“wisdom”
39 posts under this tag.
...Is how Peter DruckerWP drives it home. “It” here was not originally the free market, though what a great defense for it it makes, no? Drucker was illustrating, rather, his brave belief that strong people always have strong weaknesses, that it is foolish to concern oneself with what a man cannot do instead of what he can, that the man who “leaves least to be desired” is invariably the mediocrity, that one builds on strengths, not on weakness. Moreover, that making strength productive and weaknesses irrelevant is “the unique purpose of organization.” A great short book, The Effective ExecutiveAM.
Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, “Why, why, why?” Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.
Kurt Vonnegut, Cat’s CraddleWP, AM
El tigre tiene que cazar, el pajaro que volar; el hombre tiene que sentarse y pensar, “Por que, por que, por que?” El tigre tiene que dormir, el pajaro regresar a su nido; el hombre tiene que decirse que ha comprendido.
I read this in a great post, 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will, soon after heWP died—which was, personally, surprisingly sad—SlaughterHouse 5WP, AM has got to be among the best books I’ve read. Anyway, I’m still fascinated by the phrase and particularly by the interpretation offered there (which seems obvious and inevitable now, but you never know so maybe you—virgin you—may want to make your own unadulterated meaning before reading the following):
[A] koan of sorts from Cat’s Cradle and the Bokononist religion (which phrases many of its teachings as calypsos, as part of its absurdist bent), this piece of doggerel is simple and catchy, but it unpacks into a resonant, meaningful philosophy that reads as sympathetic to humanity, albeit from a removed, humoring, alien viewpoint. Man’s just another animal, it implies, with his own peculiar instincts, and his own way of shutting them down. This is horrifically cynical when considered closely: If people deciding they understand the world is just another instinct, then enlightenment is little more than a pit-stop between insoluble questions, a necessary but ultimately meaningless way of taking a sanity break. At the same time, there’s a kindness to Bokonon’s belief that this is all inevitable and just part of being a person. Life is frustrating and full of pitfalls and dead ends, but everybody’s gotta do it.
So the songpiece has lived inside me since and served as an interesting flashlightELZR. Hope it’s useful to you too.
Oh, and here’s an interesting elaboration on it, from, of all places, a Grey’s Anatomy writer (yup, I’ve become such a rabid fan I gobble up the writers’ blog…shut up already):
Real life—where terrible things happen to us, to our friends, and to the world around us without warning or explanation. And we’re human beings, most of us, so when terrible things happen, we want to know the reasons why. We want the suffering to mean something. And when the meaning isn’t immediately evident, we assign meaning as a way of comprehending, if not controlling, what seem like random acts of terribleness. When bad things happen, we make sense of them by calling them tests. Tests we either pass or fail before moving on to the next level of experience, but ones we hopefully learn from either way.
I’m most definitely an idiot in at least Cortazar’s sense—always able to enthuse about anything and everything. Sometimes the excitement loop becomes critical and, a happygasm reached, I need simply contemplate the object of my devotions to reach instantaneous paroxysmal contentment. There are many examples of such cases in this blog (at its best moments it is merely a compilation of them) and here are the 3 most recent:
1. This glass. Seriously. It’s thick and stocky, heavy and curvy, velvety (in that strange way good glass can be) and transparent. Plus, it has an extremely low center of gravity (thanks to its glassy booty) that gives ponderous gravitas to the gassiest soda. I won’t drink in anything else. That all this heavenly goodness was less than a buck a piece (we’ve eight of’em) only adds to my marvel—a fragile monument to capitalism and division of labor. The photo makes absolutely no justice to its glistening beauty.
2. Mac OSX Tiger’s Wallpaper. The asymmetry, the restraint in means, the abstract yet natural forms—sometimes petals sometimes hyperbolas; sometimes tears in the canvas, sometimes valleys, sometimes hills—with their rolling, blue gradients, their digital, velvety textures; the tridimensional light play of twodimensional curves—a perfect background, ideally fitted to highlight whatever is atop it, to be discrete, serene and becoming, never flashy, never tiring. Because make no mistake, this is a designELZR, it has a purpose: to be a desktop wallpaper. And it easily trumps the cloy BlissWP, the over-eager photos, the dull colors, the duller patterns (ugh). As far am I concerned it is the best graphic design of the late twentieth century.
3. This quote. Such words. Some four centuries old and still as haunting.
No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
John Donne WP, “Meditation XVII” of Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions
And an orator said, “Speak to us of Freedom.”
And he answered:
At the city gate and by your fireside I have seen you prostrate yourself and worship your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before a tyrant and praise him though he slays them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in the shadow of the citadel I have seen the freest among you wear their freedom as a yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you can only be free when even the desire of seeking freedom becomes a harness to you, and when you cease to speak of freedom as a goal and a fulfillment.
So true. So true.
I remember being completely, utterly floored when reading in Henry Hazlitt’s Economics in One Lesson about how, at bottom, supply and demand are one and the same.
Those who think that the destruction of war increases total “demand” forget that demand and supply are merely two sides of the same coin. They are the same thing looked at from different directions. Supply creates demand because at bottom it is demand. The supply of the thing they make is all that people have, in fact, to offer in exchange for the things they want. In this sense the farmers’ supply of wheat constitutes their demand for automobiles and other goods. All this is inherent in the modern division of labor and in an exchange economy.
This fundamental fact, it is true, is obscured for most people (including some reputedly brilliant economists) through such complications as wage payments and the indirect form in which virtually all modern exchanges are made through the medium of money. John Stuart Mill and other classical writers, though they sometimes failed to take sufficient account of the complex consequences resulting from the use of money, at least saw through “the monetary veil” to the underlying realities. To that extent they were in advance of many of their present-day critics, who are befuddled by money rather than instructed by it. Mere inflation—that is, the mere issuance of more money, with the consequence of higher wages and prices—may look like the creation of more demand. But in terms of the actual production and exchange of real things it is not.
Yes, it was obvious. Ridiculously obvious. But I had never realized it. A whole semester of economics in high school plotting gratuitous graphs and fondling equations for what? They should have put this in big, bold black letters at the very first class and let us go afterwards. My twenty something dollars per hour would have been far better employed.
But yesterday I stumbled on Wikipedia’s trade pedia and realized, mind blown, I had only scratched the surface of it. It only took the first, luminous paragraph. (Its scary how good Wikipedia is becoming.)
Trade is the voluntary exchange of goods, services, or both. Trade is also called commerce. A mechanism that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and services. Modern traders instead generally negotiate through a medium of exchange, such as money. As a result, buying can be separated from selling, or earning. The invention of money (and later credit, paper money and non-physical money) greatly simplified and promoted trade. Trade between two traders is called bilateral trade, while trade between more than two traders is called multilateral trade.
Buying and selling are concepts that only acquire meaning when we bring in money. At its essence, trade (barter), is fundamentally reciprocal—providing no ready way to distinguish between its participants.
So simple and yet so deeply buried by mindlessness. Don’t forget it and watch countless everyday fallacies come tumbling down, naked.
(Notice also the definition of market: “a mechanism that allows trade”—a mechanism that allows for voluntary exchange. There’s untold beauty and nobleness in free trade.)
Three good, non-obvious answers:
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That we participate in it.
Who are these people? Seriously, who actually sits down after a long day at work and says, I’m not going to watch Lost tonight. I’m going to turn on my computer and make a movie starring my pet iguana? I’m going to mash up 50 Cent’s vocals with Queen’s instrumentals? I’m going to blog about my state of mind or the state of the nation or the steak-frites at the new bistro down the street? Who has that time and that energy and that passion?
You can use words like ‘platform’ and ‘web application’ and ‘Ajax’ and ‘desktop functionality’ but really in essence the most amazing thing about the web today is the concept of sharing is becoming increasingly OK. We are slowly coming out of our cocoons, testing the waters and sharing out things that we know, and things that we love or hate.
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That we can make (some) sense of it at all.
People understand a graph composed of tree-like documents (HTML) related by links (URLs). In some ways I find this the most surprising of all. For years we assumed people had trouble with trees, never mind graphs. And suddenly hyperlinks come along, and as long as there is a Back button, they work.
I would argue that the “back” button is one of the two or three defining constraints of interaction design. I’d even go so far to say that it’s more significant than the hyperlink.
“Back” doesn’t just mean “go backwards”: it stands for the entire paradigm of user-controlled navigation, arbitrary hyperlinking, and back-as-undo that everyone has come to expect from the behavior of software.. The back button is a contract web design has with our users.
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That it is a universal namespace.
The most important thing about the Web is that it is a universal namespace, something that has not been available before, not at this level of precision.
Benny Gustavsson, On the Semantic Web languagePDF
 There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera MechanismWP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).
Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten TrackAM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.
If the headache would only precede the intoxication, alcoholism would be a virtue. (Samuel ButlerWP)
(What he actually wrote, in The Note-books of Samuel Butler: Part II - Elementary Morality, is “Morality turns on whether the pleasure precedes or follows the pain. Thus, it is immoral to get drunk because the headache comes after the drinking, but if the headache came first, and the drunkenness afterwards, it would be moral to get drunk.” but it has been passed along in the shorter folk version above, which, I think, is as elegant a thought as a sentence can fit.)
Techguru Esther DysonWP, EDGE (who, I just learned, is Freeman DysonWP’s daughter) on freedom under communist Russia (and why it was, bizarrely, like bestiality), online smut, intellectual property (long live intellectual process!), failure, and changing the world in a 1996 interview with Virginia Postrel for Reason mag.
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