the whole plan, and implement at least some of it first thing Monday morning.

Put things into motion before ready. Start multiple projects simultaneously recognizing only some of them will succeed.

Every relationship is easier to get into than to get out of. Never go in anywhere without a predetermined escape route. Never enter any relationship without a prenegotiated exit.

Poor people have big TVs. Rich people have big libraries. They can walk you through their big libraries and tell you what actions they took as a result of each of the hundreds and hundreds of books on the shelves.

Extremely successful people put themselves under extreme pressure to perform—and thrive on it.

You can accomplish more in 12 months than in the previous 12 years. That’s possible. The trigger is the deciding. Determining everything you will get DONE in the next 12 months, the next 12 weeks, the next 12 days, the next 12 hours.

New China Playbook - by Keyu Jin

2025-06-16T04:00:00Z

summary:

Look into China’s economy and government as of 2023. Good explanations and insights, but quite financially focused. For a broader perspective, read “China’s World View” by David Daokui Li.

recommend: 6/10

my notes:

China’s economic system has begun to morph gradually into a unique form. Whether it is called “managed capitalism,” the “mayor economy,” or, more officially, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” its model does not neatly fit into any category. Instead, it embodies a unique blend of the state and the market economy, striking a balance between state and industry, coordination and market incentives, communalism and individualism.

China’s political centralization is paired with economic decentralization. The central government sets the strategic direction, but local officials deliver on the ground. This unique marriage of local officials and intrepid entrepreneurs is how China reformed, industrialized, urbanized, and now innovates.

Local officials are more likely to lend a helping hand than to extend a grabbing hand.

Western economic thought is based on the premise that individuals seek to maximize their own welfare. Consumers, entrepreneurs, and the state: in China none of them behaves like a conventional economic agent. Chinese households tend to make decisions on a collective rather than individual basis, choices that take into account a rich network of intergenerational relationships and duties. Entrepreneurs decide not only what is optimal for their firm’s profits, but also how to balance delicate relationships with local officials, align their goals with national policy directives, and manage symbolic and political responses to regulations that affect their business.

93 percent of Chinese value security over freedom. 95 percent of Chinese participants had significant confidence in their government, compared to 33 percent in the US.

In China, an interventionist state is rooted in paternalism, a hallmark of government in China since Confucian times, more than 2,500 years ago. It is based on the conviction that intervention by a senior person is justified if it benefits a junior person. The Chinese government disciplining children and making decisions on their behalf is taken for granted by the Chinese people.

The short-and-fast approach, with its rush to boost GDP, is becoming a thing of the past as the Chinese economy comes of age.

China’s new playbook is based on innovation and technology, meant to be attained through self-reliance and mastery. It’s marked by an unparalleled sense of national urgency and pride.

China’s relentless pursuit of economic growth has been replaced with a burgeoning emphasis on improving the softer metrics of development — a cleaner environment, greater food security, and a higher quality of life. There is a growing consciousness that what is economically efficient may not be socially desirable.

Between 1978 and 2016 life expectancy increased by nearly ten years and infant mortality dropped by more than 80 percent.

The government formally introduced a dual system of pricing in the early 1980s, replacing collective farming with a system that allowed farmers to work individual tracts of land and claim some of the fruits of their own labors: after turning over a portion to the government at state-level prices, farmers could then sell the rest at market prices and keep the profit. Effects were dramatic. Between 1978 and 1984, grain yield per unit of land increased by 43 percent, and real agricultural output increased by more than 50 percent, despite an overall reduction in the agricultural workforce as people moved to urban areas. Productivity in agriculture grew so quickly that many fieldworkers who remained in the countryside were freed up to engage in activities unrelated to farming.

In the mid-1980s, the government implemented a second wave of reforms, creating special economic zones (SEZs) that mimicked the effects of open, export-oriented market economies. Privileges extended to SEZs included tax exemptions, reduced custom duties, cheaper land prices, and greater flexibility to negotiate labor and financial contracts. This experiment with SEZs turned out to be a huge success. Foreign firms brought in technology, equipment, and know-how while benefiting from China’s cheap labor, business-friendly environment, sound infrastructure, and huge domestic market. Foreign investment poured into China. Deng Xiaoping doubled down on his commitment to boost the momentum of reforms in his 1992 Southern Tour. He encouraged local officials to be enterprising and entrepreneurial, and to continue to open up markets. By 1994, only a decade after the term “privatization” was taboo, the private sector was generating 40 percent of China’s urban employment. Today, the private sector employs around 80 percent.

The last high tide of economic reforms came with China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, flinging open its doors to global trade. The government aggressively liberalized exports, removing major barriers to trade and slashing tariffs in half. Of China’s 160 service sectors, 100 were opened to foreigners Between 2000 and 2007, China’s real GDP per capita nearly doubled.

Total factor productivity (TFP) — the measure of how efficiently inputs like labor and capital are used — played an even more significant role in GDP growth. With a rising level of total TFP, the same number of machines and workers can continue to generate greater and greater output. Growth can overcome the curse of diminishing returns so long as it can count on continual rises in TFP. More effective allocation of resources and technological advances: This way of improving TFP — reducing the misallocation of resources — is far more relevant. When resources are used ineffectively — they’re wasted or misallocated — in such a way that the economy is kept below its potential. There are lots of examples of misallocation in real life: it is not always the best firms that get the best workers despite merit exams, it is not necessarily the best students who get the best jobs nor do the most productive farmers get the largest pieces of land. Private entrepreneurs struggle to find financing for their innovative companies, while behemoth State-Owned Enterprisess flush with funds buy soccer clubs.

In post-reform China, the biggest and most important source of growth was reaching its own potential. Four hundred million workers moved out of low-productivity pockets of the economy into high-productivity ones.

Policy changes would not have been so effective were it not for the heavy hand of the state. The state mobilized resources, connected and coordinated different actors into a nationwide network, and pushed through tough reforms that would have been met with resistance or taken much longer to implement elsewhere. Of course, not all countries have strong states, and not all citizens are happy to have an outsize government. The effects of the Confucian tradition, with its emphasis on communalism, social order, and respect for government leadership, have rippled throughout Chinese society for more than two thousand years. In contemporary China, people have gotten used to omnipresent state intervention and simply assume it.

For a country that had suffered half a century of humiliation for its “backwardness,” modernization was an absolute objective.

Latin American countries such as Mexico and Peru, and Asian economies such as Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand, have all experienced rapid growth, but as of this moment none of these developing nations has graduated into the ranks of high-income countries. Data shows that the main reason is that they suffered from a significant slowdown in productivity. What economists call “the middle-income trap”: Since 1960, only 13 out of 101 middle-income economies have managed to escape it. South Korea and Israel made it, but can a gargantuan country like China do it? This is perhaps the single biggest question concerning its economic future. If China gets stuck in the middle-income trap, it may follow in the footsteps of Japan, which experienced a lost decade of no growth in the 1990s.

China’s productivity level is currently only a fraction of the US level. China’s share of labor force with a college degree is even smaller than that in South Africa and Brazil, and way below rich countries.

Reforming the hukou system (the household registration system), which tethers a person’s labor to their birthplace, would allow the flow of talent across regions and improve the allocation of labor as well as reduce regional disparities.

One theme from Confucianism that runs most prominently through the veins of the Chinese people, it would be this: “To be a credit to one’s ancestors.” The achievements in a career should serve as a way to honor one’s ancestry.

The “influencer economy” in China has doubled every year and has become as large as the restaurant industry.

Parents with more children have a weaker motive for saving than those with just one child. The fewer children there were, the bigger the education investment per child. Chinese households spend a lot on their children’s education. On average they devote 25 percent of their annual spending to educating one child. The average American household earmarks about 5 percent. The one-child policy led to a noteworthy increase in human capital investment, which hiked the cost of education, and in turned weakened the inclination to have more children.

Financial returns on education are also higher for women than for men. For the years between 2000 and 2009, economists estimate an 11–12 percent return per year of schooling for women, compared to 6–7 percent for men. Ironically, now that girls have so many more options, urban families are becoming more interested in having daughters than in having sons. A bachelor’s eligibility is firmly tied to the sum of his material possessions.

In 2022, the highly educated youth had a record-high unemployment rate of 20 percent. A story that caught the nation’s attention is that a cigarette manufacturing company’s new production line workers in 2021 consisted of one third master’s graduates, and two thirds undergraduates from high-ranking universities.

What was once an “American dream” the Chinese people only fantasized about can now be materialized in China. This generation has vaulted into consumerism with surprising ease. A taste for pleasure, a creative sartorial sensibility, and a high degree of comfort with spending have made them both targets and subjects of advertisements and news stories. Optimistic about China’s economic prospects, they are not nearly as risk averse as their parents. The haunting memory of economic depression and expropriation so firmly embedded in the minds of previous generations play no part in their consciousness. Their outlook on the economy and their own prospects is a rosy one, which makes them different from millennials around the world. They are also a socially conscious group — indignant about societal injustice, passionate about environmental sustainability, and sensitive to things as remote and far-flung as African wildlife protection. They have purpose, drive, and an appetite for hard work that goes beyond material pursuit and personal gain. They are the first generation in China to seek happiness more than wealth. They are proud of their nation’s growing power and influence, a sentiment that is only accentuated by alarm from the West over China’s rise. All this draws them closer to things Chinese, to events that take place internally rather than externally. Previous generations that once looked up to Western standards, foreign brands, American jobs, and foreign ways of being are giving way to a new generation convinced that their own education, goods, and services are as good as any, if not better.

More than 82 percent of young people born in the 1990s or later would choose a job different to the one they now have if they could. As a popular saying goes, “Can’t die! Can’t travel far! Really want to make money because my parents have only me.” For all their new sense of empowerment, this generation’s “onliness” has become a shackle both mental and physical, and from which they may never break free. They carry a heavy burden of expectation, from both their parents and their society.

Twenty million private firms have sprung up within just thirty years.

Deng’s decision to permit Fool’s Melon Seeds to exceed the eight-employee limit signaled that Marxist ideology would no longer suppress the growth of private firms.

80 percent of the state-owned firms operating in 1998 were shut down or privatized by 2007, particularly the smaller and less efficient ones. As a consequence, the overall performance of state enterprises improved. Larger State-Owned Enterprisess were becoming more profitable and productive. In 2018, half of China’s central State-Owned Enterprisess were listed among the five hundred largest companies in the world. This transformation also rendered obsolete the conventional wisdom that all-out privatization was the inevitable future. We have a dual-track system where State-Owned Enterprisess and the private sector coexist.

In the wake of the economic crisis of 2009, State-Owned Enterprisess were called on to salvage the economy.

Nio, the electric car company. In April 2020, its share price had fallen 62 percent from its initial public offering in 2018, and the company teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, with its financing cut off. At this point, the Hefei government of Anhui Province, succeeded in persuading Nio to locate its headquarters there. It injected cash in return for a stake in the company, provided it with cheap land, and offered all kinds of services to ease Nio’s journey. Successfully outbidding its competitors with an offer of RMB 7 billion (the equivalent of about US$1 billion) in exchange for a 25 percent stake in the company. Nio moved its headquarters to Hefei, where the local government helped it secure loans from six large state banks, in addition to helping create, organize, and coordinate a supply chain for batteries, engines, and control systems (encouraging other productive businesses to establish themselves in the region). Over the next year, Nio’s car production grew by 81 percent. Its total valuation, which had been roughly US$3 billion in April 2020, increased to about US$100 billion eight months later. By being a stakeholder, the local government benefited handsomely in many ways: it was able to attract a high-quality enterprise to its high-tech park, create employment and a name for itself, and make a handsome profit from owning Nio stock. Not only did Nio, as a global company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, earn the Hefei government a great reputation and a huge financial payoff as its stock price soared, it also fostered a thriving local industry. The local government of Guangzhou is playing a similar role for another private EV company, XPeng. This logic behind the alternative scenario helps explain why local governments were motivated to break with China’s history of antagonism toward private enterprises and encourage productive private firms in their region.

Local governments can give out licenses, contracts, cheap land, and direct loans from local banks to the firms they preferred. They can make new laws or sidestep the old, give out permits, and lobby the central government for exemptions.

Private-state collaboration is successful only when the state is a minority shareholder — letting managers and entrepreneurs make key business decisions free of political interference.

The number of active firms doing business in China increased ninefold in between 2000 and 2019. But a more striking fact is that private owners with state connections owned about a third of the capital registered by these companies,

In 2019, sixty-three out of the one hundred largest corporate owners (measured by registered capital) are state players. But the surprise lies in the fact that every single one of these state owners has a joint venture with a private company. The same is true in reverse for the largest private owners — the majority of them have a joint venture with a state owner.

Government participation can be both a blessing and a nuisance. Local leaders who succeed often leave their districts to pursue bigger political opportunities elsewhere. When their successors take over, they have their own visions to pursue. They may stop implementing their predecessor’s plans simply to differentiate themselves. The largest Chinese firms are only a decision away from also incurring the government’s wrath.

A popular business motto in China is “Jie di qi” — keep your feet on the ground, or stay embedded in local conditions.

Local governments busily commission landmark bridges, skyscrapers, opera houses, and gymnasiums with the latest avant-garde architecture. In Shanghai alone, a visitor would need to visit more than one new exhibition every day in order to see them all in any given year.

In China, the mayor economy rivals the market economy in importance.

Political centralization paired with economic decentralization, which makes room for creative local business activity under central guidance.

In China, the Communist Party and the government each function according to its respective mandate, but instead of working in parallel, they are intertwined. They function like a double helix, stabilized by cross-links between the two systems. Unlike the classic structure of DNA, however, the two systems merge at the top. China is a socialist republic run by a single political party, the Communist Party of China, or CPC. Its Politburo stands at the zenith of power and is directed by the Standing Committee, which makes decisions about major policies, legislation, and other important matters. At the next level down, power splits into two branches, with the party on one side, and the legislature and government on the other. The chairman of the National People’s Congress heads up the legislature, while the premier directs the government; both are members of the Standing Committee, where the two strands of China’s double helix converge. The secretary general of the party serves both as head of the state and as chairman of the Central Military Committee, assuring that the party maintains control over the military. On the government side, there are a number of ministries under the State Council and provincial governments. The same parallel party/government structure is at work here. The highest-ranked leader in any organization at any level is invariably the party secretary. Likewise, in a municipal government, the municipal party secretary ranks above the mayor. One represents the party and the other represents the government, and both work closely together. In China the central government takes care of domestic and international politics and sets overall economic policy, while local governments tend to the economy itself. The Politburo’s Standing Committee, which consists of the most important officials in the country, functions much like the senior management team of a giant corporation, with executives like a chief operating officer, head of human resources, and chief marketing officer, each in charge of a particular domain. Local government officials work much like department managers, finding ways to meet objectives set out by the central leadership. The Organizational Ministry of the Central Committee is responsible for screening cadres for promotion to senior positions in the party, the government, and major State-Owned Enterprises. Those who can deliver economic growth in their region have a greater chance to be promoted in the party hierarchy.

Competition among local governments to accelerate GDP growth in their respective regions: a phenomenon often referred to as GDP worship. Local government can spend the funds on building a subway system, the hallmark of a prestigious city. They can improve the environment, which has recently taken on more significance in the metrics of performance evaluation, cleaning up lakes and rivers and tackling air pollution and waste.

Deng Xiaoping’s local chiefs were encouraged to try out bold ideas. Importantly, there were few penalties meted out for trying and failing. Successful plans were lauded and emulated around the nation, their sponsors showered with recognition and praise. This high-risk, high-reward environment led to the development of an entrepreneurial state within a highly centralized one. Officials were encouraged to bend or even break rules and traditions, to come up with even the most outlandish original ideas, and to make creative or intuitive decisions even when the outcome was uncertain. They were both emboldened and empowered.

Removing internal trade barriers can result in much higher gains to productivity than boosting external trade via globalization.

No government official holding an important position is allowed to stay in any one place for too long. Cadre rotation is important because it limits the possibility of local officials building their own independent fiefdoms, where loyalty goes to the local boss rather than to the party’s Central Committee. After most party secretaries and governors serve a five-year term, they move on to a new posting. Provincial bosses are brought in from other regions to prevent long-term consolidation of power.

Massaging GDP figures is a minor problem compared with the creation of empty GDP — that is, GDP with no intrinsic value. Building bridges boosts GDP. Excessive urban reconfiguration, an overkill of industrial parks and science parks, exhibition centers, steel factories, and coal mines.

China has woken up to the urgent need to shiftto a new developmental paradigm — from maximizing output to improving quality, education, healthcare, and other public services. As income rises, pollution first increases and then falls. After their income reaches a certain level, they prefer cleaner ways to grow, even though they are costlier.

A decade ago, foreigners visiting China were struck by “the spitting habit.” People loudly hawked and spat, or blew their noses right onto the street, wherever they might be. Littering seemed to be the national sport. Streets, rivers, lakes, and other public places were used as wastebaskets. Empty bottles, cans, and other trash were jettisoned by cars flashing by. Today, the streets of Beijing and Shanghai are spick-and-span, and residents have significantly changed their behavior. The government recently issued an elaborate trash-sorting ordinance, and the fact that there was more compliance than complaint speaks to the convergence of people’s growing expectations and social norms.

Local officials are sacked summarily should they fail to respond to natural disasters or to outbreaks of epidemics, through accountability and responsiveness.

The common assumption that social media is completely censored is incorrect. Top leaders are aware of the value of letting people express their opinions. Tuning in to this information also allows the government to respond swiftly to negative public opinion before it gives rise to social unrest. So long as postings do not touch the third rail — subversive views of the party itself or attacks on very senior party officials — a wide range of politically and socially sensitive issues are tolerated. It is also useful to have social media whistleblowers helping the government monitor the party’s cadres. Amateur civilian paparazzi use their telephoto lenses to catch corrupt officials. Official’s wrist gleaming with a variety of luxury watches; posting the images online led to an official investigation and charges of corruption, sneaking out of a luxury mansion at night. A broader set of social indicators — one that is inherently much harder to measure than GDP growth — has come to dominate the all-important process of performance evaluation.

Inequality has become a critically important issue. Local governments to tackle it have been given targets for the number of people who need to be lifted out of poverty each year in their jurisdictions. As a result of this program, the number of very poor rural residents declined from nearly 100 million in late 2012 to 16.6 million by the end of 2018. By the end of 2020, the target of eliminating extreme poverty altogether was achieved when the last cohort of 40 million people in rural areas were lifted out of abject destitution.

Between 2000 and 2018, China’s economy quadrupled in size. Yet a Chinese citizen who invested $1.00 in a diversified portfolio of domestic Chinese stocks in 2000 still would have had just that $1.00 eighteen years later, after adjusting for inflation. Investing in Chinese stocks listed in international exchanges would have returned $3.50. A Chinese citizen with access only to the domestic financial system would have fared better by stashing the cash in a savings account.

Bank credit is the main source of financing in China and stood at around 165 percent of GDP in 2019. In the US, by comparison, bank credit accounts for only 52 percent of GDP. China’s domestic financial landscape has a notable shortage of such typical financial players as investment funds, insurance companies, ratings agencies, and international investment banks.

Policies dictated by the central government are often mercurial. Not long ago, for instance, shortly after having encouraged homeowners to sell in order to avoid a sharp upturn in housing prices, the government prohibited Chinese households from selling homes in order to avoid a big drop in housing prices. Not long thereafter, the government started to clamp down on housing investment, which caused nationwide panic in 2022. Citizens justifiably complained about not being able to sell on the way up or buy on the way down.

Between 2003 and 2013, the average price of housing in major Chinese cities quadrupled. As of 2022, the market value of housing in China is almost twice that of the US. This is reminiscent of Japan leading up to its housing bust in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the market value of its real estate was more than twice that of the US, but less than a third three decades later.

Everyone in China wants to own a house. The home ownership rate there is the highest in the world — more than 90 percent for the 276 million urban households, compared with 65 percent in the US or 42 percent in Switzerland. Why don’t people in China just choose to rent apartments, given the low cost relative to buying? The housing price–to–rental ratio is 70 in Beijing or Shenzhen, compared to less than 20 in New York or San Francisco. You could choose to continue to rent, put your savings in the bank, and earn an annual deposit rate of about 2 percent. Given an average inflation rate of about 2 percent, your real return would be about zero. You could also elect to put those savings in the stock market and earn a low rate of return coupled with a high degree of risk. A third alternative would be to buy a place to live and earn a real rate of return of about 20 percent per year as your equity in the property grows in value.

Why were there so many empty housing units in China? The most prominent ghost towns were all in the same region, Inner Mongolia. Districts once dubbed ghost cities are now thriving new urban centers. Pudong in Shanghai was one of the earliest ghost districts, but is now one of the most thriving parts of the city.

In China, property development by local governments has been described by the homily “Poor kids wear oversized clothes.” Growing into loose-fitting garments makes as much sense for urban development policy as it does for children. Time takes care of the rest.

Every financial crisis is a crisis of confidence.

Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run it is almost everything.

When outside firms wanted to operate in China and take advantage of its lower costs and vast market, they were required to form joint ventures with Chinese companies, which often entailed sharing proprietary technology. In recent disputes over trade, the West has referred to this policy as “forced technology transfer.” Foreign companies shared only the technology necessary for those products — or parts of products — manufactured locally in China. They withheld the master blueprint, or critical information needed for fully independent production. Ford and Toyota invested in Chinese EV companies so that their technologies could be brought to the American, Japanese, and European markets.

Because tech companies are based on data, they become capable of harnessing what economists refer to as “increasing returns to scale,” which means that if you double the inputs, you more than double the output.

On a given day, Chinese digital payments exceed US digital payments for a given year. China’s obsession with digital services means that many aspects of daily life are transformed into digital data.

Chinese people don’t mind sharing their data if it means that there will be less crime, better social behavior.

The biggest barrier to creating something truly great is having something already good enough.

Uber took the model that had proved so successful in the US and tried to replicate it in other countries. Didi’s strategy focused on adapting their model to accommodate demographic conditions, cultural norms, and other national characteristics. In Brazil, for instance, where many drivers live from hand to mouth, Didi paid them on a daily rather than monthly basis, which Brazilian drivers vastly preferred. Most didn’t have a bank account, so Didi created a one-click bank account application button inside its app for drivers, which also allowed Didi to apply for an account on the drivers’ behalf, guaranteeing quick approval and allowing new drivers to receive a bank card within just a few days. Didi is the most popular ride-sharing app in Latin America.

Grunt work: The colloquial term for this is “eat bitter.”

A category called ke jiao xing guo, which means bolstering the nation through science, technology, and education. The Chinese government is invoking a juguoapproach, or an “integrated whole-nation scheme,” concentrating all sorts of national resources in an attempt to achieve breakthroughs in key technologies, or as the Chinese call it, “throat choking” technologies. This campaign is now in full swing. When a strategic objective has been given a juguo designation, cost considerations are set aside. Waste will be tolerated. The essence of the juguo system is that the whole nation mobilizes to achieve a strategic goal; it casts the net wide for a big catch.

Duan, ping, kuai, or “short, flat, fast.” This was originally used to describe a winning strategy in volleyball, but now it serves as a popular prescription for investors. Make short-term investments, keep them simple, and look for rapid returns. It also reflects a more general attitude in society at large.

One of the most significant shifts over the past forty years has been the way the Chinese view their own country. In the 1960s and 1970s, students who landed an opportunity to go to school in the West usually stayed there. In the early 2000s, Chinese students had started moving closer to home, parking themselves in cosmopolitan cities like Hong Kong or Singapore, benefiting from opportunities that originated in mainland China but were still a comfortable distance away. By 2013 the mainland had become their prime destination. Of the five million students who completed their studies abroad between 2000 and 2019, around 86 percent returned to China.

The unusual power of the Chinese state is rooted in its ancient bureaucratic structure of tiaotiao kuaikuai (lines and blocks) — an elaborate administrative system that makes it possible for authorities at the top to convey instructions all the way down to the smallest administrative unit. Vertical lines of command are combined with horizontal jurisdictions, or blocks, in a network whose reach extends to every corner of the country. This structure, which traces back to imperial times, is still essential to China’s ability to build new infrastructure with startling speed. For all its effectiveness, the system does not grant China’s central authority total control. Power delegated to provinces and municipalities incentivizes local governments to grow their economies, achieve social progress, and maintain order. It’s a dynamic balance that sometimes shifts in the direction of the central authority and at other times tilts toward local government, but the central government never fully relinquishes control, and every external shock or crisis tends to shift power back to top leadership.

It’s not easy to understand why the state takes such an active role in the stock market, the housing market, education, the number of births in a family, and even how much time children can spend playing video games. But this tendency to guide and manage the Chinese people stems from the nation’s deep history and culture of paternalism. The track record so far is that the government has done a good job of maintaining stability and safety even as the nation undergoes a sea change.

The top priority of China’s fatherly government is stability.

We should always be wary of wholly attributing economic patterns and behaviors to culture, as an explanation for why things “work differently in our country.” Often, lurking behind these patterns are policies or economic conditions responsible for nudging people to act in certain ways.

A glorious history does not necessarily confer upon a nation leadership in the modern world, as countries like Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Britain, and others can testify.

China’s push for common prosperity mandates that Chinese firms be hefa, heli, and heqing — “lawful, reasonable, and empathetic.” It is no longer enough to be a big contributor to the mayor economy. In China’s changing economic environment, companies have to be disciplined, environmentally conscious, and considerate to their customers. Increasingly they must respect rules and regulations and protect consumer privacy.

China is moving away from low-end, mass-produced goods and toward more specialized and sophisticated products.

After years of prolonged debate over regulating the likes of Facebook and Amazon, the US still has little to show for it. In China, the government stepped in with immediate effect. In less than a year beginning in 2020, social media and gaming giant Tencent was forced to sell off holdings to reduce its concentration of market power. Meituan was fined huge sums for not adequately protecting workers’ rights and benefits, and a series of antitrust probes across all sectors targeted the likes of Alibaba and Didi. A sea of regulations swept across the nation, and at the tail end of 2021 the state refused to bail out its deeply indebted real estate giants.

Some dramatic undertakings are intended to have a “big bang” effect — to arouse awareness and to enforce change. They are often dialed back once the message gets across or if ramifications start to bite.

Su Shi, a famous poet from the Song dynasty, described the difficulty of conveying the haunting beauty of Mount Lushan in Jiangxi Province this way: “Why can’t I tell the true shape of Lushan? Because I myself am in the mountain.”

CHINESE SAYINGS: (unrelated, author quoted these throughout book) One thrives in adversity and perishes in prosperity. Trees wither from uprooting whereas humans thrive by moving. The emperor regards his people as heaven. People regard food as their heaven. Reforms start with breaking rules. Humans should avoid getting famous. Pigs should avoid getting chubby. Tall trees bear the brunt of high winds. No fish can survive in water that is too pure.

Co-Intelligence - by Ethan Mollick

2025-06-12T04:00:00Z

summary:

I was so excited to read this, hoping it would give new insights and expert tactics for getting more out of GenAI LLMs. But unfortunately it was almost nothing I didn’t know.

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

The machine, also known as the Mechanical Turk, beat Ben Franklin and Napoleon in chess matches.

AI stores only the weights from its pretraining, not the underlying text it trained on, so it reproduces a work with similar characteristics but not a direct copy of the original pieces it trained on.

Whatever AI you are using right now is going to be the worst AI you will ever use.

LLMs are connection machines. They are trained by generating relationships between tokens that may seem unrelated to humans but represent some deeper meaning. Add in the randomness that comes with AI output, and you have a powerful tool for innovation.

Invite AI to your brainstorming sessions.

Tell AI who it is: “You are an expert at marketing. When asked to generate slogan ideas you come up with ideas that are different from each other, clever, and interesting. You use clever wordplay. You try not to repeat themes or ideas.”

AI will not naturally deliver novelty. It tends to give the crowd-pleasing “average” answer that is most likely from its training data. But we can make it deliver novelty with a little work.

Tell it to think this through step by step: Come up with good analogies for an AI tutor. First, list possible analogies. Second, critique the list and add three more analogies. Next, create a table listing pluses and minuses of each. Next, pick the best and explain it.

Ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel. What do you need to know to help me?”

To solve a new problem, we need lots of connected information stored in our long-term memory. That means we need to learn many facts and understand how they are connected. After that, we have to practice.

Political Thought of Xi Jinping - by Steve Tsang and Olivia Cheung

2025-04-29T04:00:00Z

summary:

Shares the stated and implied policy of China’s president. Fascinating.

recommend: 6/10

my notes:

Xi has largely kept the hardware of the CCP system in place. He has replaced or substantially upgraded the operating system, however.

PRC history using digital terms: 1949 Mao era = OS 1.0 minor updates over 25 years. 1978 Deng Xiaoping reform era = OS 2.0 updates under Deng, Jiang Zemin, and Hu Jintao 2012-present = OS 3.0 = “Xi Jinping Thought on socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era”

Xi wants to change the Party, the country, and the people. This is in contrast to the relatively modest and pragmatic approach of Deng Xiaoping, who merely advocated “crossing the river by feeling for stones” in his era of “reform and opening up.” Deng’s experimental approach required no master plan to guide China in its direction of travel. Xi Thought is the self-updating navigational chart to guide China’s ship of state to its destiny, encapsulated in “the China Dream.”

We distill the vision of Xi Thought into two core elements or ambitions: 1. to create “one state, one people, one ideology, one party, and one leader.” 2. to make China great again and better than any other country in the world.

Since Xi Thought is now the highest guide for policymaking, it is important to take what Xi says into account seriously.

Xi puts ideology and politics ahead of policies. This means that the design, implementation, and evaluation of policies is premised on Xi Thought, which must be considered before policies are made. This ideology-first approach contrasts with Deng’s pragmatic approach, by which policies were made first and then the ideology interpreted to uphold them.

Contrary to Mao’s treatment of Marxism-Leninism and China’s past, Xi is proud of China’s history. No longer a need to underline how “new China” has broken from “old China.” Xi sees the rise of the Communist Party to power in China as rooted in China’s long history and civilization. To sustain that narrative, he conscripts the moralistic, romantic, and rule-by-virtue elements in Confucian thoughts. The CCP is the sole legitimate heir to the Chinese civilization.

Four of Lenin’s principles seem especially influential on Xi’s Thoughts on how to organize and manage the CCP. 1. lower levels submit to upper levels and the whole party submits to the central party leadership to ensure strong party unity and discipline. 2. CCP remakes society according to their values rather than being transformed by society. 3. CCP controls the appointments of all important positions, whether party posts or not. 4. Invest in building the party organization, including penetrating party structures at the grassroots level.

Marx and Mao inspiration: Zero-sum view of politics paranoia of betrayal belief that the Party will decay unless it is subjected to constant rectification strong national pride achieve self-reliance from foreign import, assistance, and technology. concentration of power in the top leader fusing institutional and personal authority cultivation of a cult of personality around the top leader ruthless treatment of enemies relentless ideological indoctrination the use of the mass line to manipulate public opinion

Legalist and Confucian inspiration: Legalism equates hegemony and coercion with good governance. Confucianism beautifies authoritarianism in a moralizing discourse of harmony and hierarchical order. Everyone must know their roles and play to its script in the “five relationships” that sustain society: ruler and subject father and son elder brother and younger brother husband and wife friend and friend

In 2014, CCP published a selection of Xi’s speeches and made reading the book mandatory. Party schools and universities were required to incorporate the book into their curricula. 79 of his speeches from 2012-2014 were published into a book, translated into 33 languages, and spread worldwide.

Xi put forth eight basic guiding principles, called the “eight making-clears”: 1. Modernization of socialism, rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. Build a great modern socialist country that is rich, strong, democratic, cultured, harmonious, and beautiful by the middle of this century. 2. The principal contradiction in society is between people’s ever-growing needs for a good life and unbalanced and inadequate development. Put people at the center. All-round development of the individual, and common prosperity of the entire population. 3. Maintain self-confidence in our chosen path, theory, system, and culture. 4. Advance the modernization of the state governance system and capacity. 5. Build the judicial infrastructure and a country based on “rule of law” 6. Build the army into a world-class military that obeys the Party’s command, can fight and win, and has an excellent workstyle. 7. Diplomacy will advance new international relations conducive to common destiny for humankind. 8. CCP is the highest power in political leadership

Xi specified six indicators for the “basic realization of socialist modernization” by 2035: 1. Make China a top-ranked innovative country. 2. Protect people’s rights to equal participation and development. A “rule of law” country, government, and society. 3. Enhance China’s cultural soft power: broad, wide, and deep. 4. Get people to live more comfortably. Increase the middle-income group. Reduce disparities in urban–rural, regional, and living standard, making access to basic public services more equitable. 5. Society full of vitality, harmonious, and orderly. 6. Improve the ecological environment: an environmentally sound China.

Xi’s five criteria for the fulfillment of the China Dream: 1. enhanced material, political, spiritual, societal, and ecological civilization 2. complete the modernization of state governance system and capacity 3. become the leading country of national strength and global influence 4. common prosperity for the entire population: happier, safer, and healthier lives 5. stand mightily among the world of nations and do so in higher spirit.

A mobile app, Xuexi qiangguo — literally, learning from the great power — released by the CCP Propaganda Department, developed by Alibaba Group. Use of the app on a daily basis became a mandatory requirement for all party members, civil servants, teachers, and employees of state-owned enterprises. Covid pandemic interweaved the use of the Xuexi qiangguo app into daily lives in China, substantially increasing its usage.

Consultative Leninism (our term) priorities: 1. Party supremacy 2. Governance reform to preempt public demands for democratization 3. Monitoring and shaping public opinion 4. Economic growth regardless of its previous ideological commitment to communism 5. Party-centric nationalism: national pride in a tightly guided narrative of China’s history

Reform policy implemented by Deng Xiaoping in 1978 led to the significant decentralization of power and created a more individualistic society. Risks economically empowered people and cadres becoming impatient of being politically marginalized. The Party has learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union that this could be dangerously destabilizing.

1. Party supremacy: the country is nothing without the Party. Regime security is China security. 2. Party-centric nationalism: portrays China as a long-suffering victim of the West and especially the United States, and the Party as the defender of China’s honor, instilling a strong sense of pride in the Party. 3. Give China “soft power” and make it superior to the West or liberal democracies. 4. Monitoring and shaping public opinion: putting the people at the center. Mass surveillance to solicit strong consensus anticorruption, antipoverty. Groom people to share one basic outlook and ideology. 5. Economic strength: a China-first approach, insulating the economy from external threat, market discipline over private entrepreneurship.

CCP has centralized authority, absolute discipline, ideological uniformity, organizational resilience, and successful penetration into nonparty structures.

Xi’s anticorruption drive: 3,881,000 cadres were sanctioned by Xi from 2013 to 2021, most being rank-and-file corrupt cadres. Within Xi’s first year in power, 18 “tigers” — corrupt cadres at the vice-ministerial rank or above — were expelled from the Party, stripped of political office, and handed down hefty jail sentences to account for corruption and related offenses. 58,000 cadres had criminal prosecution. Under Xi, by May 2022, 264 tigers had fallen from power.

TV series “In the Name of the People” in 2017, exalts fictional CCP disciplinary investigators for working fearlessly to bring corrupt senior cadres to justice. The series was an instant success.

Party members are required to criticize themselves and their colleagues for shortcomings, and to commit to make amends. The practice is meant to be an annual performance evaluation after an immersive experience of learning Xi Thought via the mobile phone app, Xuexi qiangguo, and ideological campaigns. What matters is that they are aware of the standards required of them, and that they are being monitored constantly. This pressures them into eliminating the deviant behavior Xi wanted to rectify.

The Party leads everything. It provides and exercises effective control over the whole country.

Xi does not trust that people will support the Party by default unless they are being actively guided to do so. For this reason, Xi sees no difference between the Party as a leader and a manager. Setting direction and managing, including micromanaging, are both necessary.

Xi said repeatedly that “our party is so large, and our country, so huge — it is such that if the Party Central lacks the sole authority to make decisions, nothing can be achieved.”

Party Central (dang zhongyang) is consistently mistranslated in English, but Party Central is a flexible concept, which may refer to: (1) Party Central Committee (200 members, meets yearly) (2) Politburo (25 members, meets monthly) (3) Politburo Standing Committee (7–9 members, meets weekly) (4) central leading small groups (5) Xi as the core leader The ambiguity obfuscates the differences between strengthening the Party’s leadership with strengthening Xi’s leadership.

In state-owned enterprises (SOEs), the CEOs are party appointees.

The revised Code of Corporate Governance promulgated by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in September 2018 commands all companies listed in China — including private firms — to “write party-building work into their articles of association.”

Cracking Down on “False Ideological Trends”: Known as “Document # 9” for circulation lists anti-Western sentiments of Xi Thought, including the promotion of separation of powers, multiparty system, universal suffrage, independent judiciary. These ideas dismiss the Party’s leadership. The intent of championing these ideas is regime change, and transplanting the Western political system to China. Western concepts of freedom, democracy, and human rights distort the Party’s worldviews on democracy, freedom, equality, justice, and rule of law.

Xi Thought benchmarks in opposite terms to liberal or Western political ideas, in order to rally the Chinese people to the Party.

It accuses Western countries of rallying behind the United States to implement neoliberalism in Latin America, the Soviet Union, and eastern Europe under the guise of globalization, bringing calamitous consequences on the receiving nations.

One of the goals of Xi Thought is to reshape economic globalization on China’s terms. This includes arresting the spread of Western, liberal, or capitalist governance models to China and developing countries. Xi Thought promotes a state-centric economic system that bolsters SOEs and public ownership.

What Western journalists describe as suppression of press freedom amounts to emancipating the mind from enslavement to Western thoughts, an important step to bolster national self-confidence.

Xi Thought views Chinese history as a useful tool to shape the thinking of Chinese people. He sees facts in history as incidental; interpretation is what matters, and only one correct interpretation is allowed.

The CCP has always been steadfast in its commitment to socialism. Although Xi accepts that the CCP made mistakes, he does not allow any mistake to be deemed ideological. Disallowed: claiming the reform and opening up to have gone too far or have deviated from the socialist direction, or questioning if China is still socialist.

If wrong ideas spread in China unopposed, it will disturb the national consensus on which flag to raise, which path to take, and which goals to pursue.

China’s consultative Leninist is superior because it has achieved two miracles that are rare in the world: rapid economic growth and sustained social stability.

Xi resorts to ancient Chinese governance ideas and systems to legitimize the fact that the CCP, the choice of history, alone knows how to apply ancient wisdom to today’s China. Yet, while Confucian governance ideals are accepted in Chinese society, they bear little resemblance to the ethos of China’s political system under Xi, which is about sustaining the Party’s rule at all costs, not moralistic governance. The turning point for China’s destiny, Xi claimed, was the arrival of Marxism to China, which gave birth to the CCP. If not for the leadership of the CCP, our country and our nation would neither have attained today’s achievements nor global status.

The Party is a communist party not only in name but also in reality by applying itself to improving the livelihood of the poor.

2.76 billion surveillance cameras are in place: two for every Chinese citizen.

By putting cadres from outside the locality in charge, Xi eliminated the tendency for local village leaders to funnel a disproportionate amount of poverty relief to their family and friends. Subsidies were transferred to the recipients’ bank account directly by the provincial government to avoid embezzlement by local cadres.

In 2016, 9.6 million poor rural residents were relocated for the purpose of poverty eradication. They included those living in areas (1) designated for ecological conservation and thus must not be developed, (2) officially classified as inhospitable or prone to natural disasters, and/or (3) too far away from a main road. The local government arranged every step of relocation and postrelocation settlement, ranging from financing the construction of mega resettlement points in the outskirts of cities, recruiting businesses to open factories in industrial parks purposely built to employ the relocated, to managing the farmland left behind by villagers on their behalf.

Beijing assigned 342 well-to-do counties along China’s affluent eastern seaboard to lift 570 impoverished counties in the less accessible western or inland regions out of poverty. These private companies, social groups, universities, and individuals in their jurisdiction had to contribute generously toward poverty alleviation in their paired western counties. This could take the form of setting up satellite factories to hire the rural poor, donating to impoverished villages for infrastructure improvement, stocking the staff canteen with produce from those regions, or other imaginative alternatives. 109,500 private companies contributed ¥106.8 billion (US$15.5 billion) for poverty alleviation. Monitoring its effectiveness did not seem to be a priority.

Xi is not interested in making China socialist at any cost. He does not intend to lead China to a socialist utopia, as Chairman Mao did, regardless of its consequences for the economy. Instead, he believes his brand of socialism will help to maintain economic stability and order, on which he can build an innovative and world-beating economy. This is why in terms of ranking of the top three economic goals, making China’s economy innovative comes first, followed by enhancing economic order and security, before promoting common prosperity.

When we were weak, everyone wanted to sell their technology to us. Now that we are developed, no one wants to sell us their technology. They are afraid that this will make us big and strong. Advanced Western countries have the mentality that training up the apprentice will starve the master to death.

Until China can surpass the West in innovation, its political power is constrained. His plea to Chinese scientists to stretch their limits to innovate appeals to nationalism. If China can independently manufacture technologies in key domains and choke-neck technologies, it will be practically impossible for the West to block it from taking a leading role in making international economic rules for these new technologies: new generation IT robotics aerospace equipment ocean engineering equipment and high-tech ships railway equipment energy saving and new energy vehicles power equipment agricultural machinery

Huawei enjoys an unparalleled degree of rapport with and support from the Chinese Government.

By 2020, as the world turned more critical of China following the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, he became worried about advanced countries, curtailing the cutting-edge technologies the Chinese economy needs to innovate. To prepare for and, indeed, to preempt such an eventuality, he required his government to devise a “back-up plan for critical industries.” This means ensuring that there is “at least one alternative source” for every important product and material, so that the industrial and supply chains that matter to China can be fully “autonomous, controllable, secure and reliable” within the country.

Xi laid down two “guiding principles” for international engagement under the dual circulation strategy: 1. China should actively cooperate with all countries, regions, and enterprises that are willing to cooperate with it 2. the more China opens up to the outside world, the more it must pay attention to security and focus on enhancing its own competitiveness so that it can become indestructible. China should enjoy the benefits of accessing the outside world without being vulnerable to such economic integration.

Any Chinese national who has settled abroad and who has been naturalized as a foreign national or has acquired foreign nationality of his own free will shall automatically lose Chinese nationality.

Converting people deemed unpatriotic or disloyal is a lengthy process, using coercion to change their mindset. This allows for a transition, during which people not yet fully converted are required to put up an appearance of loyalty. While Xi ultimately requires wholehearted support for the Party, inculcating widespread submission to the Party is an acceptable transitional arrangement.

Like people anywhere, people in China are preoccupied with getting on with their lives. Left to themselves, they are not predisposed to prioritize “national rejuvenation.” Xi works to change this. Whatever one finds oneself doing, one should always do it for the glory of China.

Xi expects the Chinese diaspora to serve as the Party’s eyes and ears, to open doors for China to acquire cutting-edge foreign technology, and to foster people-to-people connections that can help enhance China’s influence and prestige abroad - and to tell the China story well.

Turning minorities like the Uyghurs into patriotic Chinese is leveling them up, even if they require re-education to understand.

Xi: “We did not invade or bully others or claim to be the emperor or hegemon in the past, neither would we do so in the future.” China’s forceful occupation of Tibet and Xinjiang represented peaceful liberation. China’s war with India in 1962 and its invasion of Vietnam in 1979 are purely defensive acts.

Loving the Party and the nation are the same thing, and something that any hot-blooded Chinese patriot must do.

China is predestined to outcompete the United States, the vilest of capitalist countries, regardless of the setbacks that China may encounter along the way.

Xi asks people in China to consciously struggle against materialism and individualism: moral and social ills that originated in the West.

To ensure young people do not waste time, he requires online gaming companies to enforce restrictions on when under-18s can play video games: three hours per week, no more than one hour per day on Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, or public holidays. The entertainment industry should not be a lucrative business but an “ideological battleground” in which the Party must dominate.

China will only ever cover the very basic social service to provide a minimum fall back.

The UN is the highest authority in international affairs should be bolstered. Xi urged all countries to fully abide by the UN Charter and international agreements and laws.

Xi said countries should only form partnerships, not alliances. Nuclear weapons should be completely banned.

Treat all political systems as equals. Democracies are not superior to authoritarian regimes and have no right to criticize the latter, especially on human rights and domestic governance. This implicitly rejects the postwar US global leadership, the US-led alliance system, and the doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” or the “responsibility to protect.”

Xi admitted tacitly that the ultimate yardstick for judging what is legitimate in the world order is not existing international rules and norms, unlike what he stated at the UN, but the Chinese concept of tianxia. He has romanticized it to the point of mythical. Xi’s tianxia worldview prioritizes regime security above all else.

The focus of Xi Thought on soft power is the less developed, less wealthy, and often undemocratic parts of the world. Countries that are more receptive to Belt and Road Initiative. Xi Thought does not make China more appealing to them overall, but it is not ineffective either.

The Network State - by Balaji Srinivasan

2025-01-09T05:00:00Z

summary:

It’s a great thought experiment: how to start a new country. Good core idea: God → State → Network. I was intrigued until it descended into long rants against America, like it was written only for Americans. I gave up after 100 more pages of that. I hope this idea is made vivid by a great movie/show.

recommend: 2/10

my notes:

A network state is: * a social network with a moral innovation * a sense of national consciousness * a recognized founder * a capacity for collective action * an in-person level of civility * an integrated cryptocurrency * a consensual government limited by a social smart contract * an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories * a virtual capital * an on-chain census

A successful network state is one that attracts aligned immigrants. A vote of confidence by the people inside who remain and those outside who apply. An unsuccessful network state is one that loses them.

Focus on building admirable societies that people want to join.

Religions start with history lessons. How humans once behaved - and how they should have behaved. There’s a moral to these stories. Political doctrines are based on history lessons too. They’re how the establishment justifies itself.

Newspaper articles aren’t really about true-or-false, but good-and-bad.

Debug our broken society.

Running a so-called time-travel debugger to get a reproducible bug: Once we find it, we might want to execute an undo, do a git revert, restore from backup, or return to a previously known-good configuration. Knowing the detailed past of the system allows us to figure out what had gone wrong.

Early America’s religious colonies succeeded at a higher rate than its for-profit colonies, because the former had a purpose.

You’re arguing that the culture of your startup society is better than the surrounding culture. Implicitly, that means there’s some moral deficit in the world that you’re fixing. Without a genuine moral critique of the establishment, without an ideological root network supported by history, your new society is at best a fancy Starbucks lounge, a gated community.

History is written to the ledger. If everything that happened gets faithfully recorded, history is then just the analysis of the log files.

History is a cryptic epic of twisting trajectories. Cryptic, because the narrators are unreliable and often intentionally misleading. Epic, because the timescales are so long that you have to consciously sample beyond your own experience and beyond any human lifetime to see patterns. Twisting, because there are curves, cycles, collapses, and non-straightforward patterns. Trajectories, because history is ultimately about the time evolution of human beings, which maps to the physical idea of a dynamical system, of a set of particles progressing through time.

Another term for “Big Data” should be “Big History.” All data is a record of past events. What’s another word for data storage in a computer? Memory.

Power cares about the past because the morality of society is derived from its history.

All political ideologies have been around for all time. The only thing that changes is whether a given ideology is now technologically feasible as an organizing system for humanity.

Our civilization may just be like the best player in a video game so far: we’ve made it the furthest, but we have no guarantee that we’re going to win before killing ourselves and wiping out like all the other civilizations before us.

Historical heuristics are strategies for distilling insight from all the documents, genes, languages, transactions, inventions, collapses, and successes of people over time. History is the entire record of everything humanity has done.

Some truths are intrinsically relative (and hence political), whereas others are amenable to absolute verification (and hence technological). Here’s the key: Is it true if others believe it to be true? Or is it true regardless of what people believe? A political truth is true if everyone believes it to be true. Things like money, status, and borders are in this category. You can change these by rewriting facts in people’s brains. For example, the question of what a dollar is worth, who the president is, and where the border of a country is are all dependent on the ideas installed in people’s heads. If enough people change their minds, markets move, presidents change, and borders shift. Conversely, a technical truth is true even if no human believes it to be true. Facts in math and physics exist independent of what’s in people’s brains.

Chinese have a pithy saying: the backwards will be beaten. If you’re bad at technology, you’ll be beaten. Americans also have a saying: “you and what army?” If you’re unpopular enough, you won’t have the political power to build in the physical world.

People wanted god-fearing men in power, because a man who genuinely believed in God would behave well even if no one could punish him. In the 1900s, why didn’t you steal? Because even if you didn’t believe in God, the State would punish you. A new Leviathan now rose to pre-eminence.

The Network — the internet, the social network, and now the crypto network — that is the next Leviathan.

CCP’s early action in the 2000s and 2010s to ban foreign social networks looks farsighted in retrospect, as if they hadn’t built their own Weibo and WeChat, then US executives in Silicon Valley would have been able to deplatform (or surveil) anyone from China.

sometimes Network > State (which is new) sometimes State > Network (which is what most people expect) The competition between these Leviathans will define our time.

Choose your competitors carefully, because you’ll become a lot like them. When you have three Leviathans (God, State, Network) that keep struggling with each other, they won’t remain pure forms.

People of God offer thoughts and prayers. People of the State say “there oughta be a law!” People of the Network write some code.

If the news is fake, imagine history.

New countries begin with new stories.

All the Ghosts in the Machine - by Elaine Kasket

2024-12-28T05:00:00Z

summary:

Wonderful subject: how to handle digital data after death. But focused almost entirely on Facebook and Google, and the bureaucracy in place of those big social media corps.

recommend: 3/10

my notes:

Continuing a connection to the dead is an entirely normal phenomenon.

Life is for the living, and the dead are in the suburbs or out in the country, behind the cemetery gates.

We put the technology in place that would enable the dead to stick around in the same places and spaces as the living.

A spectrum from Internet rejectors to enthusiasts: hermits, pragmatists, curators, always-ons, and life loggers.

Curators’ digital imprint is far more personal than that of a pragmatist, and much more carefully crafted.

You will have a posthumous virtual self that is relatively visible, vocal and nimble.

Kübler-Ross’s five stages – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – weren’t actually even based on bereaved people. They referred to the stages she had observed dying people themselves go through. They’ve long been regarded as a comforting fiction, practically folklore. She’d never intended the model to be interpreted as linear.

Jessica’s in-life profile was different from the memorial page. On the latter, people talked about her, but on the former they talked to her, carrying on conversations that had started in life. One photo showed her with her friends, lined up on lounge chairs in some tropical location. It had been posted before she died, and there was her own comment underneath: ‘Oh my god, we look all skinny and tan!! I want to go back there!!!’ After her death, her friends simply carried on the thread of conversation, as though it was the most natural thing in the world. The comment was casual, conversational, everyday. It was almost as though she wasn’t dead at all. Reading Jessica’s own words, following her conversations with her friends, viewing her images, and seeing her in the context of her relationships was a far different experience from looking at the memorial page. ‘If the profile were deleted, it would feel like I wouldn’t be able to talk to her properly,’ she said. ‘It would be deleting the last bit of her that’s still almost real.’

‘I know u can read this, it just sux that u can’t talk back . . . thanx for lettin me talk to u again,’ says someone. ‘Part of me just feels like he sees it somehow. When I’m communicating with him on Facebook, there isn’t that immediate reminder that he’s gone. But when I see his name on his headstone in a silent cemetery or I see his room frozen in time, it’s more in-your-face.’

Physically dead, yes. Socially dead? Not just yet.

Social networking sites are simply our Digital-Being-in-the-world-with-others. Sure, you set up the profile on your own in the first place, but from there onwards it’s co-constructed, co-authored. After she’s gone, it doesn’t just feel like ‘this was her’. It feels like ‘this was us’.

Those left behind could compile obituaries, information about family heritage, photos and comments on a Living History™ archive website.

When digital remains cause a disruption in continuing bonds, it’s almost always about one or both of these things: access, and control.

which can interfere with a mourner’s capacity to determine for themselves the kind of continuing bonds they want, or don’t want.

Dr Edina Harbinja is one of my super-specialised law buddies.

It’s often assumed in law that only natural persons have legal personalities, and by extension only natural persons have full legal claims on privacy. Dead people aren’t usually considered to have much, if any, interest in it. If you’re dead, you can’t maintain control of your property, because there’s no longer such a concept as ‘your’.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Game Theory - by Edward Rosenthal Ph.D.

2024-12-21T05:00:00Z

summary:

Great introduction to the subject.

recommend: 6/10

my notes:

Game theory is all about choosing what to do in the face of uncertain outcomes and scheming adversaries.

Game theory is about anticipating how others will act. Anticipate the decisions that others are making.

The solutions are called equilibria because the players arrive at a point where their outcomes can’t be improved by any different choice of strategy.

A game is in strategic form when a table is used to enumerate the strategies for the two players as rows and columns, and the entries in the table indicate the outcomes.

A pair of numbers in each cell: each pair consists of a 1 to represent victory and a -1 to represent defeat. Notice how adding together 1 and -1 equals zero, as in “zero sum.”

An extensive form game is represented by a branching diagram in which the branches represent alternatives available to the players.

They begin with a single point, or node. Each node, represented by a circle in the diagram, indicates when a player has a decision to make. Different moves, or actions, are represented by branching lines that fan out (from left to right) from the starting node. Each branch leads to another node, at which point either another decision takes place, or else the game ends with a certain payoff.

Chess (and checkers, Go, and tic-tac-toe), every information set is a single node. In other words, nothing is hidden, so every time one player makes a move, they both know the resulting configuration. Such games are called games of perfect information.

With games of incomplete information the solution involves trying to gauge the other players’ utilities. In other words, the monetary outcomes or, at least, the relative preferences, of the other players.

These unknown evaluations are called types (as in, what type of folks we are up against).

Cooperative games: situations in which players are better off when they join up with others. People benefit by forming subsets called coalitions. List all of the possible coalitions that can be formed, together with what each coalition is able to accomplish by way of costs or profits, when cooperation is limited to just that coalition. Each coalition’s value is determined solely by what they are able to accomplish on their own, without the participation of the remaining players.

The single most important idea in game theory: always put yourself in the other player’s position. Ask what they would do.

People are often irrational in certain, often predictable, ways.

Events that directly impact us are completely out of our control. Game theorists call these events states of nature.

The first step is to deal with averages. A simple average is an average that counts each figure in the set exactly once. A weighted average takes into account how frequent, or likely, the figures are. Computing the weighted average revenue is a relatively simple matter: for each entrée you multiply its price by the number of times the dish has been ordered. You then add these terms up over all of the entrées and divide by the total number sold. When probabilities of the outcomes are available, the weighted average, or expected value, is found by multiplying each outcome by its associated probability and adding up all the terms.

Performing a maximin analysis: 1. Identify all possible choices that you can make. 2. For each choice, find out what all the possible outcomes are and locate the worst possible choice (the one with the minimum gain).

Decision theory refers to a set of methodologies based on expected values, maximin, and related criteria that are used to select the best alternative when a decision maker is faced with uncertainty.

The most important solution concept in game theory: the notion of an equilibrium. An equilibrium in a zero sum game is a pair of strategies such that neither player will improve their payoff by (unilaterally) deviating from his or her strategy.

In zero sum games, the most that one player can guarantee winning is equal to the least that the other player can guarantee losing. The maximin outcome for the row player is always equal to the minimax outcome for the column player. Every zero sum game has an equilibrium that is determined by these strategies.

When solving for equilibria in zero sum games you don’t worry about the opponent’s payoffs, just their strategies. The reason is that the opponent’s payoffs are implicitly known—they are always diametrically opposed to yours. But in nonzero sum games, when computing the equilibrium strategies, you have to consider what the opponent’s payoffs are.

A Nash equilibrium in a two-person, nonzero sum game is when both players are employing their best reply strategies. Every nonzero sum game has at least one (Nash) equilibrium, possibly in mixed strategies. Many nonzero sum games have more than one Nash equilibrium.

The advertising game is a form of an arms race where both parties would be better off agreeing not to spend!

When the U.S. government put an end to cigarette advertising on TV, they did the tobacco companies a favor. The firms were forced into playing their cooperative strategies, and the bottom line was that all of them came out significantly better than before.

Stag Hunt is more benign than Prisoner’s Dilemma because the cooperative outcome (stag, stag) is a Nash equilibrium that yields the absolute best payoffs for them both. You can imagine the players promising beforehand not to go chasing after rabbits, and actually keeping that promise.

One game can be changed into another. It is a matter of the players generating additional incentives—carrots or sticks—that serve to modify the payoffs in one or more of the outcomes. Adding conditions that make a particular outcome either more or less enticing can change the nature of the game and ultimately steer the players toward a mutually satisfying encounter.

People feel pressure to defect (in Prisoner’s Dilemma) for two reasons: greed and fear.

Each company to hold some of the other company’s assets until the joint venture has been completed to everyone’s satisfaction. Firm A’s product had great potential but needed B’s complementary technology or expertise to succeed. Perhaps A worries that B will steal its technology and market a similar product in the near future. To make the joint venture work, they might enter into a contract in which B is required to purchase a certain amount of the resulting output.

Both parties to determine in advance what actions or consequences would constitute cheating, and to jointly create a binding agreement as to how the cheating, when detected, would be punished. For players stuck in a Prisoner’s Dilemma, they provide some welcome get-out-of-jail-free.

A game of incomplete information is a game in which at least one player does not know the payoffs to the other players.

It costs more for an unproductive person to obtain a credential than for a productive person. The naturally unproductive person requires more effort to reach the same goal.

Way of the Peaceful Warrior - by Dan Millman

2024-12-01T05:00:00Z

I read this long long ago and remembered liking it. I read it again and do not like it anymore.

Connecting the Dots - by Sam Brinson

2024-11-28T05:00:00Z

summary:

About learning. I would have loved it, but I'd already read all the sources it got its information from, so unfortunately it was nothing new to me.

recommend: 5/10

my notes:

If you understand something in only one way, then you don't really understand it at all.

Turn ideas around in your mind, to envision things from many perspectives until you find one that works for you.

The more a certain piece of knowledge is associated with other information, the greater chance there is of us being able to find it.

Waiting for something makes it more exciting.

Wish Lanterns / China’s New Youth - by Alec Ash

2024-11-24T05:00:00Z

summary:

20-something British author living in Beijing got to know six Chinese people his own age, and profiled them deeply here through age 30, through 2016. Feels almost like fiction, following each character’s inner and outer life, switching between the six people in stages. If you feel that wide cultural profiles are too broad, and miss the personal touch, this format and writing is great.

recommend: 7/10

my notes:

There are 400 million Chinese millennials, which is more than the total US population. They have the most buying power and travel the most widely. They are the driving force behind China’s urbanization, lifestyle reforms, and engagement with the world. They are becoming the new backbone of Chinese society and will shape its politics in the near future.

When the children of this generation grow up, China will be unrecognisable all over again.

My focus is on Chinese born between 1985 and 1990. They are the first generation of single children (a policy that came into effect in 1980 and ended in 2016). Their parents and grandparents grew up in times when conformity was prized, when to be different was dangerous. This generation is defined by its individuality. They have the freedom to pursue the different lives. This resulted in a diversity of subcultures.

The gulf between city and countryside still looms large.

You could belong to the ‘ant tribe’, commuting into the city from the outskirts, or to the ‘three haves’, with a flat, car and nest egg.

It is common in China for grandparents to raise a child while mum and dad work long hours in cramped city conditions, sending back money.

Nicknames are common in China, where the full name is too formal and a single character alone sounds odd unless duplicated.

The south of China can feel like a different country entirely from the north. Differences in personality can be summed up by their respective cuisines: Northerners quick-fry their meat and speak just as directly, with a toughness that is sometimes only skin deep. Southerners braise, boil and stew, but a soft exterior can hide subtle and sharp flavours.

Hainan is the same latitude as the Caribbean.

All of those bands sang in English, which for Li Yan became the language of escape.

Young Chinese say there is a generation gap every five years (some have it as every three)

The two digits of your birth year is essential information, often the first thing out of your mouth after your name and home province.

The 80s has been likened by those who lived through it to coming out of the dark to be dazzled by the day.

Students at Beida were exposed to fresh culture and ideas - free to experiment with long hair and listen to jazz.

Politics isn’t something one can’t afford to care about.

North-eastern men have a reputation for being tall and tough.

China has even more Christians than it has Communist Party members. Estimates vary wildly but most put the number around 100 million.

The political spectrum is reversed in China: the left is conservative, the right is liberal.

China’s only democratic election, in December 1912, ended when the winning candidate was assassinated. Some form of authoritarianism, meanwhile, had kept China functioning for millennia.

The word for “loyalty to your nation” - in Chinese, guojia, doesn’t differentiate ‘country’ from ‘state’ and includes the character for ‘home’.

Fenqing, the ‘angry youth’. By switching the first character to another with the same pronunciation, it became the ‘shitty youth’.

Leftover women: a deliberate campaign to match educated women with the millions of surplus bachelors. Without wives, those men were a potentially restive threat to social order, and the true demographic leftovers.

As with most traditions it wasn’t taken too seriously but carried more weight with the elderly.

There are various tribes to identify with. The ‘working grunt tribe’ (shangbanzu) or ‘urged tribe’ (beicuizu) are the nine-to-fivers pressured into conformity. The ‘strawberry tribe’ (caomeizu) are nice to look at but soft inside, flitting from job to job and avoiding responsibility. The ‘moonlight tribe’ (yueguangzu) spend their monthly wages shopping - a punning double meaning of ‘moonlight’ and ‘spend it all’. The ‘bite the old tribe’ (kenlaozu) still live off mum and dad. Almost everyone’s in the ‘rush-rush tribe’ (benbenzu), But those who can’t hack it might join the ‘crush-crush tribe’ (nieniezu), named for a brief craze where stressed young workers took out their frustrations by crushing packets of instant noodles in supermarket aisles.

If the post-80s were on a conveyor belt from exams to college to work to marriage, the post-90s wanted to get off the track. Their tribes were as often subcultures that marked them as nonconformists - making up for the lost youth of those who came before them. They were the punks, skaters, cosplayers, graffiti artists. The shamate youth (named for the English word ‘smart’) whose over-the-top hairstyles and outfits were somewhere between goth and Japan’s counter-culture Harajuku street: The metalheads and the skinheads.

If a visitor to Beijing doesn’t venture outside a square kilometre from the hotels near here (as sometimes happens) he or she might get the false impression that China is just like the West, or years ahead.

Inside the street entrance, a series of connected courtyards extended deep in an intricate maze of unmarked doors. It was called a ‘big mixed courtyard’, with over thirty households squeezed into the same address. If a package arrived, the delivery boy would just yell the recipient’s name until someone opened their window or pointed at a door.

The apartments were spartan and cheap, and tenants tended to be in either their twenties or their sixties.

With the piratic Beijing accent that adds an ‘r’ to the end of words.

Any foreign holiday in China is an excuse for young Chinese to party.

The only issue where major protests were given full licence was against Japan.

Since the late nineties, in part due to a drive to create more college places, China has had more university graduates than jobs for them. Those who are gainfully employed still barely make enough to afford rent and noodles.

Almost all high-rises in Chinese cities have a basement, generally one to three floors deep. Thousands have been converted into mazes of cramped flats, just enough space for a single bed and a suitcase. Technically illegal to live in them but that is uniformly ignored. One million people - mostly young graduates and migrant workers - live underneath the other nineteen million as a literal underclass. There is a name for them too: ‘rat tribe’ (shuzu).

A favourite expression of anyone talking about marriage in China is mendanghudui: ‘the doors match, the windows fit’, meaning your partner should come from a background close to your own.

China has more students overseas than any other nation. There are over 300,000 in American universities and more than 60,000 in Britain.

When American classmates talked to her, Fred came to realise two things. First: no one knew much about China. Second: everyone had an opinion anyway. The same sense of American superiority seemed to underlie each conversation, along with the implicit question: why don’t you hate your country?

Overseas Chinese students every year choose to apply their new skills back home - not drain but gain. Nickname for them: ‘sea turtles’, haigui, a punning play on the verb ‘to return’.

She admired many aspects of the US that China lacked: friendly strangers, trust in society, assurance of legal rights. On the flip side there was a dynamism to China that she didn’t sense in the States, a drive and an upwards movement. Both had a strong sense of exceptionalism. Both wanted to be number one. Both were obsessed by personal and national quests for money and power. They were the same in opposite ways.

Every other word out of his mouth was ‘niubi’, a common slang that means ‘friggin’ awesome’ but translates literally as ‘cow vagina’.

Chinese New Year is a time to take stock. Like Christmas it’s a natural break, a chance to reunite with family and eat far too much before beginning the next year refreshed. Also like Christmas, as childhood magic fades the festival becomes less about you being treated by your parents and more about your parents getting to see you. For the Uighurs it wasn’t their festival - they had their own, Rosa at the end of Ramadan and Corban at Eid al-Adha - and they went about their business as usual.

The character for fortune - fu - was tacked upside down. The custom owed its origins to another homophone: ‘upside-down fortune’, fu daole, sounds the same as ‘fortune has arrived’.

China years are dog years: they fit more in.

There are few vestiges of antiquity in modern China, where the iPhone is better loved than the I Ching. Taiwan, meanwhile, has since 1949 considered itself a legacy-holder of Chinese civilisation. Uninterrupted by the upheaval of Communism, for many the island is where Chinese culture truly continued. The traditional characters in books and on street signs are more faithful heirs to the first oracle bone pictograms. The cadences of language aren’t infected by sloganeering Mao-speak. The architecture is inspired by Chinese and not Soviet tradition.

The wedding ceremony began at exactly 10:58, as the digits 5-8 when spoken, wuba, sound (with a generous stretch of the imagination) like wofa, ‘I make money’.

China is supposedly a classless society - certainly a socially mobile one where you can transform your status by making enough money - but the real class divide is between rural and urban.

They would cross the river by feeling for the stones.

Shanghai is an international hub - a city that looked out to the West whereas Beijing looks inwards to China.

I (author) found the six subjects variously: Snail in a World of Warcraft online forum Lucifer at one of his gigs Fred through her teachers at Peking University Mia on a geo-location app as she lived near me Dahai and Xiaoxiao through their wedding photographer. All interviews were conducted in Chinese, as even if some of them could speak some English, we are different people in a second language. Three years spent with people of my own age in their own language, much of it not ‘getting material’ but building trust and getting them.

Age of Ambition in the new China - by Evan Osnos

2024-11-18T05:00:00Z

summary:

Journalist in China for many years focuses on three aspects of ~2013 Chinese culture: money, truth, faith. The first section was especially interesting with good insights.

recommend: 6/10

my notes:

The age of ambition sorted people not by their pasts, but by their futures.

The word for “ambition” ye xin — literally, “wild heart”.

The difference in life expectancy and income between China’s wealthiest cities and its poorest provinces is the difference between New York and Ghana.

The Chinese people have outpaced the political system that nurtured their rise. The government unleashed the greatest expansion of human potential in world history.

Chinese leaders were actively promoting the pursuit of the good life. There was a new government slogan around town: “Borrow Money to Realize Your Dreams.”

Something previously unimaginable: three weeks of vacation. Chinese academics greeted it with a new genre called leisure studies.

Small towns felt half-abandoned. The call of the city had swept away everyone who was not too old or too young to feel its pull.

A Chinese friend asked which American cities to visit on his next trip to the United States, I suggested New York, and he responded as tactfully as he could, “Every time I go, it looks the same.” China was building the square-foot equivalent of Rome every two weeks.

In the seven years I had been gone, the language had changed. The word for “comrade,” tongzhi, had been wryly adopted by gays and lesbians to describe one other. I was in line at the bank one afternoon when an old man, peering ahead impatiently, said, “Tongzhi, let’s hurry up!” and two teenagers cracked up. The word for waitresses and shopgirls, xiaojie, had been repurposed to refer mostly to prostitutes.

Historically, personal choice was a low priority for the Chinese, for reasons both modern and ancient, including, in the beginning, the land itself. In ancient China, fertile plains and rivers lent themselves to rice farming that required irrigation and compelled people to cultivate the land in concert with one another. By contrast, the ancient Greeks, who lived amid mountains and coastlines, relied on herding, trading, and fishing, and they were able to be more independent. In that history, we saw the makings of Greek ideas about personal freedom, individuality, and objective thought.

In imperial Chinese law, punishment was collective: judges sentenced not just the guilty individual but also family members, neighbors, and community leaders.

Mao relied on propaganda and education — “Thought Reform,” as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or “mind-cleansing.” In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.

In the village hierarchy, the only person who ranked lower than a young woman was a young woman who had something better in mind for her future.

Confucius has exhaustive advice about justice and duty, but he mentions emotion, qing, only once.

Even as rates of divorce have climbed, so much of the culture revolves around family and offspring that 98 percent of the female population eventually marries — one of the highest levels in the world.

Mattel opened a six-story Barbie megastore in downtown Shanghai, with a spa and a cocktail bar — only to discover that Chinese parents did not approve of Barbie’s study habits.

The Party made an important change to its constitution: it stopped calling itself a “revolutionary party” and started calling itself the “Party in Power.” China’s rulers had altered their reason for being. By becoming the Party in Power, the former rebels who’d spent decades lambasting their enemies as “counterrevolutionaries” turned themselves into such ardent defenders of the status quo that even the word revolution was now problematic. In 2004, prime minister Wen Jiabao said, “Unity and stability are really more important than anything else.”

The Party and the people were now facing in opposite directions: Chinese society was becoming more diverse, raucous, and freewheeling. The Party was becoming more homogenous, buttoned-down, and conservative.

Macau feels like China amplified and miniaturized.

How Americans acclimated to sudden fortune in the 1870s: One man had little holes bored into his teeth, into which a tooth expert inserted twin rows of diamonds; when he walked abroad his smile flashed and sparkled in the sunlight. The American political system at the time was subject to criticisms similar to those facing China’s political system today: corruption, lack of rule of law, weakness in the face of corporate monopolies. When strikes and demonstrations raged across the United States in the 1870s and ’80s, they were met with force. Pennsylvania Railroad exec said to give the strikers “a rifle diet for a few days, and see how they like that kind of bread.” Europeans liked to say that America had gone from barbarism to decadence without the usual interval of civilization.

Americans tend to see themselves in control of their fate, while Chinese see fate as something external. To alter fate, the Chinese feel they need to do things to acquire more luck.

Gamblers tend to view bets as investments and investments as bets. The stock market and real estate, in the Chinese view, are scarcely different from a casino.

Chinese were found to take consistently larger risks than Americans of comparable wealth. Launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job. Unlike Las Vegas, where most of the profits came from coins fed into slot machines, three-quarters of the revenue in Macau was derived from enormous bets made in VIP rooms.

The cushion hypothesis: traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed. For those who have come from poverty to the middle class the thinking may be, “If I lose half my money, well, I’ve lived through that. I won’t be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win? I’m a millionaire!”

Distilled understanding of values, priorities, and desires: The Party made sure that art, literature, and other expressions of taste adhered to what it later called the zhuxuanlu—“the central melody”—of Chinese society. The Party discovered that the best way to deprive Chinese art of its rebellious energy was to embrace it: in 2006, after years of threatening to demolish Factory 798, a former military electronics plant in Beijing that had been turned into a cluster of galleries and studios, the municipal government designated it as a “creative industry area,” and tour buses filled the streets around it.

Chinese attitudes toward Western culture were a mix of pity, envy, and resentment: Pity for the barbarians outside the Middle Kingdom, envy for their strength, and resentment for their incursions into China. “Chinese have never looked at foreigners as human beings. We either look up to them as gods or down on them as wild animals.” Until the final years of Mao’s reign, when he established ties with the United States, admiring the West was a punishable offense.

In the life of a Chinese tourist, guides play an especially prominent role: interpreter, raconteur, and field marshal, with a duty to relay more than facts. Chinese guidebook says the guide should “express approval or disapproval, praise or opposition, pleasure or contempt.”

Europe: on the surface, it appears to rely on everyone’s self-discipline, but behind it all there are strict laws.

A typical Chinese breakfast consists of a bowl of congee (a rice porridge), a deep-fried cruller, and perhaps a basket of pork buns. In Europe, he warned, in his most tactful voice, “Throughout our trip, breakfast will rarely be more than bread, cold ham, milk, and coffee.” The bus was silent for a moment.

Tour guide asked us to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind in the hotel, because some of his older travelers used to have a habit of hiding cash in the toilet tank or the ventilation ducts. “The worst case I’ve had was a guest who sewed money into the hem of the curtains,” he told us.

If a traveler on official business encountered a journalist, the authors offered a strategy: “Answer in a simple way; avoid the truth and emphasize the empty.”

“Europeans sometimes move slowly. Let them do things their way, because if we’re rushing, then they’ll feel rushed, and that will put them in a bad mood, and then we’ll think that they’re discriminating against us, which is not necessarily the case.”

Why did China fall behind? We cast aside our three core ideas - Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism - and that was a mistake. We were taught Marxist revolutionary ideas from 1949 to 1978. We spent thirty years on what we now know was a disaster.

On the bus, people asked if we could stop at a Western restaurant; we had been in Europe for a week and had yet to sit down to a lunch or a dinner that was not Chinese. Nearly half of all Chinese tourists in one market survey reported eating no more than one “European-style” meal on a trip to the West. But Li warned us that Western food can take too long to serve, and if we ate it too fast, it would give us indigestion. “Save it for your next trip,” he said, and everyone consented.

Central Propaganda Department is compared to the Vatican’s influence over the Catholic world. To learn the art of modern spin, the Communist Party studied the masters: Tony Blair’s response to mad cow disease and the Bush administration’s handling of the U.S. media after 9/11.

He pruned and massaged his facts until they were, in his words, “clearer than truth.”

“Intersubjectivity,” as theorized by Edmund Husserl, the German philosopher who influenced Sartre.

90% Chinese approved of the way things were going in their country - the highest share of any of the 24 countries surveyed that spring by the Pew Research Center.

bainian guochi - the “century of national humiliation” - an arc of events extending from China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the mid-nineteenth century to the Japanese occupation of Chinese soil during World War II. Emotion and policy became harder to separate. When Chinese diplomats denounced the actions of another government, they often said it hurt the feelings of the Chinese people.

Some of them see that liberalism in the West has lost its belief in itself, and they turn to Leo Strauss for conservatism that is based on principle, on ‘natural right.’ This conservatism is distinct from a status-quo conservatism, because they are not satisfied with a country that has only a status quo and not a principle.

The key to China’s rise was the fusion of the market and strong government.

Whenever faced a choice between growth or the environment, growth won; between social security and growth, growth won. The costs of transformation were harsh.

In a jailhouse poem, he wrote, “Besides a lie / I own nothing.”

Life was fluid, and nobody ever seemed too far from success or failure.

Serving as a mirror for his fans was perhaps his greatest strength. He articulated what others thought but didn’t say. While China’s boldest intellectuals and dissidents stood out for being flamboyantly atypical, he excelled at being typical, for allowing his fans to relate to him enough that the principles he espoused felt within reach.

Whatever you’re trying to cover up becomes the truth.

Spring is sandstorm season in Beijing.

At one point, Beijing had more temples than any other city in Asia.

Before the school exams each spring, I watched Chinese parents stream past the gates of the Lama Temple to pray for good scores. Then they crossed the street to pray at the Confucius Temple, and some finished the afternoon at a Catholic Church, just in case.

Chairman Mao believed in “permanent revolution,” and when the Cultural Revolution began in 1966, he exhorted young Red Guards to “Smash the Four Olds”: old customs old culture old habits old ideas. Zealots denounced Confucius for fostering “bad elements, rightists, monsters, and freaks,” and one of Mao’s lieutenants gave the approval to dig up his grave. Hundreds of temples were destroyed.

He would rather break than bend.

I often marveled at how much people in China had managed to put behind them: revolution, war, poverty, and the upheavals of the present.

An anthropologist who studied Hardware City told me that nobody was more alert to the risk of being tricked than migrants far from home. In America, an individual is the basis of civil society, but in China, the collective is breaking down, and there is nothing yet there to replace it. When you come to a new place, you take care of yourself; you make a life with your family at its core - your wife, your husband, your child - and everybody else becomes less important. You divide your mind.

The anthropologist Yan Yunxiang examined 26 cases of Good Samaritans who had been the victims of extortion in China, and he found that, in every instance, the local police and the courts treated the helpers as guilty until proven innocent. In none of the 26 cases was the extortionist ever required to provide a witness to back up the accusation; nor was the extortionist ever punished, even after the helper was found to be falsely accused. People picked up more reasons to fear the law than to trust it.

Several weeks after Yueyue died, the city of Shenzhen drafted China’s first regulation to protect Good Samaritans from legal liability. It shifted the burden of proof to the accusers, and it laid out punishments for false accusations ranging from a public apology to detention. The law stopped short of requiring passersby to get involved - as they are required to do in Japan, France, and elsewhere.

I asked him, “When your grand-daughter grows up, what kind of person do you want her to be?” “That depends on what’s going on in society,” he said. “If good people run things, she should be a good person. If it’s bad people, well, you have no choice but to be bad.”

Michael J. Sandel acquired a level of popularity in China usually reserved for Hollywood movie stars. A professor of political philosophy, he taught a popular course called Justice, which introduced students to the pillars of Western thought: Aristotle, Kant, Rawls, and others. Sandel had acquired an almost preposterous level of celebrity. His Chinese lectures on Western political philosophy had been watched at least twenty million times. His latest book, What Money Can’t Buy, in which he asked whether too many features of modern life were becoming what he called “instruments of profit.” In a nation where everything seemed to have a price tag - a military commission, a marriage, a seat in kindergarten - his audience was rapt.

The free-market assumptions and convictions are more present in China among young people than anywhere, with the possible exception of the United States.

Christianity has probably become China’s largest nongovernmental organization.

China churned out more television programming than any other country - more than 14,000 shows a year - but other countries didn’t want them, so China imported fifteen times as much television content as it exported.