The musician Nick Cave was on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert earlier this week (full interview) and he read a letter from his Red Hand Files, an AMA project where fans write in with questions and he answers them. The question was:
Following the last few years I’m feeling empty and more cynical than ever. I’m losing faith in other people, and I’m scared to pass these feelings to my little son. Do you still believe in Us (human beings)?
In a lovely letter in response (which he reads in the video above), Cave writes that “much of my early life was spent holding the world and the people in it in contempt” and that “it took a devastation to understand the idea of mortal value, and it took a devastation to find hope”. That devastation was the death of his 15-year-old son in 2015, which he talks more about in this interview and in this book. Cave’s response concludes:
Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned, makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act, as small as you like, Valerio, such as reading to your little boy, or showing him a thing you love, or singing him a song, or putting on his shoes, keeps the devil down in the hole. It says the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.
I promise, your day will be better if you take a few minutes to watch or read this letter. And the entire interview is worth watching as well — there is no better interviewer on the topic of loss and grief than Stephen Colbert.
Clipping
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web > Hopefulness is the warrior emotion
[https://kottke.org/tags/word.php?word=Nick%20Cave]
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web > People want interesting choices
[https://ranprieur.com/archives/046.html]
Google Is Not What It Seems. Julian Assange writes about being interviewed by some people from Google who appeared to be politically neutral, but they turned out to be representing the American foreign policy establishment, and he argues that Google has been allied with these people and their world view for a long time:
By all appearances, Google’s bosses genuinely believe in the civilizing power of enlightened multinational corporations, and they see this mission as continuous with the shaping of the world according to the better judgment of the “benevolent superpower”… This is the impenetrable banality of “don’t be evil.” They believe that they are doing good.
If you think about this, it puts a twist on the popular idea that the elite simply rule the world. On a deeper level, the world is ruled by the stories the elite have to tell themselves to feel like they’re the good guys. These stories include: that global-scale decisions must be made from the top (or center); that political stability is more valuable than political participation; and that anything you can call “economic development” is good.
But the story I find most interesting, is that you raise the quality of life of ordinary humans by taking away their pain and giving them stuff. I’m thinking what people really want is interesting choices — partly inspired by Sid Meier’s famous definition of a game as a series of interesting decisions, and partly by an email I got more than a year ago from Owen:
In game design, they talk about choices that matter. If a choice is presented but people feel obligated to take only one of the branches, that’s not really a choice. You must take this option, taking that other option is stupid. Or if taking a branch doesn’t result in any perceived consequence. Then take any branch, the choice doesn’t matter. They put those kinds of choices in front of you all the time. How do you like your steak cooked? Should I use the gelpacks or the powder for the dishwasher?
This is important so I’ll say it again in my own words. If the choice doesn’t effect your path, like Coke or Pepsi, then it’s not interesting; and if one choice is obviously stupid, like keep your car on the road or run it off, then it’s not interesting. But deprive people of interesting choices for too long, and they start making the obviously stupid choice just to feel alive. Another way to say it: we would rather do the wrong thing that we choose ourselves, than the right thing that is chosen for us. I think this explains a lot of behavior that otherwise doesn’t make any sense, and it’s why even the most benevolent central control can never make a good society.
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books > Shogun (James Clavell)
Now sleep. Karma is karma. Be thou of Zen. Remember, in tranquillity, that the Absolute, the Tao, is within thee, that no priest or cult or dogma or book or saying or teaching or teacher stands between Thou and It. Know that Good and Evil are irrelevant, I and Thou irrelevant, Inside and Outside irrelevant as are Life and Death. Enter into the Sphere where there is no fear of death nor hope of afterlife, where thou art free of the impediments of life or the needs of salvation. Thou art thyself the Tao. Be thou, now, a rock against which the waves of life rush in vain…
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web > Be nice to AI
[https://x.com/jonst0kes/status/1761930145420415071]
I have thought about this a lot lately. The relationship we have to AI assistants is fundamentally sociopathic — we instrumentalize them. They are a means to an end.
This is fine. They are tools & have no thoughts, feelings, moral worth. So we treat them appropriately. BUT…
We relate to them through the medium of language, by stating our intentions as we would to a fellow sentient being. There has never been another tool — another instrument of zero inherent moral worth — that we have related to through the medium of language.
So I’m generally polite to the chatbots not because I care about the chatbots but because I care about myself. I don’t want to regularly relate to anything via my words in a way that purely instrumentalizes it, in a way that’s sociopathic. I don’t want to get used to that feeling. It creeps me out & I suspect it’s bad for me.
I’m not advocating that everyone else be polite to chatbots, but I might at some point advocate that on the grounds that to do otherwise is to practice using language in a way that’s evil. I dunno. We’ll see.
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web > Guy who sucks at being a person sees huge potential in AI
[https://theonion.com/guy-who-sucks-at-being-a-person-sees-huge-potential-in-1850488022/]
SAN MATEO, CA—
After spending the past three decades of his life being totally unable and unwilling to engage in any meaningful way with the world around him, James Parker, a local guy who sucks at being a person, told reporters Thursday that he saw huge potential in AI.
“While it’s still in its early phase, artificial intelligence will one day accomplish things that humans could have never even dreamed of doing,” said Parker, who, by all accounts, has never stretched himself to do something he found difficult; has never created anything truly original; and, deep down, has absolutely zero understanding of what makes things good, enjoyable, or rewarding. “Just yesterday, I asked an AI program to write an entire sci-fi novel for me, and [as someone who will die an empty shell of a man who wasted his life doing nothing for the world and, perhaps, should never have been born] I was super impressed. Soon, humans won’t need to do anything at all! Awesome.”
At press time, Parker added that as someone whose contributions to society would almost certainly be measured cumulatively as a net loss, he also saw great potential in the future of the metaverse.
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books > Shogun (James Clavell)
It’s a saying they have, that a man has a false heart in his mouth for all the world to see, another in his breast to show his very special friends and his family, and the real one, the true one, the secret one, which is never known to anyone except himself alone, hidden only God knows where.
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web > Friendship theory of everything
[https://www.avabear.xyz/p/the-friendship-theory-of-everything]
Some tenets of the friendship theory of everything:
You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.
Almost everyone who’s unhappy is unhappy because they feel isolated. The best cure for isolation is a strong friend group. So much of happiness is having someone you can get a last-minute dinner with on a Monday night, or ask to water your plants while you’re gone for a week. The opposite of loneliness, as it were.
You try your best to move to where your favorite people are. You do not agonize over whether this is, in fact, The Best City in the World. You do not Complain Relentlessly about Everything You Dislike About It. You simply suck it up and accept that if you like the people around you, everything else will work out.
You ask your friends to live close to you, though you accept that they might not want to. You say, Let’s all stay in California together. I want my kids to grow up with your kids.
When you value friendships more, they also get more fraught. I think this is what Rhaina Cohen referred to as “the problems of having community versus not having community.” When we ask for more from friendship, we also get more disappointment, conflict, mismatch. There is no such thing as closeness without friction.
Befriending people who are good communicators can make you a better communicator. Befriending people who are trustworthy makes you more trusting. Secure attachment can be a learned thing.
People will have periods when they disappear; people have times when they let you down. When you know someone for many many years you will have so many ups and downs. As with any kind of love, the most important thing is that you both keep coming back.
It’s okay to pursue and cherish romantic love, but sacrificing platonic love for it leads to disconnection and atomization.
You show up: you go to your friends’ birthday parties. You ask them to read your writing. You make an effort to make nice with whoever they date.
Your friends will change you, even in ways you initially reject. That’s a good thing. You will acquire new opinions and hobbies; you will find yourself into uncomfortable situations; you will learn to like the people they like.
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books > Shogun (James Clavell)
‘Always remember, child,’ her first teacher had impressed on her, ‘that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that discipline—training—is about. So train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes, the touch of this silk, tender raindrops against the shoji, the curve of this flower arrangement, the tranquillity of dawn. Then, at length, you won’t have to make such a great effort and you will be of value to yourself, a value to our profession—and bring honor to our world, the Willow World…’
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web > Someone who never writes has no ideas about anything
[https://paulgraham.com/words.html]
The reason I’ve spent so long establishing this rather obvious point [that writing helps you refine your thinking] is that it leads to another that many people will find shocking. If writing down your ideas always makes them more precise and more complete, then no one who hasn’t written about a topic has fully formed ideas about it. And someone who never writes has no fully formed ideas about anything nontrivial.
It feels to them as if they do, especially if they’re not in the habit of critically examining their own thinking. Ideas can feel complete. It’s only when you try to put them into words that you discover they’re not. So if you never subject your ideas to that test, you’ll not only never have fully formed ideas, but also never realize it.
—Paul Graham
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web > Delayed gratification
[https://www.afterbabel.com/p/a-time-we-never-knew]
But it doesn’t have to be this way. We can give future generations a real-world childhood. We can prioritize play. We can delay entry to social media platforms until at least 16. We can encourage young people to just hang out with each other, without supervision and without smartphones. We can take elements of childhood from previous eras and re-introduce them in modern life. But we have to remember what has been lost. When we are grieving record stores, mixtapes, old-school romance, and friends goofing around in ‘90s high schools, what are we actually grieving? Delayed gratification. Deeper connection. Play and fun. Risk and thrill. Life with less obsessive self-scrutiny. These are things we can reclaim—if we remember what they are worth and roll back the phone-based world that degraded them.