Sunday, November 23, 2014

Study notes: Nov 18-22, 2014: "Philosophy in Prison" and other things

This is commentary. And this is really good. 

What I've been watching and reading this week:

TED Talk: "The leaders who ruined Africa and the generation who can fix it," by Fred Swaniker
TED Talk: "Is there a real you?" by Julian Baggini
TED Talk: "Philosophy in prison," by Damon Horowitz.
TED Talk: "All it takes is 10 mindful minutes," by Andy Puddicombe
TED Talk: "We can be Buddhas," by Robert Thurman
Blog post: "Contemplating the Red Pill," by Free Northerner
Article: "Fifty Ways to Leave Leviathan," by Max Borders & Jeffrey A. Tucker
Article: "How Long Ago Was Adam Created!?" by Maan Khalife
Blog post: "The Most Useful Mnemonic Technique," by Brienne
Article: "How Climate Change Will End Wine As We Know It," by Sandra Allen
Article: "Latter-day Saint, Latter-day Lovecraft: an interview with W.H. Pugmire," by Theric Jepsen

I have also written notes on David Pulsipher's talk, "Renouncing War: How Mormon Theology & History Lead Us to Nonviolence," and compiled some knowledge from Wikipedia and elsewhere.

Also check out: 

 Homework for next week: 

 Fred Swaniker
  • Swaniker had some bad luck, running to escape from one coup (in Ghana) and settling in another country (Gambia) right before it had a coup, too. 
  • Botswana got fiber-optic before many Western countries. 
  • Swaniker's rule of thumb: "When societies have strong institutions, the difference that one good leader can make is limited, but when you have weak institutions, then just one good leader can make or break that country." 
  • Generation one, in the 50s and 60s, brought independence to Africa. 
  • Generation two "brought nothing but havoc to Africa. Think warfare, corruption, human rights abuses. This is the stereotype of the typical African leader that we think of." 
  • Generation three was "by no means perfect, but the one thing they have done is that they have cleaned up much of the mess of generation two. They've stopped the fighting, and I call them the stabilizer generation." 
  • "The next generation to come after this, generation four, has a unique opportunity to transform the continent." 
  • "One billion people will need jobs in Africa [in 2050], so if we don't grow our economies fast enough,we're sitting on a ticking time bomb, not just for Africa but for the entire world." 
  • Madagascar's bats have especially high-nutrient droppings. 
  • Generation four needs to create strong institutions so that a country cannot be "held to ransom again by a few individuals like Robert Mugabe." 
  • The African Leadership Academy is a way to "identify and develop these [needed] leaders in a systematic, practical way." "Over the next 50 years, this institution will create three million transformative leaders for the continent." 
  • Nelson Mandela: "Everyone now and then, a generation is called upon to be great. You can be that generation." 

 Julian Baggini
  • The general idea is that there is a core "you" that has experiences and accumulates memories, beliefs, &C. 
  • But this is wrong. "There isn't actually a 'you' at the heart of all these things." 
  • They're all integrated, connected, "overlapped," with "a narrative, a story that we tell ourselves."
  • "A shift between thinking of yourself as a thing that has all these experiences in life, and thinking of yourself as all these experiences in life." 
  • "If you had a belief transplant would you be the same person?" 
  • "In a way it's common sense." 
  • There is not "a thing called water," to which molecules of H2O are attached. Water is the molecules of H2O. 
  • "We say the watch has a face, has hands, has a battery, but what we really mean is... you take these things, and you put them together, and you get a watch." 
  • This is the idea behind Buddhism, Locke, Hume. 
  • The brain makes possible a sense of self but "there isn't a center, where things happen." 
  • The "ego trick." 
  • "It's not that we don't exist. The trick is to make us think that inside, there's something more unified than there really is." 
  • Your self isn't an illusion, any more than the watch is an illusion. But you're a thing in the way that a stream is a thing. You're a process more than a standing entity. 
  • "I think that if you have this fixed, permanent self that never changes, through your whole life, then I think in a sense that you're trapped. You're born, with an essence, until you die." To be a process, on the other hand, is "liberating," because then you can change. 
  • Dhammapada: "Well-makers lead the water (wherever they like); fletchers bend the arrow; carpenters bend a log of wood; wise people fashion themselves." 

 Damon Horowitz
  • "You think you know right and wrong? Then can you tell me what wrong is? No, don't give me an example. I want to know about wrongness itself, the idea of wrong. What is that idea. What makes something wrong?" 
  • "We're not here to trade opinions; everyone's got an opinion. We are here for knowledge. Our enemy is thoughtlessness. This is philosophy." 
  • Tony X: "I want to know what is wrong. I want to know what I know."
  • "Socrates died in prison, his philosophy intact." 
  • "His [Tony's] body is in prison, but his mind is free." 
  • "So when he gives me his final paper, in which he argues that the categorical imperative is perhaps too uncompromising to deal with the conflict that affects our everyday and challenges me to tell him whether therefore we are condemned to moral failure, I say, 'I don't know. Let us think about that.' Because in that moment, there's no mark by Tony's name; it's just the two of us standing there. It is not professor and convict, it is just two minds ready to do philosophy. And I say to Tony, 'Let's do this.'

Andy Puddicombe
  • "When did you last take any time to do nothing? Just ten minutes, undisturbed?.. Not even sitting there reminiscing about the past or planning for the future. Simply doing nothing." 
  • "We don't take any time out to look after it [our mind]. The result, of course, is that we get stressed."
  • Meditation is not just "aspirin for the mind." It is preventative as well. 
  • Meditation can be stressful in the beginning. 
  • "I guess we all deal with stress in different ways... My own way of dealing with it was to become a monk. So I quit my degree, I headed off to the Himalayas, and I started studying meditation." 
  • Being a monk "gave me a greater appreciation, an understanding for the present moment." 
  • On average our minds are lost in thought almost 47 percent of the time. 
  • "To spend almost half of our life lost in thought and potentially quite unhappy, dunno, it just kind of seems tragic, actually, especially when there's something we can do about it." 
  • "We need an exercise," and meditation is the exercise. "Familiarizing ourselves with the present moment." 
  • Meditation is not "stopping thoughts, getting rid of emotions, somehow controlling the mind," but "stepping back, seeing the thought clearly, witnessing it coming and going, emotions coming and going without judgment, but with a relaxed, focused mind." 
  • Through meditation we can "start to let go of those [negative mental] storylines and patterns of mind."
  • Meditation is a change of perspective. 

Robert Thurman
  • The Buddha always accepted the first invitation that came to him, from wherever it came from. 
  • "In the Buddhist cosmos there are millions and billions of planets with human life on it, and enlightened beings can see the life on all the other planets." 
  • "In the Buddhist universe, we've already done this already billions of times in many, many lifetimes in the past. And I don't give the talk always. You did, and we had to watch you, and so forth. And we're all still trying to." This is the same as Nietzsche's idea of the Eternal Return, although I shouldn't be surprised by that. 
  • "Our egocentric perception- from the Buddha's point of view, misperception- is that all we are is what is inside our skin. And it's inside and outside, self and other, and other is all very different." 
  • "Where compassion comes is where you surprisingly discover you lose yourself in some way: through art, through meditation, through understanding, through knowledge actually, knowing that you have no such boundary, knowing your interconnectedness with other beings." 
  • "When you're no longer locked in yourself... that enables you to let your mind spread out, and empathize, and enhance the basic human ability of empathizing, and realizing that you are the other being, somehow by that opening, you can see the deeper nature of life. And you can, you get away from this terrible iron circle of I, me, me, mine, like the Beatles used to sing." 
  • "The Dalai Lama always likes to say- he says that when you give birth in your mind to the idea of compassion, it's because you realize that you yourself and your pains and pleasures are finally too small a theatre for your intelligence. It's really too boring... and the more you focus on how you feel, by the way, the worse it gets."
  • "Leilei said that the way of helping those who are suffering badly on the physical plane or on other planes is having a good time, doing it by having a good time." 
  • "So what could possibly change this terrible gap that has opened up in the world today?... You teach: it's generosity." 
  • "I think the key to saving the world, the key to compassion is that it is more fun. It should be done by fun. Generosity is more fun. That's the key. Everybody has the wrong idea." 
  • "What good does it do to add being miserable with others' misery? You have to find some vision where you see how hopeful it is, how it can be changed." 
  • "Compassion means to feel the feelings of others, and the human being actually is compassion... because what is our brain for?" 
  • "You decide, 'Well, I'm sick of myself. I'm going to think of how other people can be happy.'" This is a nice thought, although, with a value system based on complexity rather than hedons, it doesn't fly without adaptation. 
  • "And you realize that this- being with these people- is the flower garden that Chiho showed us. It is Nirvana." 

"Contemplating the Red Pill"
  • Yeah, um, no. Just no. 
  • I think that I've enjoyed reading from reactionary monarchists exactly twice, both on the same day. I think that it's because of the "reactionary" part. It leads to a lot of views that I don't only disagree with but find to be outright disgusting. 
  • This is the story of a guy who's allowing himself to be defined by sex and his ideas of masculinity, however much those ideas are or aren't influenced by other people. He's trying to validate his existence through manliness, through "Christian masculinity," a large family, &c. 
  • His blog contains posts that titles like Genocidal Mercy, where he says things like "To think the [sic?] genocide at the behest of God is murder is a grave misunderstanding of the law. Murder is unlawful killing and God's law is the highest law." This post has the tag "God's love." 
  • He also says things like "Death, war, destruction, genocide, violence, blood, savagery, fire, all are superior to the void." By "the void," he means a potential future where, in the prisoner's dilemma, the instinctive and rational response is to cooperate, not defect. Because "Man was made for struggle, man was not made for the void. Struggle may kill the body, perpetual peace devours the soul." 
  • He retweets things like "Consent is a social construct" or comments which claim that feminism is "cultural Marxism," and then wonders why "I haven't had a relationship in a couple years. I very rarely meet quality girls worth pursuing and when I do, I get rejected." 
  • Maybe social justice warriors are not "creating young women who are very confused on how to interact with guys." Maybe they're just creating young women that don't want to interact with assholes, and know that they don't have to. Have you considered that? 
  • There's a retweet on there that asks, "Are they technically people?" I don't even want to find out what the context is. 
  • He defines himself in terms of relationships, and these in turn because of the demands of "Christian masculinity," to the point that he owns a house that has "much more space that I need or use, and eats up a significant portion of my pay and I find the mortgage somewhat restricting," because he owns a house in preparation for the day that he marries and raises a family. 

 "Fifty Ways to Leave Leviathan"
  • "People... struggle to be free and sometimes they succeed." 
  • The "Leviathan State," which has "gained the upper hand, sometimes through big periods of upheaval but mostly through a million daily nicks and cuts." 
  • "There is a fundamental asymmetry between the structure of government and the structure of a networked people." 
  • The post office is an example of a government service that has simply fallen by the wayside more and more because it is being rendered obsolete. "This is the archetype. Government was supposed to provide but didn't. Now markets are picking up the pieces and making new products and services that facilitate better living... Every time the State shuts a door or closes a loophole, people find and exploit two more doors, two more loopholes." 
  • Google is working on generating its own power! 
  • Need to look up "bitmessage," which is apparently to email what bitcoin is to fiat currency. 
  • 3-D Printing is going to be a hassle for people who want to maintain their patents. "When everyone is a maker, no one is regulated." 
  • Lending clubs and health coverage cooperatives. 
  • TOR. I like TOR. Just to put that out there. 
  • "Expatriation from the United States is reaching record levels." Not surprised. 
  • "Outside of China's special economic zones (SEZs), Honduran startup cities are a new experiment worth watching." Indeed. Feels ripe for a story idea. 
  • "The harder the tax and regulatory State pushes, the more viable the sea becomes as a place to live and do business." 
  • "Are you after a real education or a signaling mechanism?"
  • "If you are in business, you know the score. If you can trade services or goods directly, it's best to forgo the paper trail. You donate programming time, I'll give you web space... Barter has become a natural response to the tax collector." 
  • "At a certain point, no one bothered driving 55 anymore (not just Sammy Hagar). People sped en masse until Congress decided to let the states set speed limits- higher. It's a paradigmatic case: People disobeyed until the law was changed." 
  • "If you can stand to eat your tacos on a park bench, it might be worth hitting a food trailer- the ultimate in microentrepreneurship. They are often at the forefront of experimentation and variety." 
  • "We're in the process of creating the Matrix around us." 
  • "It's as if we're creating communities in the sky and commerce in the ether." 
  • "This is the way bad laws and bad regimes die. Enforcement becomes impossible." 
  • I'm definitely going to be referencing back to this article for near- and far-future worldbuilding. Figure out some ways that each could evolve over the next twenty/thirty years or twenty centuries. 

 "How Long Ago Was Adam Created!?"
  • This is a Q&A sort of thing, asked by an anonymous reader of OnIslam and answered by Maan Khalife, a member of the editorial staff. 
  • "Qarn" may be taken to mean one hundred years, but according to a hadith by Al-Bukhari it means a generation. According to Ibn Abbas a qarn is one thousand years long. 
  • Muslims and Mormons share a similarity in oft referring to our respective founder as "the Prophet." 
  • It is not unreasonable to conclude, according to the Quran, that Noah lived hundreds of thousands of years ago. 

 "The Most Useful Mnemonic Technique"
  • "Roz Picard and her students have figured out how to track someone's emotions through heartbeat and respiration via webcam using changes in skin tone and blood circulates." 
  • "I made a mental note with the name and a brief description of the study, situated it in my memory of the restaurant where the conversation took place, and associated it with the trigger of opening my laptop." 
  • Mnemonics "cost[s] less time and attention." 
  • "The most practical insight I've gained by studying mnemonics is like this: System 1 runs your memory, and it does not speak English. If you want to convince System 1 to remember something System 2 thinks is important, you have to translate it into the language of System 1." 
  • "System 1 is in charge of your memory, and it does not care about your proper nouns and abstract concepts... It likes things that are concrete, emotional, multi-sensory, vivid, dynamic, personally engaging, and story-like." 
  • "So next time you want to remember something-- or learn an abstract concept or skill-- notice when it's mostly System 2 doing the talking, and see if you can explain it in System 1 terms instead... I bet you'll see big results from small preliminary efforts if you give it a try." 
  • "Repeating things strengthens associations via classical conditioning, but you can do orders of magnitude better than that." 
  • I wonder how well this system would work out for me, considering that I'm very poor at mental imaging and much more word-y and abstract in my head. 

 "How Climate Change Will End Wine As We Know It"
  • "You can't just leave ripe grapes on the vine-- their sugars will get too high, yielding wines that are too alcoholic." So, higher alcohol content in the future? "Too much sun exposure can also affect flavor, and eventually grapes will being to raisin."
  • Wineries are designed to handle a limited amount of production as a time. 
  • Though some places, like in Australia, are becoming too hot to make wine effectively, other places, like Tasmania, were once too cold but are warming up. England, Scandinavia, and British Columbia may also benefit. 
  • Traditional winemaking areas like southern Italy, Spain, and Central Valley in California, may be replaced by new areas. 
  • "The area capable of consistently producing grapes required for the highest quality wines is projected to decline by more than 50% by late this century."
  • Winemaking is a "canary in the coal mine" for measuring the effects of climate change. 
  • "The world's wine regions are particular little bands that fall in between the 30th and 50th parallels, the majority in highly biodiverse Mediterranean climates. This is because, as crops go, quality wine grape vines are super finicky. They need a cold-- but not too cold-- winter. They need a mostly frost-free spring during which their buds can safely emerge. They need a long, sunny growing season and eventual temperatures that are fairly warm-- but not so hot that the grapes will sunburn or ripen too quickly. They need a fluctuation between daytime and nighttime temperatures, which enable the development of compounds that eventually become the complex flavors in a fine wine." Some varieties of wine grape are even more particular. 
  • "Each vine is like a remote sensor out in a field, and the behavior of wines across a region can paint a picture as to a given season's weather. European vintners have been keeping records for about a thousand years, which is one way climatologists have learned about Europe's historical climate, including the Little Ice Age that struck the continent between 200 and 700 years ago." 
  • "It five to seven years for years for a newly planted vineyard to begin producing grapes suitable for winemaking." 
  • Part of making a good wine is having an intense knowledge of the local area and how it works, down to little details. 
  • "In Europe, the identity of a wine is so tied to a fixed place that the wines themselves are named after where they're made: Chianti is from Chianti, Champagne is from Champagne. (If Americans played by the same rules, we'd call Napa Valley wines Napas.)"
  • "Winemakers aspire to create wines that best express the personality of a given area's climate and weather, a concept called terroir, or the taste of a place. A given wine is thought of as an expression of a given geography's climate; much the way that you can't make New York bagels in Iowa..."
  • "People care about where their wines originate," unlike corn orwheat.
  • The "Yukon-Yellowstone" corridor is another potential winemaking area. Germany and Burgundy are also getting better vintages compared to ten years ago. 
  • Rebecca Shaw: "You can get into an argument about what's food and what's necessary and what's not necessary. The bottom line is wine is a very, very important part of many, many cultures." 
  • "Grape growers and winemakers have to be risk-averse given that they only get a single shot each year to make do with what that year's weather produced." 
  • "There are things they [winemakers] can do in the case of really hot weather. They're managing canopies to increase air circulation around berries. They're spraying vines with what's basically wine-grape sunscreen" and using "remote sensors or drones to help monitor vineyards and use water resources more intelligently, or even cloud seeding to artificially create rain. In some cases, they are starting to replant vineyards to varietals that they anticipate will better handle the increased temperatures to come."
  • "Inexpensive mass-market wines are also going to be less susceptible to climate change because they're already so loaded up with additives, like powdered tannins, a super-concentrated grape juice called Mega Purple that adds color, and what's essentially liquified oak chips... Bottles aren't labeled with ingredients, meaning consumers are often unaware of whether their wines are natural or full of additives."
  • Some specialty handicraft wines are produced entirely by a single person. 
  • "If the case study of American Prohibition serves as an example, the end result of global warming will be a wine scene that is more homogenous in terms of style, and owned by fewer, richer players... Fine wine will be even more of a luxury commodity than it already is." 
  • Sparkling wine was most likely invented in England, in 1662. 
  • "Cool-climate wines are very different in style from those produced in the hot, dry regions under threat," which "produce larger-bodied reds." 
  • The new areas will also likely take centuries to perfect their craft.

 "Latter-day Saint, Latter-day Lovecraft"
  • All quotes are from W. H. Pugmire unless otherwise noted. 
  • "Began to write weird fiction in Ireland, under the influence of Robert Block, with whom I was in correspondence."
  • "Upon returning I had a love affairwith a male-to-female lesbian fantasy novelist, who caused a huge scandal when I brought her to the Young Adult Sunday School class I was teaching, which led to questions of my sexuality." 
  • "I was so annoyed, because I didn't want to change my lifestyle and I scolded myself, 'That's what you get for praying, girlfriend.'"
  • "My lifestyle at the time was queer transvestite, so at times I'd attend church with traces of last night's drag and pink and green hair, &c &C. I was such an extreme case it took the High Priests two years to decide I was cool enough for re-baptizm [sic]."
  • "I'm basically an underground (non-commercial) Lovecraftian artist, writing modern tales of the Cthulhu Mythos. Writing such fiction seems to be a phase that young horror writers pass through on their way to individual voice and vision. I decided early on that writing Lovecraftian horror will be my authentic and personal voice and vision, and to that end I have stayed true." 
  • "The Lovecraftian genre is now so utterly a part of my soul that I feel I can only be fully myself as an artist therein." 
  • "The one critic whose opinion means anything to me is S. T. Joshi, the world's leading H. P. Lovecraft scholar, and... he praised my work." 
  • "Sesqua Valley is my Lovecraftian locale, invented in 1974... Unlike Lovecraft's fiction, my weird tales are supernatural to the max, and in Sesqua Valley anything can happen. The trick is not to get too carried away so that a sense of strange reality can co-exist with all the freaky stuff going on." 
  • Theric Jepson: "Lovecraft's monsters are so distant, so incomprehensible. Yours are close and present. I admit that change feels very Mormon to me... Do you feel that your work is on some level a Mormonizing of the traditional Lovecraft tradition?" 
  • "I have not purposefully attempted to Mormonize my weird fiction-- my purpose is to be Lovecraftian and perversely myself; yet being Mormon is so life-defining that it has to have an effect on my approach to art. The chief influence in my life these past twenty-something years has been punk rock, and it is actually being a hardcore punk that taints how I am LDS, a writer, a man." 
  • "I am queer to the core of my soul. Long life the Queen. I think some members may see this as a form of stubborn rebellion, but it's simply honesty. I will not live a lie." 
  • "It's a very punk rock mentality, whenever you leave your house, a part of you is always ready to encounter those who hate you for what they fancy you represent." 

 Miscellany
  • Teresam Philosophy, via Caleb Jones: "Life is purposeful, death is optional, God is technological and love is essential."
  • Brigham Young, via Theric Jepson: "In a word, if 'Mormonism' is not my life, I do not know that I have any. I do not understand anything else, for it embraces everything that comes within the range of the understanding of man. If it does not circumscribe every thing that is in heaven and on earth, it is not what it purports to be." 
  • "The fundamental optimization problem: The truth will always sound less truthful than the most truthful sounding falsehood."  I am seconding Velorien's declaration that this needs to be on T-shirts.
  • Also part of the same conversation: "If you become conscious of your thoughts, you gain a degree of control over them."
  • In The Hedgehog and the Fox, Isaiah Berlin divides philosophers into "hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples giving include Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dosotoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, Proust, and Fernand Braudel) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Moliere, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson)." The book focuses on Tolstoy, who appears to be both and neither (a liminal writer, then). I should check it out when the I get the opportunity. 
  • There is a system by which one can note down the movements of a dance, like a musical composition. Very few people learn it, however, because it is very complicated. 
  • Some Protestants are moving to no longer perform civil marriages. I can't say that I approve of their reasons, but beggars can't be choosers. 
  • C.S. Lewis: "A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself you should try to make divorce difficult for every one. I do not think that. at least I know I should be very angry if the Mohamedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the Churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christian and, therefore, cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her on her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not." 
  • An article discussing this statement, and Tolkien's reply, states that "no article of Christian morality is intended exclusively for Christians," and so on and so forth, but... No. Let's not have the laws of the State dictated by the tenets of any one or number of religions. Please. 
  • If Quiverfull were so intent on raising big families in order to do God's will and stage a peaceful political/religious takeover of the country, you'd think that they would be interested in adoptions, which would not only provide homes to those in need (God's will) but reduce The Opposition by one while raising their own numbers by the same, instead of just raising their own numbers by the same through birthing (political/religious takeover of the country). 
  • The above might be considered a case where you'd expect a smart person to not be so stupid as to actually come right out and say this, but if Quiverfull happens to somehow come across this post and think that I had a good idea, then I believe it to be a sufficiently low risk, one not worth worrying about, that they will be able to do this in such great numbers as to actually swing the balance of power. As Scott Alexander points out, there's like a 20% retention rate. And in the meantime some homeless kids gets three square meals from a family that is significantly less likely to beat them. Quiverfull. Quiverfull. Quiverfull. 
  • And now I have called up that which I cannot cast down. 
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