Quotes

Commonplace book

It is also no wonder that Crumb was so popular among the hippies and fit in with the psychedelic artwork of the era: the signature feature of that style is that it is packed with meaningless detail, which means nothing, but feels important. (Isn’t it interesting that a false feeling of profundity, insight, and unity is also one of the most striking aspects of the psychedelic experience?) Crumb’s LSD-caused art was the perfect fit for an era of LSD-affected readers. (Gwern on Crumb) AI Art

Something from erewhon by Samuel butler

Byrne Hobart: Your dating pool is limited to the people you’re attracted to, who find you attractive. The more efficient the dating market, the more range restriction will create artificial negative correlations between traits that positively correlate in the real world. (On average, physically attractive, outgoing, high-income, and mentally stable all positively correlate to some degree, but almost everyone’s experience is that, if they’re in a position to choose, they’re trading off some of these traits against others. A corollary to this is that the more efficient the market, the more rewarding it is to have idiosyncratic preferences.)

An integral — though demonized by the press– part of boot camp is hazing, the beating of lagging cadets with soaps wrapped in towels, to toughen them up, give them a face-to-face taste with unendurable pain, the kind that transforms and darkens you, makes you less afraid since you know it can’t get any worse. Anything less than that level of prolonged and traumatic beating up is just business as usual from then on; the volume is turned way down. This tradition is nothing new, and corresponds to Native American rituals that involve hanging by pierced shoulder muscles until you see your white buffalo vision and know you are a man. Women have the agony of childbirth; men have to find agonies for themselves to equal it. Acidemic

Online confrontations lack the threat of physical violence, and therefore cannot be “masculine”. In the realm of the virtual, the only way to escalate a confrontation is to engage in forms of essentially feminine violence: emotional bullying, innuendo, gossip, and group exclusion, just as I would have done in my hypothetical scenarios, at the gym. This is why all online spaces eventually tend to manifest an anti-masculine dynamic. The more men spend time cultivating their following, the more they become prone to creating dramas

Samuel Johnson on self-condemnation: “All censure of a man’s self is oblique praise. It is in order to show how much he can spare.” Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn

When you are walking down the street and feel overcome with a line of Wallace Stevens just say it out loud to yourself. Why not? One day you’ll be dead and you won’t get the chance.

Keiran Setiya It’s tempting to equate “work” with what has to be done, even though we wish it didn’t: with activities that have “ameliorative value,” solving problems or meeting needs we would rather do without. The downside of work like this is that, the more time we devote to it, the harder it is to maintain our grip on what makes life worth living in the first place. If the best we can do is to mitigate what is bad, why bother to live life at all? Better, or no worse, not to be born. There have to be activities that make life positively good: ones that have what I’ve called “existential value,” a value that does not come from meeting regrettable needs. Think of the the value of art, of games, of spending time with family and friends.

One of the most harrowing things about mental illness is not anything captured by descriptions of its first-order symptoms, but rather the way it can convince you that these symptoms are just picking up on something that is and has always been the case, that was actually there all the time; and when you didn’t feel this way it was because you had been blind. Mental illness can persuade you that you’re now seeing the reality that had always been real, the Face that had always been there in the Floor – which is all to say that your epistemic position has simply been improved. So long as that is what you are being made to believe, then how can anyone expect you to also believe ‘this too shall pass’ (or anything of the sort), or to somehow just stop it from swallowing you up?

From Clive James’ Cultural Amnesia

• There are only two things that can destroy a healthy man; love trouble, ambition, and financial catastrophe, and that’s already three things, and there are a lot more - Altenberg (see his other quotes)
• Altenberg was an ideal for men weighed down with ideals
• apparently Camus was a genji-like polyamorist, re his benevolence and care.
• listen to I’m coming virginia
• Wagner’s music isn’t as bad as it sounds

Llosa on Borges - “He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words.”

Weil - we hate what we are deoendent on, we are disgusted by what depends on us.

Dennett on Harris’ notion of free will, he has taken on a strawman, and the strawman is beating him’.

From MR 6. Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, The Swedish Theory of Love: Individualism and Social Trust in Modern Sweden.  A fascinating book about how the Swedes pursue a kind of “statist individualism,” namely that they value personal independence very highly, and are happy to use state action to pursue that kind of freedom.  They don’t like being so obligated to help each other, thus enter a large welfare state.

Harold Bloom - “It is tiresome to be encountering myths called “The Social Responsibility of the Critic” or “The Political Responsibility of the Critic.” I would rather walk into a bookstore and find a book called “The Aesthetic Responsibilities of the Statesman,” or “The Literary Responsibilities of the Engineer.”

ACX - Which is more likely: that Science always agrees with Truth? Or that one guy’s perception of Science always agrees with that same guy’s perception of Truth? The latter gives me two degrees of freedom: I can either cherry-pick experts who agree with me and declare them to be Consensus, or I can conform my opinions to consensus so slavishly that I end up discovering only that Consensus agrees with itself. I don’t feel like I’m making this kind of mistake. But then again, nobody ever feels like they’re being biased.

Goodhart’s Law says that a measure which becomes a target ceases to be a useful measure

“Intellectuals are naturally attracted by the idea of a planned society, in the belief that they will be in charge of it.” – Roger Scruton

“Nothing so dates an era as its conception of the future.” – Brian Eno Progress MOC

“An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field.” – Niels Bohr

He identified himself with the ruling power and not with the opposition. In a gifted writer this seems to us strange and even disgusting, but it did have the advantage of giving Kipling a certain grip on reality. The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’

–George Orwell, “Rudyard Kipling” (1936)

(Misfortune) becomes something that happens to other people, far away from us, with fewer teeth, and less intricate souls
(Super-infinite)

Also, there’s some federal regulation protecting “navigable” rivers, and part of the definition of a “navigable river” is “a river someone has successfully navigated”, which produces an incentive for environmentalists to try to navigate “rivers” that no sane person would otherwise try to go down, and for polluters to come up with wacky plans to stop them. I think more laws should also operate as quest hooks.
(ACX)

Common sense is the most fairly distributed thing in the world, for each one thinks he is so well-endowed with it that even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they already have
Descartes

The philosopher supposes that the value of his philosophy lies in the whole, in the structure; but posterity finds its value in the stone which he used for building, and which is used many more times after that for building better. Thus it finds the value in the fact that the structure can be destroyed and nevertheless retains value as building material.
Nietzsche Progress MOC

“All of us have sufficient fortitude to bear the misfortunes of others”
“Hypocrisy is the homage which vice pays to virtue”
Rouchefoucauld

“My soul is so heavy that no longer can any thought sustain it, no wingbeat lift it up into the ether. If it moves, it only sweeps along the ground like the low flight of birds when a thunderstorm is brewing.” Kierkegaard, Either/Or

Addison - It is said of Xerxes, that when he stood upon a hill, and saw the whole country round him covered with his army, he burst out in tears, to think that not one of that multitude would be alive a hundred years after. For my part, when I take a survey of this populous city, I can scarce forbear weeping, to see how few of its inhabitants are now living. Population ethics

Addison - As I was sitting after dinner in my elbow chair, I took up Homer, and dipped into that famous speech of Achilles to Priam, in which he tells him, that Jupiter has by him two great vessels, the one filled with blessings, and the other with misfortunes; out of which he mingles a composition for every man that comes into the world. (Prelude to those mixing glasses of water in the sink memes) (Iliad, xxiv. 527.) Memes

Chesterton - The man who was thursday

• “Nonsense!” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. “Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!”
• We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage, or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fulness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.”
• But I’ll tell you what is a trifle creepy about Sunday. His room is neat, his clothes are neat, everything seems in order; but he’s absent-minded. Sometimes his great bright eyes go quite blind. For hours he forgets that you are there. Now absent-mindedness is just a bit too awful in a bad man. We think of a wicked man as vigilant. We can’t think of a wicked man who is honestly and sincerely dreamy, because we daren’t think of a wicked man alone with himself. An absentminded man means a good-natured man. It means a man who, if he happens to see you, will apologise. But how will you bear an absentminded man who, if he happens to see you, will kill you? That is what tries the nerves, abstraction combined with cruelty. Men have felt it sometimes when they went through wild forests, and felt that the animals there were at once innocent and pitiless. They might ignore or slay. How would you like to pass ten mortal hours in a parlour with an absent-minded tiger?”
• “Then, and again and always,” went on Syme like a man talking to himself, “that has been for me the mystery of Sunday, and it is also the mystery of the world. When I see the horrible back, I am sure the noble face is but a mask. When I see the face but for an instant, I know the back is only a jest. Bad is so bad, that we cannot but think good an accident; good is so good, that we feel certain that evil could be explained.
• Kingsley Amis on Chesterton: “What I will risk calling nightmarishness is another characteristically Chestertonian effect, an air of unreality that is not the same thing as implausibility (though there is implausibility here and there as well), a feeling that the world we see and hear and touch is a flimsy veil that only just manages to cover up a deeper and far more awful reality, a sense, in fact, of impending apocalypse in the literal meaning of uncovering. (Relevant to painting town story, various ideas of horror, the positive side of lovercraft is here too).
  • Could do the SF version by looking closer and closer at someone’s face and seeing it’s just made up of pixels.

The wicked bible error states thou shalt commit adultery

Gibson - Neuromancer

• Horror. The spiral birth factory, stepped terraces of the hatching cells, blind jaws of the unborn moving ceaselessly, the staged progress from egg to larva, near-wasp, wasp. In his mind’s eye, a kind of time-lapse photography took place, re- vealing the thing as the biological equivalent of a machine gun, hideous in its perfection. Alien. He pulled the trigger, forgetting to press the ignition, and fuel hissed over the bulging, writhing life at his feet.

Walter Murdoch - 72 Essays Here’s the cleaned text with each section following a ’-’ as its own paragraph:

• On purely destructive criticism: What is the matter with destruction, anyhow? I have yet to learn that destroyers are a useless part of the British Navy.

• GREAT men—I have come to the conclusion after reading many biographies—are all right, provided you do not take them too seriously.

• Pope described mankind, with singular precision, as “the glory, jest, and riddle of the world.” Silly and solemn people are ready enough to accept the first and third term, but are inclined to shy at the second. Accept all three, if you seek a sane philosophy of life.

• While an undergraduate of Oxford, deep in Plato’s Theory of pre-existence, (Shelley) met in the street a woman with a baby in her arms, and demanded that the baby should tell him something about the world from which it had lately emerged. The mother, no doubt thinking him quite mad, explained that the baby could not talk. In the end, Shelley walked away despondently, remarking to the friend who was with him, “How provokingly close are these new-born babes!”

• From Murdoch’s “Are you stock size?”, on the benefits of epistemic deference; Do you remember Matthew Arnold’s pathetic story about Mrs Shelley? After the poet’s death, she was consulting a friend about the education of her little son. “Oh, send him somewhere where they will teach him to think for himself,” said the friend; whereupon Mrs Shelley cried out, “Teach him to think for himself? Oh, my God, teach him rather to think like other people!” Corrigibility

• I heard a lady in the Forum say, “this place has seen better days”; which seemed to me to be a model description, historically accurate and perfectly concise.

• A friend of mine once told me that he had brought me a copy of his last poem; I innocently supposed the phrase expressed a definite promise, and on that understanding cheerfully undertook to read the poem, only to discover a few days later that what he had really meant was his latest poem.

• From his The Great Strike, on longtermism and future generations, the entire thing is worth re-reading: The babies had gone on strike. They had refused to take up the burden of existence. They had declared the earth black. Population ethics

• In On Sheep and Goats he distinguishes interventionists from neutrals, e.g. Milton, Ruskin, Swift, Shelley, Shaw vs. Browne, Keats, Shakespeare, Hardy. It is hard to say either one is better.

• The writer of essays is always talking to himself. The readers are eavesdroppers, overhearing a private conversation between the essayist and his troublesome conscience.

• THE worst of meeting distinguished people is that, so far as my small experience goes, they don’t say distinguished things; or, at least, they don’t say them to you—possibly they reserve their really great utterances for other distinguished people.

• It is pleasing, for instance, to see incredulity, stupefaction, dismay, and chagrin chase one another across the solemn countenance of Sir Thomas Lucy as it is borne in upon his dull mind that his name would have been wholly blotted out from men’s remembrance had it not been for an obscure young scapegrace from Stratford, who is supposed (on the flimsiest of evidence) to have poached on his preserves. Karnofsky’s Beethoven - Scientific and Artistic Progress

• I quite agree with you that we are not very like Hamlet in our talk or in our outward semblance. He is a wit; we are dull and muddy-mettled creatures beside him. He can utter deep things about life and death; we can utter only inanities and trivialities. But what of it? The real difference between us and Hamlet is that we are inarticulate, while he has at his beck and call all the vast resources of his creator, who was the greatest lord of language that has ever been. We are dumb; he has a word for everything he wants to say. I judge other people by myself; and I know that the shallow stuff I utter, in spoken or in printed words, is a wretched caricature of the real me. We cannot express our deeper selves, and the reason why we are endlessly drawn to Hamlet is that he finds words for us; that he puts our questionings into speech, and finds utterance for our coiled perplexities.

• On Cowper’s alleged irrelevance to modern life: This puzzles me. It seems to imply that “poor Shakespeare,” too, is of no use to us, there being, as far as I can recall, no steel girders in Hamlet; and that Dante is obsolete because there are no limited liability companies in the Divina Commedia.

• So there you have the contrast, in terms of politics: Milton the insurgent against oppression in Church and State, the stern democrat, the undaunted champion of liberty; and Shakespeare the mocker of the common people, the believer in a strong monarchy, the conservative if not the reactionary… And yet I have a notion that Shakespeare was the more essential democrat of the two. Because, you see, to be a democrat means something quite different from being a believer in some particular piece of political machinery; it means an attitude of one’s mind, of one’s whole personality, in relation to one’s ordinary fellow creatures. I don’t know whether Browning realized how accurate he was when, in “The Lost Leader,” he said that “Shakespeare was of us, Milton was for us.” Milton was for us, undoubtedly; no one has ever pleaded the cause of the common man more eloquently; he was, theoretically, a democrat of the purest water. But we have a strong feeling that he had no love for the common people; he never felt at home with them; he knew very little about them, their joys, their sorrows, their needs, their ways of thinking and speaking. Shakespeare was quite different. He may have made fun of them in matters of politics, but he knew them and liked them and was one of them. How did he acquire that marvellously full knowledge of their little tricks of speech and their little twists of thinking? There is only one explanation: they must have opened their hearts to him. In Milton’s presence, they would have locked their hearts; they would have recognized him as a superior person, and with superior persons we are all afraid to be ourselves. Shakespeare, we may be sure, would have been hail-fellow-well-met with Falstaff and his disreputable crew, and with everybody else in London or in Stratford. It was not a pretended geniality, assumed for the sake of securing copy; that sort of thing is always seen through. It was a genuine and an all-embracing love of humanity. Different types of progressivism, conservatism, and reactionism

• The authorities of Venice decreed some centuries ago that all gondolas should be painted a plain black, because the owners of gondolas were so given over to swank, so bent on outdoing all others in the magnificence of their boats, that the thing became a public menace. [Status spirals, peacock’s tail stuff, coordination to avoid involution somehow. Can AI firms do the same?]Involution and Moloch

• There is nothing ignoble it seems to me, in seeking to escape from our present squalid and shabby world by reading one of Shakespeare’s plays; what does seem to me to be ignoble is to grow so accustomed to the squalor and shabbiness that one no longer desires to escape from it… All literature is a way of escape. Second-rate literature offers you an escape from unpleasant realities into a world of pleasant, rose-tinted unrealities, generally known as the world of romance. First-rate literature offers you an escape from unrealities into the world of reality; from surfaces and appearances to the inner core of truth; from what seems to what is.

• “The aim of philosophy, abstractly formulated, is to understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term. Under ‘things in the broadest possible sense’ I include such radically different items as not only ‘cabbages and kings’, but numbers and duties, possibilities and finger snaps, aesthetic experience and death. To achieve success in philosophy would be, to use a contemporary turn of phrase, to ‘know one’s way around’ with respect to all these things, not in that unreflective way in which the centipede of the story knew its way around before it faced the question, ‘how do I walk?’, but in that reflective way which means that no intellectual holds are barred.” (Sellars)

Hazlitt (on conversation?)

• “To excel in conversation,” said an ingenious man, “one must not be always striving to say good things: to say one good thing, one must say many bad, and more indifferent ones.”
• When a stranger came in, it was not asked, ‘Has he written any thing?’—we were above that pedantry; but we waited to see what he could do. If he could take a hand at piquet, he was welcome to sit down. If a person liked any thing, if he took snuff heartily, it was sufficient. He would understand, by analogy, the pungency of other things, besides Irish blackguard, or Scotch rappee. A character was good any where, in a room or on paper. But we abhorred insipidity, affectation, and fine gentlemen. There was one of our party who never failed to mark ‘two for his Nob’ at cribbage, and he was thought no mean person. This was Ned P——, and a better fellow in his way breathes not. There was ——, who asserted some incredible matter of fact as a likely paradox, and settled all controversies by an ipse dixit, a fiat of his will, hammering out many a hard theory on the anvil of his brain—the Baron Munchausen of politics and practical philosophy:—there was Captain ——, who had you at an advantage by never understanding you
• Perhaps it might be supposed that a person who excels in conversation and cannot write, would succeed better in dialogue. But the stimulus, the immediate irritation would be wanting; and the work would read flatter than ever, from not having the very thing it pretended to have.
• If you really want to know whether another person can talk well, begin by saying a good thing yourself, and you will have a right to look for a rejoinder. (Same as Cowen’s point that you need to ask good questions to get good answers)

Waugh

• My cousin Jasper had told me that it was normal to spend one’s second year shaking off the friends of one’s first, and it happened as he said.
• “I never really knew your mother,” I said. “You didn’t like her. I sometimes think when people wanted to hate God they hated Mummy.”
• “Rex has never been unkind to me intentionally,” she said. “It’s just that he isn’t a real person at all; he’s just a few faculties of a man highly developed; the rest simply isn’t there. He couldn’t imagine why it hurt me to find, two months after we came back to London from our honeymoon, that he was still keeping up with Brenda Champion.”