Assorted Notes

WEDNESDAY, 28 DECEMBER 2016

Who begins their day with a manifesto on their lips, and a finely worked-out blueprint in their heads?

The fact is, most people’s days start with necessity: you get up because you need to go to the bathroom, because you are hungry, and because you have made arrangements with people and businesses, and if you do not show up, you’re going be in trouble.

And so begins your day. Eventually, you shower and you brush your teeth, you get dressed, and you go somewhere to earn your bread and butter, or to otherwise be of value to the community.

Layer upon layer your day is built up. Here and there you make a mistake. Here and there you say something or you do something that embarrasses you, but after a few minutes or an hour or so you are in full swing again.

By the time the day is over, you will perhaps look back on a good and relatively successful day. Did you start with slogans rolling over your lips, and a neatly printed plan waiting next to your bed for you to follow like an obedient robot? Most likely not, although you may have had a good idea of how you would like your day to progress.

So it is with other endeavours and projects that you undertake. You have a good idea of what you need to do to achieve reasonably good results. You have a good idea what you should do to stay out of trouble. You still make the occasional mistake, and every so often you slide on a banana peel. But successful results, like a good and successful day, is built up layer by layer – ten, twenty, a hundred big and small actions and steps following after another to produce a good result.

Slogans are good. Manifestoes have their place. Surely you have to know what you must do. But success is more often than not the result of layer upon layer of small, seemingly insignificant actions. Just like a good and successful day.

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Not exactly on the same topic, but in the same spirit: Scott Adams wrote the following in a blog post at Dilbert.COM: “The idea of a talent stack is that you can combine ordinary skills until you have enough of the right kind to be extraordinary. You don’t have to be the best in the world at any one thing. All you need to succeed is to be good at a number of skills that fit well together.”

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WEDNESDAY, 21 DECEMBER 2016

You get to know yourself in varied situations: by travelling to foreign countries, by spending time with people you don’t really like, and in trying times, alone or with other people.

You also learn about yourself by speculating with money, say on the financial markets. You observe how you feel and act when you end up with some profit, and how you feel and behave after a loss. You also learn how you feel and how you act after a catastrophic mishap.

How long it takes you to give up is another important thing you learn about yourself, as well as how long you keep doing something simply because you don’t want to give up, even though a stick blind man can see you’re getting nowhere.

Does it qualify as giving up if you shift your experience to something else, or when you apply things you have learned to an entirely different market? Would you then still think you wasted your time? Would you still think you wasted your money?

How do you calculate “profit” when it comes to self-knowledge? And does it necessarily mean it was less of a waste of time just because you learned a few useful things about yourself?

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WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2016

On Friday, 5 October 2007 I wrote a note which began as follows: “Is self-denial – the denial of your values, of who you are – justifiable if the end result is good?”

I sketched a situation where someone who seems to be a good person commits an evil act, but for good reasons.

Long story short, I decided not to use the original text because I think when a “good person” commits an evil act – such as murder, for a good enough reason – like saving a hundred lives, he did not really act against his moral values, and he did not really sacrifice his “good conscience” in the same way as someone sacrificing life or limb to save someone else.

Nevertheless, I thought, surely one must draw a line somewhere.

I

Say someone saves a hundred lives by deceiving someone else and then killing them in the middle of the night – after winning that person’s confidence. The person feels very guilty, but the world is a better place. Is this not also a case of a person sacrificing himself for other people?

II

Say someone ends up providing long-term shelter to two hundred homeless people by deceiving someone else and then killing them in the middle of the night – after winning that person’s confidence. The person feels very guilty, but the world is a better place – those two hundred people will have a warm place to sleep. Is this also a case of a person sacrificing himself for other people?

III

Say someone saves a thousand people’s feelings by deceiving someone who insulted their religion and then killing them in the middle of the night. The person feels guilty, but the world, so he believes, is a better place because the community feels that justice was done. Is this a case of a person sacrificing himself for other people?

Many people would need a few minutes to contemplate the first two scenarios. I believe fewer people will need time before condemning the third scenario. The question remains: Where does one draw the line?

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MONDAY, 10 OCTOBER 2016

Like any intelligent person I read my quota of good articles on the internet. This post references a few such articles.

On 18 September 2016 Andrew Sullivan wrote about silence and technology in an article titled, “I Used to Be a Human Being”. He reminds readers that the Protestant Reformation began with an attack on the medieval fortresses of silence – monasteries. This was followed a few centuries later by the noise and disruption of the Industrial Revolution. He opines that silence has become a symbol of the worthless superstitions we have left behind. And the smartphone revolution of the last decade has according to him been the final nail in the coffin – where the last quiet moments that we still have, what he calls “the tiny cracks of inactivity in our lives” are also being filled with stimulus and noise.

* * *

In another excellent opinion piece titled, “Will the Left Survive the Millennials?” author and journalist Lionel Shriver makes a few good points:

* When she grew up in the sixties and early 1970s, conservatives were the keepers of conformity. It was the people to the right of the political spectrum who were suspicious, always on the lookout for any signs of rebellion. Now, she believes, this role has been taken over by people on the left of the political spectrum.

* In an era where people are so incredibly sensitive, participation in public debate is becoming so risky, with the danger at every turn that you may accidentally use the wrong word or that you may fail to use the right degree of sensitivity regarding disability, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, race or ethnicity, that people might just start staying away altogether from social gatherings where there is an elevated risk of offending someone.

* She wonders how it has happened that liberal people in the West have come to embrace censorship and the imposition of orthodoxy in thought and speech as an ideology.

* She also reminds the reader that freedom of speech means that you have to be willing to protect the voices of people with whom you may totally disagree.

* * *

The cognitive scientist, Donald Hoffman says evolution does not favour people who have a firm grasp of objective reality – reality as it actually is, but that it favours those who perceive reality in ways that enable them to survive most efficiently and procreate most successfully.

Read the piece, “What If Evolution Bred Reality Out Of Us?” by Adam Frank.

* * *

And finally, wise words from someone who is trying to figure out how to lift a sports team from the valley of despair:

“[T]o paraphrase Albert Einstein, you cannot solve a problem with the same level of consciousness that created it. In other words, problems created with one type of thinking will persist until you think differently — and that usually requires different people (because, in my experience, it takes a mighty epiphany for a person to change their thinking drastically enough).”

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THURSDAY, 8 SEPTEMBER 2016

Since 2011 I have thought of the years 2006 to the beginning of 2011 as a period of loss. What exactly did I lose? Time, I have always thought – because I wasted so much of it trying to make money in all sorts of ways.

Here is a more positive view of that period: I learned how to publish my writing – including formatting manuscripts so they can be printed, the creation and formatting of electronic books, setting up a WordPress site, basic web design, marketing; I learned about sports betting and trading, and I started my education on trading on the financial markets.

And, ladies and gentlemen, soon I will be able to say that the period 2006 to early 2011 also yielded a project consisting of more than seventy pieces which will include notes on the long and difficult process of trying to make money without having to work for someone else – which makes the material very different from all the material that preceded it, because it is about making mistakes, falling on your face, embarrassing yourself, failing again and again and again … and in the end deciding that you’re going to spend more time doing things that make you happy.

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