“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” — Chinese Proverb
From Plato’s Phaedrus, commenting on the invention of writing.
Here, O king, is a branch of learning that will make the people of Egypt wiser and improve their memories. My discovery provides a recipe for memory and wisdom. But the king answered and said ‘O man full of arts, the god-man Toth, to one it is given to create the things of art, and to another to judge what measure of harm and of profit they have for those that shall employ them.’
The people who invent something new, create a new tool or technology, are not necessarily the people who are going to understand what the social impact of those inventions will be.
And so it is that you by reason of your tender regard for the writing that is your offspring have declared the very opposite of its true effect. If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.
What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.
Clipping
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web > Plato's argument against writing
[https://fs.blog/an-old-argument-against-writing/]
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web > Most famous quotes
Here are the 10 most famous quotes of all time:
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“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” — Jesus Christ
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“Veni, vidi, vici. I came, I saw, I conquered.” — Julius Caesar
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“I know that I know nothing.” — Socrates
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“Cogito ergo sum. I think; therefore I am.” — René Descartes
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“To be, or not to be: that is the question.” — William Shakespeare
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“Carpe diem — Seize the day.” — Horace
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“With great power comes great responsibility.” — Stan Lee
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“You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” — Wayne Gretzky
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“Fortes Fortuna adiuvat — Fortune favors the bold.” — Virgil
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“Knowledge is power.” — Sir Francis Bacon
Here are 10 of the most famous quotes from the most famous spiritual leaders in history:
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“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist the one who is evil. But if anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” — Jesus Christ
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“My mercy encompasses all things.” — Muhammad
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“However many holy words you read, however many you speak, what good will they do you if you do not act on upon them?” — Buddha
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“Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward. Work not for a reward, but never cease to do thy work.” — Vyasa
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“A penny saved is better than a penny earned.” — Martin Luther
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“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” — John 3:16, The Holy Bible
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“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.” — Dalai Lama XIV
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“It does not matter how slowly you go as long as you do not stop.” — Confucius
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“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” ― Lao Tzu
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“It is not how much we do, but how much love we put in the action that we do.” — Mother Teresa
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web > Short aesthetic summaries of past decades
[https://samkahn.substack.com/p/decade-by-decade]
…
1910s — The split screen between those who had experienced the trenches and those who hadn’t. Gabriel Chevallier in Fear returning home to find his father drinking and playing cards with his friends exactly like in the old days, all the girls envisioning “spending their whole lives sailing on some limpid blue lake, with their heads on the shoulder of a faithful companion.” Chevallier finishing his leave longing to get back to the trench, where at least there’s something like the truth of modern life.
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1960s — The smartest man I know describes the Prague Spring as an ‘LSD event.’ There are videos of Czech army officers across the decade. At the beginning they’re uptight and professional. By the end, they’re hanging off the rafters. Anybody who’d heard an electric guitar, anybody who’d taken LSD, unable to help but feel that the world had to be perfectible. Czech soldiers on LSD
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web > Anti-majestic cosmic horseshit
[https://extelligence.substack.com/p/anti-majestic-cosmic-horseshit]
“Come on! Did you see God and angels and the tunnel of light and all that shit? Did you go to heaven?”
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“Yeah, I saw all that fucking shit,” he said.
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web > Pagrams are sentences that use all the phonemes of English
[https://www.reddit.com/r/neography/comments/6o2rka/phonetic_pangrams/]
Pangrams which use all the phonemes, or phones, of English (rather than alphabetic characters):
“With tenure, Suzie’d have all the more leisure for yachting, but her publications are no good.” (for certain US accents and phonological analyses)
“Shaw, those twelve beige hooks are joined if I patch a young, gooey mouth.” (perfect for certain accents with the cot-caught merger)
“Are those shy Eurasian footwear, cowboy chaps, or jolly earthmoving headgear?” (perfect for certain Received Pronunciation accents)
“The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen, before she heard that symphony again, just as young Arthur wanted.” (a phonetic, not merely phonemic, pangram. It contains both nasals [m] and [ɱ] (as in ‘symphony’), the fricatives [x] (as in ‘loch’) and [ç] (as in ‘hue’), and the ‘dark L’ [É«] (as in ‘all’) – in other words, it contains different allophones.)
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web > Heroic sacrifice of working at soul-killing institutions
[https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-the-pale-king]
In Wallace’s conception, boredom isn’t only personally enlightening—it can also be a heroic sacrifice for the collective good. At one point Chris Fogel wanders into the wrong classroom and ends up in the exam review for Advanced Tax, taught by a capable and dignified Jesuit (possibly the eponymous “pale king”). The Jesuit makes a speech which sparks an epiphany in Chris, where he declares the profession of accounting a heroic one: “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.’”
There it is: the vision, the cure, the path forward. We accept the burden of adult responsibility, go to work every day and engage in the important but unglamorous work that keeps society running. We orient our institutions not towards money but principle. We refuse to treat people like numbers or cogs or some great undifferentiated mass—we treat them as fully human, always, even and especially when they’ve chosen to subsume some part of their individuality to a soul-killing institution, because we recognize this as a heroic sacrifice they’re making for the good of the collective. And we withstand our negative emotions, embrace them fully, travel through their every texture until we transform and open to a deeper and richer experience.
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books > Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells (Lena Dunham)
If you have a bad feeling about someone, don’t worry about offending them. Just run. Being polite is how you get your purse stolen or your “purse stolen.”
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web > Do what you love is a trap
The desire for the cool job that you’re passionate about is a particularly modern and bourgeois phenomenon - and, as we’ll see, a means of elevating a certain type of labor to the point of desirability that workers will tolerate all forms of exploitation for the “honor” of performing it. The rhetoric of “Do you what you love, and you’ll never work another day in your life” is a burnout trap. By cloaking the labor in the language of “passion,” we’re prevented from thinking of what we do as what it is: a job, not the entirety of our lives.
~Anne Helen Petersen, Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation
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web > Writing is a spanning tree of a thought graph
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432477]
Now you’re making me curious why people with ADHD (me included) tend to have a weird tendency for writing longer run-on sentences with commas, that on top of that use more parenthesis than average. Often nesting them, even. Because according to research our working memory is a little lower on average than neurotypicals, which seems to contradict this.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41432848
Perhaps the text itself is functioning as working memory.
Both ADHD people and neurotypicals have deeply structured thoughts. “Serializing” those thoughts without planning ahead leads to the “stream of consciousness” writing style, which includes things like run-on sentences and deeply nested parentheses. This style is considered poor form, because it is hard to follow. To serialize and communicate thoughts in a way that avoids this style, it is necessary to plan ahead and rely on working memory to hold several sub-goals simultaneously, instead of simply scanning back through the text to see which parentheses have not been closed yet.
It could also be simply that ADHD people have “branchier” thoughts, hopping around a constellation of related concepts that they feel compelled to communicate despite being tangential to the main point; parentheses are the main lexical construct used to convey such asides.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41433367
It’s not just “branchier” thought that make it hard to communicate, it’s graphier thoughts, when you mean (it’s important) to communicate that it’s not just a tree, but that connections may also go both ways, and sometimes they even have cycles. That to see the full picture in more nuance you’ve got to consider those feedback loops, and that they don’t necessarily have precedence one over the other but that they must be all taken account simultaneously.
When you explain it serially you are forced to choose a spanning tree, and people usually stop listening when the spanning tree has touched all the relevant concepts, then they persuade themselves they got the full picture but miss some connections, that make the problem more complex and nuanced.
When graphs have more than one loop, loopy belief propagation doesn’t work anymore and you need an another algorithm to update your belief without introducing bias.
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web > Social anxiety is a physical feeling that can and should be overcome
[https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-was-not-acting-like-me-are-you]
About two years ago, I experienced a novel social betrayal that deeply affected me… making me realize my naivety about how people can behave… Although it caused no material damage, it led to a year and a half of uncharacteristic introversion… where I avoided socializing and felt less happy… I only recently recognized that my reduced social engagement was driven by an unconscious shift in my feelings of social safety… This background unease subtly influenced my behavior until I became aware of it, allowing me to act in line with my values again… Now, I reflect regularly on whether my actions align with my true intentions, avoiding being led by unfounded gut feelings…