Quotes

There are two ways we can produce automobiles. We can build them in Detroit or we can grow them in Iowa. Everyone knows how we build automobiles. To grow automobiles, we first grow the raw material from which they are made—wheat. We put the wheat on ships and send the ships out into the Pacific. They come back with Hondas on them.
     From our standpoint, growing Hondas is just as much a form of production—using American farmworkers instead of American autoworkers—as building them. What happens on the other side of the Pacific is irrelevant; the effect would be just hte same for us if there really where a gigantic machine sitting somewhere between Hawaii and Japan turning wheat into automobiles. Tariffs are indeed a way of protecting American workers —from other American workers.

David D. Friedman, Hidden Order

There are more concepts than words. Hence the phrase.

The Trobrianders are concerned with being, and being alone. Change and becoming are foreign to their thinking. An object or event is grasped and evaluated in terms of itself alone; that is, irrespective of other beings. The Trobriander can describe being for the benefit of the ethnographer; otherwise he usually refers to it by a word, one word only. All being, to be significant, must be Trobriand being, and therefore experienced at the appropriate time as a matter of course by the members of each Trobriand community; to describe it would be redundant. Being is never defined, in our sense of the word. Definition presents an object in terms of what it is like and what it is unlike; that is, in term of its distinguishing characteristics. The Trobriander is interested only in what it is. And each event or being is grasped timelessly; in our terms it contains past, present, and future, but these distinctions are non-existent for the Trobriander. There is, however, one sense in which being is not self-contained. To be, it must be part of an ordained pattern; this aspect will be elaborated below.

Being is discrete and self-contained; it has no attributes outside of itself. Its qualities are identical with it, and without them it is not itself. It has no predicate; it is itself. To say a word representing an object or act is to imply the existence of this, and all the qualities it incorporates. If I were to go with a Trobriander to a garden where the taytu, a species of yam, had just been harvested, I would come back and tell you: “There are good taytu there; just the right degree of ripeness, large and perfectly shaped; not a blight to be seen, not one rotten spot; nicely rounded at the tips, with no spiky points; all first-run harvesting, no second gleanings.” The Trobriander would come back and say “Taytu”; and he would have said all that I did and more. Even the phrase “There are taytu” would represent a tautology, since existence is implied in being; is, in fact, an ingredient of being to the Trobriander. And all the attributes, even if he could find words for them at hand in his own language, would have been tautological, since the concept of taytu contains them all. In fact, if one of these were absent, the object would not have been a taytu.

Such a tuber, if it is not at the proper harvesting ripeness is not a taytu. If it is unripe, it is a bwanawa; if overripe, spent, it is not a spent taytu but something else, a yowana. If it is blighted it is a nukunokuna. If it has a rotten patch, it is a taboula; if misshapen, it is a usasu; if perfect in shape but small, it is a yagogu. If the tuber, whatever its shape or condition, is a postharvest gleaning, it is an ulumadala. When the spent tuber, the yowana, sends its shoots underground, as we would put it, it is not a yowana with shoots, but a silisata. When new tubers have formed on these shoots, it is not a silisata but a gadena. An object cannot change an attribute and retain its identity. Some range of growth or modification within being is probably allowed, otherwise speech would be impossible; but I doubt whether they are conscious of it. As soon as such change, if we may introduce one of our concepts here, is officially recognized, the object ceases to be itself.

There is this Higgs field that extends through all space
And some particles slow down while other particles race
Straight through like the photon – it has no mass
But something heavy like the top quark, it’s draggin’ its ass!

There is no question that ideas and artifacts evolve, in the sense that they will start varying from one another, and some will be selected in preference to others, and then transmitted to a new generation. Most people assume that this cultural “evolution” is simply an extension of human evolution. After all, they argue, ideas and objects could not survive without us, and therefore they could not have an independent evolutionary history. But that is like saying that humans are part of the evolution of plants, since we could not survive without them. It is true that memes need our minds to exist and evolve, but then so do we require air, water, and photosynthesis, among other things, for our survival. Therefore it does not seem that memes are any more dependent on their environment than we are.

Each person creates the world he or she lives in by investing attention in certain things, and by doing so according to certain patterns. The world constructed on the blueprints provided by the genes is one in which all of a person’s attention is invested in furthering the agenda of “reproductive fitness.” This is a simple goal: How can I get enough out of the environment to make sure that I reproduce and that my children will also have children? In less complex organisms, like many species of insects, practically the entire life span is dedicated to the project of laying a clutch of eggs; promptly afterward, the parents expire. Like every other organism, the butterfly has evolved to see only those things that will either help or hinder the survival of its offspring. Its world is made up of flowery shapes that provide nectar, and shapes that resemble predators that are best avoided. Poets make much of the majestic eagle soaring freely among the snowy peaks. But the eyes of the eagle are generally focused on the ground, searching for rodents lurking in the shadows. The lives of much of humanity could be summed up in similar terms.

..she believed that houses were meant to be thought of as vehicles—physically fixed, but logically mobile..

Thiel: One of the things that’s very misleading about acceleration and exponential growth is that it’s slow at first and then it’s fast, and so the future happens more slowly than people expect and then it happens more quickly.
reason: There’s another popular narrative for the 21st century that says humanity is going to wreck the planet. Are the environmentalist doomsayers right?
Thiel: My sense is that they’re not right. I’m not an expert on it, but what I think is different from climate-change catastrophe vs. the Singularity is that climate seems like such a pedestrian thing to talk about. You talk about it every day. There’s a tendency to overdramatize the climate, and it’s something everybody can have opinions about. So I don’t think there’s a cognitive bias where people are incapable of imagining the world’s climate changing. That seems like a very easy thing for people to imagine, and maybe it’s also an easy thing for people to get hysterical about. On the other hand, computers running the world or this radical progress of technology —that’s something where I think there’s just no imagination at all.
reason: Do you consider yourself a transhumanist?
Thiel: The problem with the label is that it suggests that we should run away from being human. Take the question of aging. If you define that as the essence of being human, then transhumanists are anti-aging and therefore you try to transcend this human limitation. I don’t think that death and life are inextricably interconnected in some sort of Eastern mystical sense in which for everything white there’s something black and there’s always a yin/yang type of thing. Every myth on this planet tells us the purpose of life is death, and I don’t think that’s true. I think the purpose of life is life.

“What topic interests you more than any other?�

“Myself, I guess,� I confessed.

“Yes, that is the essence of being human. Any person you meet at a party will be interested in his own life above all other topics. Your awkward silences can be solved by asking simple questions about the person’s life.�

“That would be totally phony,� I said. “First of all, it would be like interrogating him. Secondly, I couldn’t possibly pretend to be interested in the answers. If he turns out to be some shoe salesman living with his mother in Albany, my eyes will glaze over.�

“It would seem phony to you while you asked the questions, but it would not seem that way to the stranger. To him it is an unexpected gift, an opportunity to enjoy one of life’s greatest pleasures: talking about oneself. He would become more animated and he would instantly begin to like you. You would seem to be a brilliant and talented conversationalist, even if your only contribution was asking questions and listening. And you would have solved the stranger’s fear of an awkward silence. For that he will be grateful.�

“That solves the stranger’s problem, but I have to listen to this guy drone on about himself. The cure is worse than the disease.�

“Your questions to the stranger are only the starting points. From there you can steer him toward the thing you care about most—yourself.�

“Wouldn’t he want to talk about himself instead of me?�

“When you find out how others deal with their situations it is automatically relevant to you,� he said. “There will always be parallels in your life. Find out what you and he have in common, then ask how he likes it, how he deals with it, and if he has any clever solutions for it. Perhaps you both have long commutes, or you both have mothers who call too often or you both ski. Find that point of common interest and you will both be talking about yourself to the delight of the other.�

“You think casual conversation is a waste of time.�

“Sure, unless I have something to say. I don’t know how people can blab about nothing.�

“Your problem is that you view conversation as a way to exchange information,� he said.

“That’s what it is,� I said, thinking I was pointing out the obvious.

“Conversation is more than the sum of the words. It is also a way of signaling the importance of another person by showing your willingness to give that person your rarest resource: time. It is a way of conveying respect.

Tears came to him. He wept quietly, holding nothing back. He mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute.
There’s a universe of potential, Lindsay, think of that. No rules, no limits.
Life moves in clades. A clade is a daughter species, a related descendant. It’s happened to other successful animals, and now it’s humanity’s turn. The factions still struggle, but the categories are breaking up. No faction can claim the one true destiny for mankind. Mankind no longer exists.