An Idea For A Story
An interesting idea for a story: imagine in detail a society consisting (before the first children are born) solely of clones of Goethe and Ada Lovelace. “No, no. Let us be clear about one thing: the clones most definitely do not think of each other as of themselves — they compete with enormous intensity, perhaps [...]
“Katie,” I Said
“Katie,” I said, “I think I’m gonna marry you.” And she said, “are you asking me or are you telling me?” “I’m asking you.” “Well, go ahead and ask me then.” And so I did. And she accepted. And we went out into our days.1 This is my sense of what’s romantic. Jonah Matranga : [...]
Whether To Cry Or Laugh
Whether we cry or laugh at something is no more than a question of perspective.
The Tragicomic Sense Of Life
La Rochefoucauld, Chamfort, Nietzsche, Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, the writers of the television show Arrested Development: all of them share a unique version of the tragic sense of life — a tragicomic sense, an ability to laugh at the mindnumbing absurdity of the human condition.
Dreaming Rather Than Doing
Dreaming of great things may not always be more enjoyable than doing them, but it is always easier and costs us less. As such, until we are disgusted with living in fantasies, we will live in them rather than put ourselves through the hard work of making them real.
Do Not Depend Upon Loyalty
Never rely on a feeling of loyalty to provide security. It is only in the rarest sort of man that loyalty lasts through even small changes in situation — and such a man may have other faults that lead to this: absolutism, obduracy and so on.
Stated In A Thousand Ways, An Essential Truth
If you wish to survive among men, learn this: professed motives are less reliable predictors of future behavior than previous behavior. Phrased differently: men are more likely to do in the future what they have done in the past than what they claim they will do. There are exceptions and almost everything beautiful in the [...]
Two Of My Favorite Authors
Machiavelli and Nietzsche are easily misunderstood because one, while reading their work, easily confuses their statements about what men are like with their statements about what men should be like. Moreover, their sense of what should be done to improve men is carefully informed by their sense of what can be done, so that their [...]
My Two Main Values
The two traits I believe we must invest most effort into encouraging are goodwill, which is the overflowing desire to help others when one sees that helping them will benefit them far more than it will cost oneself, and intelligence, the ability to recognize patterns, to learn quickly and to compute things accurately.
Simple Experiments In Groupthink And Mind Control
Reading “The Illusion Of Conscious Will” recently has helped to bring several isolated patterns I’ve noticed into focus. Both are easily confirmed by experimentation, though if more people learn about this it will likely become harder to perform such experiments. The first is a simple exercise that will prove to you that you can manipulate [...]