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Quotes

211 posts under this tag.

Family green-cards for $500,000 (in public works investment) 2
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1
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 Jan
01

This was frontpage news in the November 3rd edtition of ”El Norte” (there’s an online version of the article, sadly behind a silly paywall).

I’ve only started researching about it but EB5 visas seem to be very, very interesting. Strange, life. I used to dream about similar opportunities and here it is.

tagged america, economics, en espanhol, future, mexico, migration, photos, quotes

Traditions 2
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9
 Dec
24

Apropos of Christmas:


..the modern era should not see an end to cultural diversity, but modern people should engage with their traditions in a transformed way: they should be recognized as traditions, rather than as truths.

Christopher Goto-Jones, Modern Japan
Happy holidays!
tagged aphorisms, books, japan, quotes, recommendations, wisdom | 2 Comments

Meritocracy 2
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9
 Nov
21

Meritocracy used to be simply a more positive word for elitism to my mind. The word comes up frequently in discussions of elite universities and what they should aspire to. I considered it something good, a value, but the “meritless” masses left out were always a big cloud. Why exactly it was worthwhile I had never given much thought for.  

Perhaps the most interesting thing I learned from Singaporean Kishore Mahbubani’s The New Asian Hemisphere was his completely different take on the meaning of meritocracy: it’s not about exclusion but about inclusion, about casting your net as wide as you can. It’s the very base of human resource management: to be honest about people.
The principle of meritocracy is astonishingly simple. It states that since every individual is a potential resource, all should be given an equal opportunity (as much as possible) to develop and to make a contribution to society. No talent should be neglected. Virtually all successful human organizations succeed because they apply the principle of meritocracy rigorously.

[It’s the story] of how a society views its own population. Are the poor a burden or a potentially rich resource waiting to be tapped? The shift to the latter perception explains why India is now on a steadily upward trajectory. Each year India is introducing more gifted people into the global economy than any other society, with the possible exception of China.

The simplest way of understanding the virtues of meritocracy is to ask this question: why is Brazil a soccer superpower and an economic middle power? The answer is that when it looks for soccer talent, it searches for it in all sectors of the population, from the upper classes to the slums. A boy from the slums is not discriminated against if he has soccer talent. But in the economic field, Brazil looks for talent in far smaller base of the population, primarily the upper and middle classes.
tagged aphorisms, books, definitions, economics, experiments, quotes, things I've learned, words | 1 Comment

Attention trumps experience 2
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9
 Nov
16

Particularly important when traveling. Your new experiences will matter but your attention will matter more—what will you choose to notice?
[In] some experiments by Mike Merzenich.. He took
a group of monkeys
and put them in an apparatus where they
  • received a tap on their finger a 100 times a day.
    • At the same time, they were
  • listening to music piped in through headphones.

Half the monkeys were rewarded with a sip of juice when they indicated that the rhythm of the tapping changed.

Merzenich was teaching the monkeys in the first group to pay attention to the tapping,

After six weeks, in the brains of those in the tapping group, the size of the sensory cortex that corresponds to that particular finger was enlarged.
 The other monkeys were rewarded with juice when they indicated that the music changed.

and the second group to pay attention to the music.


In the brains of the music group, that part of the cortex hadn’t changed at all but the part that corresponds to hearing had grown.

Remember that the monkeys were treated identically;
they all had the music and the tapping going on at the same time.
The only difference was what they were trained to pay attention to.

[Sharon Begley comments in Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain:]

”Experience coupled with attention
leads to physical changes
in the structure and future functioning of the nervous system...

moment by moment
  • we choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work,
  • we choose who we will be in the next moment in a very real sense,
  • and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves.”
From Richard O’Connor’s Happiness: The Thinking person’s guide, spacing formatting mine.
tagged experiments, graphs, information design, inspiration, learning, mindfulness, quote collages, quotes, science, travel

flying 2
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9
 Nov
08

Flying a plane is easy; it’s the stalls, weather emergencies, getting lost, instrument failures, and those two essential but special circumstances—takeoffs and landings—that take all the training time.
Bruce Schneier, Beyond Fear
Beyond fear, by the way, is a great, straightforward book on security, full of examples and insights. It was interesting to get to read it only until now, when terrorism has been far eclipsed as the crisis of the day by the financial collapse.
tagged books, education, humor, learning, quotes

Thinking through Google 2
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9
 Oct
20

We were chatting. I was grasping for a great, recent quote that congealed my thoughts well but I couldn’t find it in my quote collection nor recall anything but the vaguest of phrasings.

What I remembered was that it was written by that famous author who committed suicide, I googled that but that’s sadly too broad a description. So I kept thinking and I also remembered that he was famously very much a fan of that famous swiss tennis player, whose name of course also evaded me. But googling was successful this time, retrieving not Martina Higgins, but ah, yes, Roger Federer. So now I google “federer author suicide” and that finally got me David Foster Wallace. With the name it was a snap to find the quote in my collection, and all of it happened real-timely enough to keep the flow of the IM conversation.

This sort of thing has happened often to me and I’m sure it has to you: googling for vague recall, for completing your thoughts. Instead of closing your eyes and willing an unconscious mind racking you outsorce to Google the unconvering of the tip of your tongue. What stroke me this time was the chaining and the speed (just-in-time-thinking). What got me to write this down was that in a few years such a thing will be so unremarkable I’m sure we’ll wonder how it felt before, if those in transition ever noticed how their mind was being steadily extruded.

The quote?
TV is not vulgar and prurient and dumb because the people who compose the audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.

David Foster Wallace
tagged anecdotes, artificial intelligence, criticism, future shock, google, intelligence augmentation, mindfulness, original content, predictions, present shock, quotes, reading processor, web

2035's µmpc 2
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9
 Jul
11

The most important perspective in my view is that health, medicine, and biology is now an information technology, whereas it used to be hit or miss..  Information technology grows exponentially, in sharp contrast to the linear growth of hit or miss approaches that have characterized medicine up until recently. As such, these technologies will be a million times more powerful in 20 years (by doubling in power and price performance each year). The genome project, incidentally, followed exactly this trajectory.

Our intuition is linear, so [we] think in linear terms and expect that the slow pace of the past will characterize the future. But the reality of progress in information technology is exponential, not linear. My cell phone is a billion times more powerful per dollar than the computer we all shared when I was an undergrad at MIT. And we will do it again in 25 years. What used to take up a building now fits in my pocket, and what now fits in my pocket will fit inside a blood cell in 25 years.
Technology Review: Blogs: Guest Blog: Ray Kurzweil on How to Combat Aging
Kurzweil has said similar things many times before, but keep yourself from forgetting it, keep it in mind. This is the future we’re building.
tagged aphorisms, future, future shock, inspiration, quote collages, quotes, technology, technolyricism, the singularity | 1 Comment

The shortest route to the good life 2
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9
 Jul
06

...involves building the confidence that you can live happily within your means (whatever the means provided by the choices that are truly acceptable to you turn out to be). It’s scary to imagine living on less. But embracing your dreams is surprisingly liberating. Instilled with a sense of purpose, your spending habits naturally reorganize, because you discover that you need less.
Po Bronson, What Should I Do With My Life?
tagged aphorisms, happiness, inspiration, quotes, wealth, wisdom

Star
Medusa math 2
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9
 Jun
27

Mango Medusa! Let us imagine that intelligence had resided, not in mankind, but in some vast solitary and isolated jelly-fish, buried deep in the depths of the Pacific Ocean. It would have no experience of individual objects, only with the surrounding water. Motion, temperature and pressure would provide its basic sensory data. In such a pure continuum the discrete would not arise and there would be nothing to count.
Michael Atiyah’s thought experiment, as quoted in Is God a Mathematician?
I loved this thought experiment because it’s the first instatiation I see of what a truly different kind of math would be like. Just imagine, a math without integers! As Jameson Graber elaborates here, we started with integers and only through calculus first started to truly grasp the continuous. What if there were other paths?

Having thought about this question a good deal, I believe that math is a human construct in that the Math that is possible is far Vaster than we imagine, and from that gnarly Vastness we choose only one thread. That’s what Atiyah’s quote illustrates to me.

Without beings to think it Math exists only in a combinatorial, potential form, just like all that we’ll ever write already exists in a latent form in the alphabet.

As to its universal truth, validity, applicability…, perhaps all that can be said is that empathic nonhumans might be able to get and accept some of it, just as exotic stories start to make sense to us only after we understand the exotic sensibilities that gave rise to it.

Math is not a special, magical kind of thought but simply the ever more sophisticated, ever more rigorous thought that we have. That it is, as it is famously said, “unreasonably effective”, is just an endorsement of thought itself.
tagged art, favorites, math, mindfulness, original content, philosophy, quotes, what could be

More false opposites 2
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9
 Jun
27

2 more suggestive false opposites, in the spirit of the unknown opposites of indifference:

Avoiding failure is not the same as pursuing success
PROFESSIONALISM IS NOT ENOUGH
or THE GOOD IS THE ENEMY OF THE GREAT.

Early in my career I wanted to be professional, that was my complete aspiration in my early life because professionals seemed to know everything – not to mention they got paid for it. Later I discovered after working for a while that professionalism itself was a limitation. After all, what professionalism means in most cases is diminishing risks. So if you want to get your car fixed you go to a mechanic who knows how to deal with transmission problems in the same way each time. I suppose if you needed brain surgery you wouldn’t want the doctor to fool around and invent a new way of connecting your nerve endings. Please do it in the way that has worked in the past.
Unfortunately in our field, in the so-called creative – I hate that word because it is misused so often. I also hate the fact that it is used as a noun. Can you imagine calling someone a creative? Anyhow, when you are doing something in a recurring way to diminish risk or doing it in the same way as you have done it before, it is clear why professionalism is not enough. After all, what is required in our field, more than anything else, is the continuous transgression. Professionalism does not allow for that because transgression has to encompass the possibility of failure and if you are professional your instinct is not to fail, it is to repeat success. So professionalism as a lifetime aspiration is a limited goal.
I need more quotes for this one, I vaguely remember some great ones but can’t find them… any suggestions?

Curing sadness is not creating happiness
..one of the key points in the science of happiness is that happiness and unhappiness are not endpoints  of a single continuum. The Freudian model is really one continuum that, as you get less miserable,  you get happier. And that isn’t true. When you get less miserable, you get less miserable. And that happiness is a whole other end of the equation.
TED, Nancy Etcoff on the surprising science of happiness
Read the rest...
tagged aphorisms, inspiration, philosophy, quotes, words | 1 Comment