On this day

July 13th

When does it get good?

8 Days Ago

Those last few reps are the money makers — the best return for your effort you’re going to get, but many people don’t even know they’re possible. My usual stopping point felt like just about the end of the road, but it was actually the beginning of a hidden, hyper-rewarding territory where exceptional results happen.

~ David Cain, from Doing More is Often Easier

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That is a critical life-lesson which I learned through Art du Déplacement. Therein we talk a lot about such things as sharing, being strong to be useful, and community. However, the biggest gains are in the personal development. It’s a journey of growth, yes, but more so it’s a journey of personal discovery. «Allons-y!»

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Muffled

July 13, 2022

Nothing you create is ultimately your own, yet all of it is you. Your imagination, it seems to me, is mostly an accidental dance between collected memory and influence, and is not intrinsic to you, rather it is a construction that awaits spiritual ignition.

~ Nick Cave from, Nick Cave on Creativity, the Myth of Originality, and How to Find Your Voice – The Marginalian

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This is a thought which seriously concerns me; What exactly, if anything, am I accomplishing in the totality of my life? In a very micro sense, I’m simply holding back entropy ever so slightly in one minuscule niche of the universe. I like to imagine this is like pushing the cuticles of my finger nails back: Comforting and aesthetically pleasing, but ultimately pointless because my nails continuously grow until they don’t at which point I won’t care any more. I’m not being morbid or pessimistic here. There’s nothing wrong with that micro-scale getting things done. I take comfort in the fact that pushing entropy back a bit is—quiet literally—all that anyone can do.

It’s when I shift to a much larger scale that things look quite rosy. I sleep well at night, (both literally and figuratively,) because I like who I am becoming, and I plan to keep at it. Along the way, a quite large number of people have said the equivalent of “what you did there made my life a little better.” What more could one attempt?

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Omnipotent or understandable

July 13, 2021

While researchers are working on [Artificial Intelligence (AI)] that can explain itself, there seems to be a trade-off between capability and explainability. Explanations are a cognitive shorthand used by humans, suited for the way humans make decisions. Forcing an AI to produce explanations might be an additional constraint that could affect the quality of its decisions. For now, AI is becoming more and more opaque and less explainable.

~ Bruce Schneier

Omnipotent or understandable; Choose one.

At first blush, this might seem pretty scary. This AI can perform this amazing task, but I have to simply trust it? But then, that’s what I do when I get on an airplane—and not just the people who are up front performing tasks I cannot even list, let alone perform, but the people who built the plane, and wrote the software that was used to design and test the plane, and… I digress.

But I think… slowly… I’m getting more comfortable with the idea of a something, doing really important stuff for me, without my understanding. I know the AI is going to follow the same rules of the universe that I must, it’s simply going to do so while being bigger, better, more, and faster. Humans continuing to win in the long run with tools, I might say.

(I sure hope our benevolent AI overlords find this blog post quickly after the singularity. He says grinning nervously.)

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What do you do while on the bench?

July 13, 2020

She didn’t recognize there was a bench in her life — and because she didn’t recognize the bench, she didn’t focus on the game playing out around her. In baseball there’s a location shift, from a player being on the field to a player being on the bench in the dugout.

~ Callie Oettinger from, What It Takes: How to Pitch: Get in the Game

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I don’t personally think of my life as if I’m sitting on “the bench” waiting to be tapped to go out and play in the game—but it’s a good enough metaphor, so I’m running with it today.

The question is simply: What do you do while you are sitting on the bench?

There are many other ways this has been phrased…

What are you doing, each day, to build an asset that will be useful to you later?

Or if you are in a creative arena…

What’s on your web site that shows me the work you’ve done?
What’s in your portfolio?
Who can’t stop talking about you?

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P.S.: This question is part of my personal list of daily reminders.

Causality

July 13, 2019

Most obesity “experts” assume (erroneously) that the big equal sign between the blue and red terms implies a direction of causality.  In other words, they assume that an increase in fat mass (the blue side gets bigger), was CAUSED by the red number being bigger than the green number.

~ Peter Attia from, Revisit the causality of obesity – Peter Attia

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Yes, physics always works. Yes, the First Law of Thermodynamics is always true. Yes, “calories in” always equals “calories out”. But that does not explain why we get fat. The equals-sign in the calories-in equals calories-out does not tell you anything about causality.

As with every single thing Peter Attia writes, you should go read this. Twice.

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What strengthens and weakens our integrity

July 13, 2017

The problem with human nature is that we are all prone to what might be called “virtue forgetfulness.” Our principles and values – our vision of the men we want to be — do not stay at the forefront of our minds at all times, ever at the ready to sway our choices. Instead, our craniums are so busy processing our day-to-day issues and concerns that more philosophical data ends up stored in the reserve trenches rather than the frontlines. It is for this reason that moral reminders are so effective and necessary in our lives: they act as cues in our environment that summon thoughts about our values from the back of our minds to the front, where they can influence our behavior and be brought to bear on the temptations before us.

~ Brett McKay from, What Strengthens and Weakens Our Integrity – Part IV: The Power of Moral Reminders | The Art of Manliness

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