NieR:Automata
Let us start with the proposition:
So long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood.
What do we have at hand for such a lofty goal?
The materials as a whole can be called “experience”. Whatever you experience is the only method of information input you have from the world. It does not matter if it’s through your own senses, by someone else’s words, or through reading text and looking at pictures: that is experience. Without experience, you have nothing to work with. You must experience in order to understand.
The tools as a whole can be called “thought”. With thought we remember; compare one past event to the next. Perhaps notice patterns here, perhaps guess causes there. We assume meaning and connections so they can be found, and hopefully, when one is found, it allows us to gain an understanding of the world; that is to say, to predict the future.
The final category, of the plan on what to build, can be called “decisions”. The world is vast. The world has many things, and even more relationships between. Which of them do you want to understand? In what way do you want to understand them? These are not given through experience, nor will you find them in comparisons through thought. These are not about the world. They are about you. Just as you must decide to build an understanding, you must also decide what form that understanding will take.
This is where I decided to start writing my understanding of human thought and human civilization.
This is where the enemies number the most. Those that number against the above tenets – the principles that say that knowledge is possible – are vast. They are so vast it is useful to think of the world as consisting of two kinds of people: you, and everyone else.
Everyone else will lie to you. Everyone else will gaslight you. You might lie to yourself too, but you are also the only one who can build your understanding. Everyone else can only and will only tell you that knowledge is impossible and you are delusional.
Among them are:
– Utopia/Equalists: They will say you can’t separate people into different groups.
– Bigotry/Womanism: They will say you can’t think things because someone might feel bad.
– NAXALT/ESID/Platonism: They will say you are wrong because you are not perfectly consistent.
– Studies/Experts/Numericism: They will say you need the fancy letters and tabled numbers.
– Management/Authoritarianism: They will say you don’t know all the details.
– Straight Up Lying/Journalism: They will fabricate things simply to contradict you.
– Bootstraps/Americanism: They will imply only the lazy embark on your endeavor.
It is not possible to respond to all of them, much less to any particular point.
Thankfully, it is also not necessary to respond. We’re after an understanding of the world… and they don’t have it. Not only don’t they have it, they aren’t looking for it. Not only aren’t they looking for it, they don’t even understand the concept of looking for something. These enemies are not an opposing army; it’s not your red team versus their blue team. It’s your red team against the insects, the animals, the trees, the flow of the river, the rain from the clouds, the sun in the sky. They’re fighting you, but not on the same level. They’re fighting you on something else entirely.
A concept that generally explains their behavior: they are talking about their dick. How long and how wide it is. How long they can go, how long they can… and so on. They usually don’t use the exact reference, but all in all it’s the same sentiment. For example: why does it matter that some idea I come across or decide to build might hurt someone’s feelings? Unless the objective in question involves other peoples’ feelings in some way, why would such a point be relevant? Because people with big dicks care. And if you don’t agree, that’s because you have a small dick. Hey everyone! This guy has a small dick!
Traditionally this was called “morality”, more recently it’s been called “signalling”. I generally prefer modelling it as dickwaving, because that’s usually about as much as they can be bothered to prop up their concerns. Womanism, Platonism, Journalism, all of it can be approximately reduced to “My dick is thiiis big!”. It’s about them and their superiority. The moment you start talking about problems and solutions, they go away. Or they repeat themselves ad nauseum. Occasionally they violently shut you down. In any case they will never respond to your points.
The points they bring up might be right. They may even be useful. But whatever you do, never bend to the people behind them. They number so many and the motivation behind the words is so obvious and overwhelming, you will, from time to time, forget the desire that started you off in the first place.
You must not lose that desire.
The desire and the understanding are not so much two separate things as they are cause and effect. You must believe that something is there before you can conceive of even the idea to look for it. The common criticisms to this logic are that the thing may turn out to not exist at all, or that you may mistakenly start seeing things that aren’t there. These are valid concerns. But they’re secondary. They only matter after you’ve set off on your journey. Whatever the idea might be, it will not be there if you don’t think it is possible, it won’t ever appear in front of you on its own. This is not true of physical objects, which are there whether or not you believe it. Ideas are different from physical objects in a number of ways. This is one of the important ones: the answer to “If all you have is a hammer, everything starts looking like a nail” is “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.”
You must desire an understanding if you are to have one.
So we start with the proposition: so long as we attempt to understand the world, it can be understood. And when we forget, which we will, this is where we will begin again.
We begin, with the blind faith and belief that it can be done.
“There has to be an answer. You must not doubt that.
If you can’t believe that, why don’t you cry yourself to sleep, and then just give up and die?”
> Intro / “There is Only One Game”
> Technical Implementation / “Capturing the Essence”
> Human Thought Space / “All Else is Halation”
> Gnostic Technology / “The World Beyond Words”
> A Mountain in the Jungle
> Epilogue / “References and Other Rulesets”
Technical Implementation
All things are built on technical implementation.
If you want to buy something, someone else has to be selling it. If you want clean clothes tomorrow morning, someone has to wash it. If you want the light to turn on, you’re going to have to walk over and flip the switch. If the switch is going to turn the light on without burning the house down, the wires can’t be frayed. If your dishes are going to be clean, the water lines must be clear. If someone else is going to sell to you, they need to trust that your money will go through.
We have generally lost the concept that things have requirements outside of time and money. This has been true for a while for bureaucrats of all sorts; the rest of us have gotten closer to them with globalization and internetization. Everything is run by accountants and managers now. When all you have is a spreadsheet, everything looks like a cell; when you have that and consistently get what you want, those few things which fit in cells will appear to explain the world. It doesn’t matter that we call it “information technology”, it’s reduced our understanding because we haven’t thought about what its existence means. Such words evoke the visual imagery of an immaculately clean environment with crisp blue water, clipped green grass, clean white walkways, and towering glass skyscrapers. It doesn’t call to mind anything about how such a world would function in achieving its goals, much less its maintenance, or how it’ll arise in the first place.
You need a map of a place to get there. You need a plan of a place to build it. Today we have only a picture and think that’s enough. Worse, we think it’s a picture of the present. This is not so bad so long as we achieve what we want – and there are an endless number who will talk about how we have things so great today; how nearly everyone has a refrigerator and we live better than medieval kings’ wildest dreams. If a refrigerator or some other modern amenity is enough for you to be happy about life, then that’s great. Good for you. God’s in His Heaven, All’s Right with the World. If you however notice that federal programs that set out to plant refrigerators in poor households don’t really seem to change their nature, or in any other matter don’t think the world is just fine and dandy, regardless of what the television priests say, then there’s more to it. The spreadsheet mindset is obviously insufficient. The understanding of the world has holes which require something else to improve. There is more to the world than employment rates and GDP. There exists more fundamental materials than just man-hours and dollar-quantities.
And we can find out what those are.
If it was built by man, it can be understood by men. Rearranged: If it is to be built by man, then however it will be built must be understandable by men. Once upon a time, every place everywhere was the hypothetical “desert island”. Anything any of us have beyond that was built at some time by some man, through some complicated, but necessarily comprehensible, set of technical implementations.
In the case of the literal desert island, we have the story of Robinson Crusoe. In the case of the modern version with the zombie apocalypse, we have a whole assortment to choose from.
My personal favorite is the story behind the Transatlantic Cable.
In a sense it’s not as grand; it’s neither building everything from nothing nor about societal collapse. But I feel it illustrates the most important principles. It’s a story about how to take a single step, where the details clearly serve the goal, rather than the all-too-common obverse. It’s also far enough back in time and thought that it’s obvious that they lived in a different world, yet not so far we doubt our ability to relate to them – we’re able to see the fishbowl, yet still properly empathize with the fish.
The plan was to lay a cable to connect Europe and America.
The cable would be for the telegraph, the era was the 1850s, the approximate speed change on message delivery between the two continents from a matter of weeks to a matter of minutes (though a full message would still take hours to fully transmit). Ships were run still on coal and propelled by paddles, and the only reason it was possible at all was because Britain had colonies in the tropical East which happened to have certain kinds of trees which happened to produce a certain kind of material. That material had been used almost since antiquity as toys for children; more recently it was discovered to remove pencil marks off paper. As electrification of cities had not yet occurred (~1880+), this would be the first large-scale usage of the material ‘rubber’. Telegraph lines are electrical, you need to protect them from water along their entire length – in this case, it would be the length of the Atlantic Ocean.
The first cable laid worked only for a few weeks.
It turned out the knowledge of electricity and cable design which had been tested and used at the time were not sufficient to achieve acceptable results over the new 2000-mile system. As it only lasted a few weeks – less than two cycles of communication between Europe and America – many did not believe it was even real, public support was negligible, and it took another five years before enough capital was gathered for another attempt.
The second cable was lost.
Halfway along, in the middle of the ocean, it snapped off the end of the ship. The cable had been designed to resist much tensile force, but for one reason or another, it wasn’t enough.
The next year a third cable was laid with no problems. But this time the mission was not just to lay a cable. It was to also finish the other one. The one that they had lost the previous year.
This was 1866. Long before the age of GPS. They had sextants and chronometers to be sure, so one could know his location on the endless sea to some approximation. GPS has an accuracy of around 5m. Sextant accuracy, depending on the navigator using it and a number of other things, is on the order of 500m~5000m. It was with sextants and paddleships that they would have to use to find a cable in the middle of an ocean. Beyond that it was a matter of throwing a hook off the back, running out the several miles (1mi=1600m) of rope for a few hours for it to hit the bottom, and then sailing around until they found it.
So that’s what they did.
They went to where they lost it, and threw a hook off the back.
Then they sailed around until they found it.
They found it.
It took them two weeks, but they found it. And then, just as they managed to get it above water, it snapped and they lost it. It took them another two weeks to find it again.
This time they did not lose it. Once they brought it aboard, much more carefully than before, they tested it. Who knows if a year at those depths had not caused something to occur to the material? Who knew if, somewhere else along those thousand miles, several miles down, something had not disconnected the cable from its station in Ireland? The general understanding was that the world would eventually erode into the sea, which had a featureless, sandy bottom. This was 1866. Plate tectonics will not be proposed until 1912. Deep-sea vehicles that can look at what’s actually going on down there will not exist until 1960.
In any case, the cable of 1865 happened to be functional.
They spliced it with the cable they had on board, and ran it back the thousand miles to Newfoundland.
The time it took them to lay the cable on their first journey that year took two weeks. They spent a little over a week in port to load up on supplies and eight thousand tons of coal. Their successful return happened four and a half weeks later.
There were now two working transatlantic lines.
The amount of money and time it took to do what they did wasn’t “because” they were using “older” technology. To them, the stuff they were using wasn’t old at all. The ship used in 1865 and 1866, called the Great Eastern, had a screw propeller, fairly new technology at the time, along with paddles and sail, which were the standard. A vessel less than 10 years old, she was upon completion the largest ship ever built, doubling the previous record in both length and in width. Again, mass electrification wasn’t yet a thing, so telegraph cables, especially these ones, were the cutting edge of technology that only the richest and most powerful could afford. Sextants weren’t so new, but what were they going to use instead?
So they threw a hook off the back.
You do what you want with what you got. If you have GPS, use that. No GPS, use a sextant. No sextant, use star charts. No star charts, remember where on the horizon the sun rose that day the best you can, remember where you came from the best you can, sail in that direction, and pray to god you reach port before you run out of supplies.
World War 2 had very few vehicles in it. The majority of logistics and supplies were on horse-drawn wagons. The car had been invented for a while, but those were expensive, and a lot of car companies were building planes. Germany in particular had no oil production of its own and was blockaded from all sides, so they were pressed for alternatives. Economies pre-war were mostly agrarian, i.e. most people were farmers and there was a bunch of farm land. Hence, horses.
In the Cold War, there was a spy plane called the SR-71. This plane leaked oil on the ground. Flying at thrice the speed of sound makes things hot, hot materials expand; the parts were designed to fit together correctly at speed. These and other spy planes would then fly over other peoples’ land and take pictures. On film. The first spy satellites also used film, and dropped canisters with parachutes after completion.
Today, missile interception largely does not exist. One attacking intercontinental ballistic missile can launch several warhead: you cannot do the same with a defensive interceptor. This “cost-exchange ratio” was discovered before missiles became commonplace, and it was clearly cheaper to just fire back. The concept of intercepting missiles was known in World War 2 when only the Germans had them, but it wasn’t possible. There was no computer strong enough and fast enough to figure out how to intercept the target. Computers at the time were mechanical, with gears and shafts. There was also no weapon with enough range or speed to intercept: anti-aircraft guns could not hope shoot down something going that fast. Today, with modern digital computers which we can literally stick in the missile (minus all the support structure, e.g. satellites in space watching for launches), an interception missile still takes years to design and incur costs so large they’re noticeable to world powers. World powers can’t just throw infinite time and money at it. They have multiple things to deal with at any given point in time.
Everyone has multiple things to deal with at any given point in time.
It’s just that almost no one pays attention to what that means.
Perhaps people in the past didn’t understand this sort of thing either, but they definitely don’t understand it today. Through “information technology” everything that actually occurs is reduced some nonsense non-technical non-actionable value, because that’s the kind of thing that fits on a spreadsheet. Dollar values and opinion polling statistics fit on spreadsheets. “Leak oil on the runway” and “Throw a hook off the back” doesn’t.
But “Throw a hook off the back” is what actually does the work. Do what you want with what you got: all things are built on technical implementation. Today and tomorrow, just as it was yesterday and the day before, no matter how many white lab coats with large flat screens there are or how many clean and sleek white unibody high-tech machines roll around, whatever is being done, at the level of things being done – if things are being done – those people are doing their equivalent of throwing a hook off the back.
Let us start with the proposition:
So long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood.
Start with what you know, the results are not the structure.
Throw a hook off the back. And we’ll see what we can find.
Human Thought Space
Knowledge has certain properties.
There are things it can and can’t do. There are places it can and can’t go.
Put another way: our usage of knowledge has certain properties. Or, if you prefer: human knowledge has certain properties. These appendages (among other possible examples) can’t actually be separated from knowledge “itself”; there’s not really such a thing as knowledge that exists outside of our using it, nor is there knowledge that isn’t human. So in a sense it’s all logically equivalent to just “knowledge has certain properties”. But the different phrasing helps gives us an idea on how to approach it. For all the boasting about being in the information age and having access to everything, people have an exceedingly poor understanding on the technical details of what it means to know anything.
About the only thing everyone knows is fact versus opinion. The classical version used on children is ice cream, which is better chocolate or vanilla; the answer is an opinion not a fact. It’s also a complete and utterly useless distinction. What does having these categories accomplish?
Suppose I said vanilla is better. Guess what flavor scoop I’m going to get?
Extending the question makes it even more obvious: if you leave the room and come back, the ice cream disappears, and I say that kid over there stole and hid the buckets, what are you going to do? “Fact or opinion”? Suppose a kid did steal and hide the buckets, and you bring it up to their parents picking him up. Are they thinking, “fact or opinion”? Ridiculous. Fact and opinion are non-actionable categories thought up of by dickwavers. “That’s just your opinion” Of course it’s my opinion, it came out of my mouth. The question is, do you believe it? I make a claim; what is your response? Those two categories don’t help you make decisions. They’re not technical. They can’t be used.
We are interested in what mental processes help us inform action. “Fact”, “opinion”, belief, theory, knowledge, understanding; these and others are approximately the same thing as far as we are concerned, and we are concerned with technical implementation. Technical implementation: out of all those words, for reasons that aren’t important, people seem to have the highest affinity for “knowledge”, so that’s the one I opened with. I don’t think it’s very illustrative, but general-purpose widely-used words and phrases are mostly about signalling and rarely illustrative. Illustrations, as with technicals, are specific first. Here, I like the combination of “human thought space”.
“Human thought space” has certain properties.
There are things it can and can’t do. There are places it can and can’t go.
Some things may have an effect on how quickly you can navigate through the space. Other things may have an effect on how large the space even is. None of these properties or items are properly appreciated today, so it is the obvious result that their understanding is so poor. They’re treated like superfluous decorations, lifestyle choices at best (“opinions”), and easily reversible errors at worst (“oops”).
For example: mental clarity is affected by sleep. If you are chronically lacking in sleep, you are not going to think as clearly. The less you sleep, the more mistakes you will make. You will eventually cause major problems and forget things that would, if you slept well, be perfectly obvious. But you didn’t.
The average response is somewhere along the lines of “just get more sleep”, as if anyone and everyone who happens to be in question is equivalent to an irresponsible carefree college kid. This lack of appreciation for the technical details which determine the conditions of human thought space is what causes people to get “unintentionally” and systematically deprived of sleep in the first place. Which is fine if it’s brushing off someone you’re never going to see again, but – as would be expected – those who are chronically deprived of sleep are common in socially and physically critical positions. The two I’m aware of are doctors and air traffic controllers. I’m sure I could guess accurately at a few more.
There’s also a lot of other of these external affectors (like nutrition), but the probably really long list of those is not particularly important here. We’re not after any list, at least, not one beyond what can sufficiently help us with the specific yet large problem we want to solve.
It so happens the list can be reduced to one item – an internal affector. Something inside human thought space that changes what else is in there, and how we get around inside it. An idea that changes other ideas.
An idea that gives order to other ideas.
Wikipedia has a long list of “Cognitive Biases”; “bias” means “arbitrary personal preference toward error”. These include items which should be at least vaguely familiar to everyone, like the bandwagon effect, dunning-kruger effect, confirmation bias, and hindsight bias, along with quite a few other things, and the expected description then dismissal of each. There’s even a section at the bottom called “Common theoretical causes of some cognitive biases”, linking to a number of other pages of various lengths, some even including math and symbols. All in all, the equivalent of a bunch of D&D role-playing board gaming bespectacled nerds getting together, using long complicated words read from manuals and paired with dice rolls, and the campaign title is “The Quest to Find Out the Reason Why Stupid People are Stupid”. I mention them for the same reason I used the word “knowledge”: everyone has a decent affinity for them.
The other reason is they got pretty close.
At this time on that page there exists a graphic which lays out the hundred or so items in a circular arrangement, with some number of subcategories, and then four large categories which encompass them all. The four categories are:
“Need To Act Fast”,
“Too Much Information”,
“What Should We Remember”, and
“Not Enough Meaning”.
Speed, Sorting, Recall, Usage: these are not just causes of biases.
These are primary dimensions along which human thought space lies.
“It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters only what you can think of in time.”
And there are limits to this. Obvious limits. Individual limits.
Your limits.
What you can think of in time at the time is what matters, not the sum total of all things you’ve think you’ve ever learned or heard of. Not what some dickwaver wants to claim at some other time. Did you get enough sleep? Have you been eating well? What were you thinking about, what were you paying attention to? Did you bring enough rope for the hook to hit the bottom? Did you bring enough coal for the trip back? These are what matter.
These are what’s underappreciated today.
There’s a number of ways you could effectively arrange and order the human thought space; this is the one I prefer, and I think it’s the most important one of them all. It’s not so much because it contains all that much in itself, but because it intuitively connects many other important things.
“It matters only what you can think of in time.”
This line for me calls: What do I know? How do I know? When did I know it? Who did I hear it from? What detail do I know it in, and what paths did I take to arrive at that point?
It turns thoughts from nebulous not-seen not-objects into things that are-spatial and are-physical, thus, even if I don’t really get it at the time, I understand viscerally that it has its boundaries. They might not be height length and width, or even temperature and weight. But they’re something, on some dimension. They’re things that exist, so they’re finite, and finite things have properties which can be found. If things can be found, they can be understood; if things can be understood, they can be grasped.
And if things can be grasped, then they can be implemented for grander purposes.
All things are built on technical implementation. This is how I model ideas so they can be implemented. I can’t know or see everything at the same time, or even remember all the things I have known and have seen, so I need a system. A system of ideas. An idea of a logic that connects and recalls one idea to the next.
An idea-logic. An idealogos.
An ideology.
These are not superfluous decorations or lifestyle choices. These are the fundamental dimensions on understanding, the equivalent of the laws of physics for thought. Human thought space has certain properties. This ideology will help us remember some of it.
When I was thinking and figuring out the problem, I didn’t spend too much time on this step. It was a thing I came back to after getting lost more than anything else. The line I’ve been quoting is from The Book of Five Rings, which, along with the Hagakure, are called ‘the books of the samurai’. They’ve been around me for a while so I’m intuitively familiar with the properties of the tool/model, even if I wasn’t clear where or how specifically beforehand it’d be used at every point on a project of this scale.
In writing, I felt “It matters only what you can think of in time” needed to be specifically explained at some length. A number of things I will say, including at least a few critical ones, have the risk of causing an unconscious flippant dismissal because the words will seem to form tautologies.
A “well duh”. Or a, “yeah, I knew that”.
But it doesn’t matter what you know.
And there are ways of getting to the right idea. Faster, more reliably, and more ahead of time.
It is true that each thing could simply be extended so that each is a path rather than a step, but for many of the ones ahead I decided to only explicitly note it here beforehand instead. Certain things are much better quickly and in quick succession, and only have certain effects when presented in that way. In this case, I desire those effects. But I also want their component parts, completely foreign to common discourse, to be properly grounded. If the best I can get is isolated and in simple contrast beforehand so that eventually and unconsciously the principle may be discovered, then that’s what I’ll take.
The technical implementation of my understanding – as far as my ability in writing can go and how much time I’m willing to spend and so on – means that this plane will just have to leak oil on the ground.
For me, it’s been leaking for a long time. For you, hopefully not so much.
Hopefully, it will all fit together now at speed.
Gnostic Technology
The world has certain properties. There are things it can and cannot do. There are places it can and cannot go. Let us start with the proposition: so long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood – specifically, human civilization. If all things are built on technical implementation, then civilization too has parts which we can examine and use to reconstruct the nature of the whole.
A thing is defined as how it behaves and operates – that is to say, what it does.
What does civilization do?
Throw a hook off the back: let’s say civilization gets together for a single simple yet large project. This is a knowable step which definitely (i.e. “by definition”) contributes to the whole, and being a large project, it would involve theoretically the largest proportion of people, thus being more fitting to help determine what civilization is. You may replace my example with any particular one you prefer and fill in your own details;
I will pick the building of a battleship.
Not only are they large projects, battleships are the greatest moving mechanisms ever built, the single most glorious monument to its creators’ capabilities.
Question:
Who exactly is the creator of a battleship?
A battleship is generally recognized as a product of a country. What is a country? A country is generally recognized by the two-dimensional shape of its political borders as they hit natural coastlines, centerlines of mountain ranges, historical treaties, and so on.
Does this two-dimensional shape covering vast amounts of space build battleships?
No.
Then what is the use of this two-dimensional shape in regards to building battleships?
There isn’t one.
This kind of problem will be frequent and reoccurring.
We will largely choose to chase our objective.
Countries are mostly empty – empty of people. There is only civilization where there is people, and people tend to be together. Usually, they congregate near water. Better yet, where fresh water meets the sea. These don’t exist everywhere, and if another group is already in the area, for water or for any other reason, people will usually either join that one, or go somewhere else, far away. What they don’t do is get a census and map, calculate the average, then some other math to find what coordinates and what size plot is theirs. There is a number of actual reasons; none of them have geographic uniformity in mind.
As for everything else a country is made out of: they don’t matter. The trees, the grass, the sand, and the fish. It can be said that having a nice climate with nature to relax in or an ease of access to various materials is related in some way. But we need to start somewhere. For me it’s obvious, if not just take it as an arbitrary assumption; we’ll say for now that only people matter in building a battleship.
When a country builds a battleship, it means only the parts of that country that can help in building a battleship, build the battleship. The rest of the it may serve any number of other purposes, or perhaps not at all and are even a nuisance; in any case it’s not all the land or the people, not even if you count up the farms including the food supply chain that keeps everyone alive. There are more people doing more things than just your battleship, even if it’s a total war economy and even if you are literally only fielding battleships – someone has to be making pencils and paper, utensils and clothing – farms keep those other guys alive too.
So which parts build battleships?
Shipyards, for one. So that part would be near a body of water, preferably one that connects to the oceans and isn’t some isolated lake. I imagine really large steel forges would be needed, along with iron supply, so unless the shipyard is also near some mountains or wherever iron is mined, the “building” will occur in at least two places. People who are familiar with manufacture of ammunition in some way would be recruited. A university or some place that has engineers and knowledge would be needed to make firing control computers. The navy would probably be consulted as to what kind of design they’d prefer depending on their doctrine. A whole number of bureaucrats would be needed to keep track of information going here and there. And of course, the food supply chain and all the other basics.
I’m probably missing some things.
But it’s not too important. We have an idea on what to look for now.
And we have a grasp on the general principle we came for.
A country is not monolithic, it is its civilization. A civilization is not monolithic, there is only civilization where there is people. Even when a civilization comes together for a great project, it isn’t everyone in it doing all the same things, it is specific people doing specific things. It’s a really different picture of civilization, a much more detailed one with parts that can intuitively be understood, compared to the extremely well-defined shapes on a map that in totality cover every square inch of land above water on the entire planet which appear arbitrary and opaque. That “political” map is what normally comes to mind when we think of “the world” – that is to say, that map is the world.
Or, was the world. Now we know there can be something different. A map of civilization, one that’d look a lot closer to a map of population density, where things are few and infinitely far between, where borders on a world map would look very poorly defined. Rather than lines running latitudes, longitudes, coasts, and mountain ranges, nearly all of which no one lives in, much less sees… borders are now always people. Borders between the parts of a civilization building a battleship, and the parts that aren’t. Borders between one civilization and the next.
Borders between one civilization and the savage beyond.
And there is a savage beyond.
If you are driving on and then fly off a cliff, it doesn’t matter that, on a map, you go only a distance of five minutes walk from the road. Five minutes walk on a well-lit well-cleaned named street in a city is very different from five minutes walk in nature’s wilderness. It doesn’t matter if that spot on the road is only twenty minutes drive from a decent sized city. You go off that cliff, you are no longer in civilization. You may bring things that civilization made with you, but you are no longer on it. If no one saw you fly off that road, if you weren’t expected that night, or the next morning, or whoever was expecting you next decides it’s not worth looking into; if that cliffside road didn’t have a guardrail that broke to show evidence that something abnormal happened; if under that cliff was a forest and your car didn’t burn, or if something did burn and the park ranger decided to not pay attention that day – the more of those and those kinds of things happen, the further from civilization you get.
The spectacle, generalized: at any moment, if you are alone, you are outside civilization.
Civilization is not out there. Civilization is not some independent abstract entity.
Civilization is here, between you and me.
Everything that civilization has, needed to be built, and everything that’s built needs to be maintained. These are done by people. Us. If we want civilization to be a certain way, then it will become that way. Everything starts with us.
That being said: “we”, too, has certain properties.
There are things “we” can and cannot do. There are places “we” can and cannot go. All things are built on technical implementation – and we already know that human thought space has its limits. Human action space imposes more limits. Human cooperation space…
And if things have limits, they can be known.
What exactly is this “we”?
We know that it’s not everyone. It doesn’t matter if it’s building a battleship or sealing/dealing with a hole in the ozone layer, there is no such thing as something that involves everyone. In at least the current standard usage of the word, even the word “everyone” isn’t everyone: it refers to only all people who are currently alive. What about the ancients? What about posterity? Are they not people too? In quite a number of analyses and decisions, to say that those groups can be “pretty important” would be quite the understatement. Yet, neither the past nor the future is included in “everyone”. Even as it is, just everyone on the planet today is unwieldy. It’s impossible to understand.
We know when something exists, it is specific, and the result of specific people doing specific things. “Everyone” was sufficiently specific when contrasted to nature, but it’s not good enough anymore.
What does civilization have?
Running water, stable food supply, in this age electricity, in any age material search, procurement, and processing. Language, culture, markets, policy and conflict resolution, some kind of future to look forward to.
“Everything starts with us”: Who exactly is doing what?
A handful of people “do” almost everything.
All the things above are largely the results of large organizations, each comprising of hundreds to hundreds of thousands, which do approximately what one or two people say. Running water isn’t a bunch of people standing in line each handing the other a bucket with everyone being equally valuable. It wasn’t like that when it was wells and aqueducts, it’s not like that today, and it’s not like that for anything else, names like “free market” and “democracy” or not.
There are people who make decisions that affect more people, there are people who make decisions that affect less; it so happens that it has and will always be true that a handful of people make decisions that affect almost everyone. These people are called the elite. They are elite because they make significantly large decisions – while we have tools like hammers and computers, their tools are companies. They de jure own large chunks of “the economy”, and by extension, de facto own large chunks of everything else. Civilization does what the elite wants…
…if they do their part correctly. All things are built on technical implementation. The elite, too, need to wield their organizations in a certain way in order to get what they want. Fail that, and they may eventually find themselves no longer elite. Fail enough, and eventually there’s no longer a civilization.
For a tool like a hammer, the technicals are in materials science, physics, and ergonomics.
The technicals on how to design an organization of people achieve an objective is: how “management” treats its “workers”. Organization. Policy.
“Culture”. “Teamwork”. “Quality”.
While these and similar ideas are shamelessly wielded by flagrantly distasteful people today, they are distasteful rather than silly because there is something valuable behind it. We know these are important. Somehow we know, even if we haven’t experienced it ourselves. Even if we can’t recall any specific example.
I now provide a specific example.
“The story of this factory is a famous one among car people–
it’s taught at business schools.”
In 1982, General Motors closed down its assembly plant in Fremont, California. At the time, GM was the world’s largest car company, and it closed down this plant because of its constant production problems. It was also manned by “the worst workforce in the automobile industry”. It wouldn’t be surprising if those words came out of GM, but they didn’t. Those words were from United Auto Workers, the union.
Drinking on the job, sex with hookers in the parking lot, average of one in four people not showing up on any particular day, deliberately sabotaging this or that part and whatever happens happens – and that’s just from the records available today. If you can imagine it, odds are, they probably did it.
Around that time, GM was having trouble with smaller cars. They had to build them due to government emission requirements, but those cars were always at a loss. Coincidentally, Toyota was also running into government issues. They were small, but rapidly gaining enough market share that Congress was pondering import restrictions. So Toyota was looking into building cars in the US. But they wanted some help. Toyota had only manufactured in Japan, specifically, in a city named after them: of their 16 plants in Japan today, 13 of them are in or near a city that changed their name to indicate the company’s local relevance.
Toyota looked to GM. Toyota would handle the factory side of things, GM would handle marketing and the rest; GM would learn how to make cars more cheaply, Toyota would get around import restrictions. For the plant, GM offered up Fremont Assembly. UAW for their part said they wanted the joint-venture to rehire the same people. Toyota agreed, and they ended up rehiring somewhere around 90%. Fremont Assembly was renamed to New United Motor Manufacturing Incorporated. It began production December 1984.
And the day NUMMI opened, the world’s best cars were coming down the line.
That’s not hyperbole.
NUMMI made cars at the Japanese standard, the highest standard, that is to say, way above GM’s. Number of man-hours spent per vehicle halved: it literally took half the manpower to make the same amount of stuff, and that stuff was made was better. In defects per hundred vehicles and basically any metric you can think of, there were similarly massive improvements.
And it was done with people who were drinking on the job and having sex with hookers in the parking lot. “Were”: they stopped doing that. They showed up, and they built cars. “Several told us they enjoyed coming to work for the first time.” The worst workforce was, suddenly, making the best cars anyone could find.
How did they do it?
“Several told us they enjoyed coming to work for the first time.”
They built better cars by changing how the people felt.
A car is made up of many parts, but aside from being a product made of metal, it is also a product of human emotions. Cars are built by men, and just as it was with the doctors who get no sleep, a man’s emotions is not an unrelated item to the outcome of his task.
When a car is moving down the assembly line at a rate of one a minute and the line is three miles long, no one knows exactly what is happening. No one worker can see all of what’s going on. No one manager can see all of what’s going on. No one mortal can see all of what is going on, even if he isn’t sitting down in an office in a different building. But each worker can see his part. And each worker further down the line has a chance to see some of the results of all the other workers that came before him.
If a worker doesn’t like his job, his team leader, the management, or just spilled his coffee that morning, he’s going to do a poorer job. Some of those actions may be said to be a result of intentional reasons, others, written off as “having a bad day”. But all of what they can do is within their thought space, and the thought space shifts based on emotions. Better emotions, better thought space. Better thought space, better results. If you feel a certain way, you will start seeing things that you wouldn’t if you felt another way. It doesn’t matter what a camera sees. It doesn’t matter what someone else sees. It matters what you see – in this case, what the worker sees.
Cars don’t get made in a car factory just because “that’s what car factories do”. Cars don’t work just because “they should”. All of those things come together, or don’t, due to human action. Human action is a result of human thought space. And human thought space is a result of, among other things, human emotion.
NUMMI imported the philosophy of Toyota, which stressed first and foremost the importance of continuous improvement and respect for people. In an organization, these two are the same thing: one is the cause, the other is the effect. People naturally want to perform well at their jobs. People want to do better every day. People especially don’t like making mistakes. But that’s working alone. With organizations, this also depends on how people treat each other.
All accounts of “labor-management relations” in Fremont Assembly describe it as “war”.
NUMMI put everyone on the same team.
The most famous symbol of the culture shift was the andon cord, “andon” being a loanword from Japanese now standardized due to NUMMI’s success. The andon cord is a cord above every worker’s station that, on a pull, would call a team leader over to help. If the team leader was unable to resolve the problem in time, or otherwise decided that it was serious, he would let the cord’s timer run out, and stop the entire line. Quality came first: that is to say, it was more important to get each car done right, than to get more cars done. Which led to more cars getting done, because errors weren’t being fixed later.
The andon cord was for the workers to catch errors. And the management supported the cord being pulled. They put it there. GM had red buttons that stopped the line too, but they were placed up to 75ft away. Walking 75ft is quite something when the line is moving at a car a minute. Its placement reflected its meaning: You weren’t supposed to push it. Sure, it’s there for a reason. There’s also a reason it’s all the way over there. Toyota replicated their own system at NUMMI brought the button within arm’s distance of everyone. It also was no longer a button, no longer something you had to look for specifically and hit it. Just reach up to the approximate height, and pull down: the point became a line. That placement and shape reflected its meaning, too.
Error-catching was part of a larger ideology.
Everyone was expected to inspect what they could in every car as they passed, solve problems, and note improvements that could be made – and in turn, management would do what they could to implement suggestions, make life easier, and make cars better. All things are built on technical implementation: this means that there’s always more details. Humans make mistakes. Machines make mistakes. Everyone and everything makes mistakes. “Mistake” simply means deviation from the idea in mind, which will always hyper-defined in one area and nebulous in the next. What we can do is do what we can now with what we have, and improve what we can the next time. In an organization, a continual project with multiple people working on multiple things, none of which are independent, this means “teamwork”. At some point in time, the andon cord didn’t exist. It, and many other things that we won’t go into here, was created because people thought and found it’d make doing things correctly, easier.
“People” – probably the worker doing it. The management and engineers listened, brainstormed some things together, and implemented a solution. While certainly there’s outside research going on in new materials, new aerodynamics, new more efficient engine design, the assembly and the running of a factory is technology that goes into the car too. All things are technology. All things can be improved.
Better cars are made by changing how people feel, change how people feel by putting them on the same team.
How did NUMMI put two sides of a “war” on the same team?
Same lunchroom. Same parking spaces. Division 1 classifications reduced from 80 to 1, skilled trades reduced from 18 to 2. Everyone on the line knows every other job on the line, everyone is allowed to do repairs. No seniority benefits. Organization was by teams rather than by skills. Bonuses for suggestions that get implemented. To counter drinking on the job, they even paid extra if you didn’t leave for lunch.
Before it opened, it flew all management and all 450 team leaders (about 1/5 of all line workers) to Toyota City for three weeks of training, including working on the line as a team member with the Japanese already familiar with the system and ideology. When it opened, and throughout its duration, Japanese management was present. They moved to California to oversee operations personally – including Tatsuro Toyoda, one of the founder’s grandsons.
It’s easy to say you care. It’s also easy to show you care.
It’s different to always and continuously go the extra mile because you give a shit.
That’s what GM didn’t do. They didn’t bother with the system behind it.
“Workers could only build cars as good as the parts they were given. At NUMMI, many of the parts came from Japan, and were really good. At Van Nuys, it was totally different.
The team concept stressed continuous improvement. If the team got a shipment of parts that didn’t fit, they were supposed to alert their bosses, who would then go to suppliers and engineers to fix the problem. All the departments in the company worked together.
But Ernie’s suppliers had never operated in a system like that. If he asked for fixes, they blew him off. And if he called Detroit and asked them to redesign a part that wasn’t working, they’d ask him why he was so special–
they didn’t have to change it for any other plant, why should they change it for him?”
“There was no vocabulary, even, to explain it. So I remember, one of the GM managers was ordered, from a very senior level– came from vice president– to make a GM plant look like NUMMI. And he said, “I want you to go there with cameras and take a picture of every square inch. And whatever you take a picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.”
Immediately, this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy employee motivation, we can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not something you can copy, and you can’t even take a photograph of it.”
“You had asked the question earlier, what’s different when you walk into the NUMMI plant? Well, you can see a lot of things different. But the one thing you don’t see is the system that supports the NUMMI plant. I don’t think, at that time, anybody understood the large nature of this system.
General Motors was a kind of throw it over the wall organization. You know, each department– we were very compartmentalized, and you’d design that vehicle, and you’d throw it over the wall to the manufacturing guys.
And they had to deal with it. And, I mean, you’re in there. You’ve kind of put your heart and soul into making this whole team concept work. And now you’re the messenger that has to go out and say, look, guys, even though this is the way the system’s supposed to work, and these are my issues, I’m not going to be able to solve them, and you’re going to have to deal with it.
And it was destructive. It was detrimental. I mean, no question about it.
You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. I’ve often puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized, we were asking all the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture thing.
All of our questions were focused on the floor, the assembly plant, what’s happening on the line. That’s not the real issue.
The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that have to take place in the organization?”
When NUMMI opened, GM was seven times the size of Toyota.
That changed because Toyota paid attention to the problems of human technology: how to get organizations of people to treat each other, how to get individual people to believe the right things and act well on their own. It’s the result of taking human cooperation and human action space seriously. “Everyone” doesn’t exist, you and I do, and that means you and I need to do our part if “everyone” is going to achieve the objective.
This general concept behind “teamwork” is how you technically make people work together.
I use the phrase “make people” deliberately to illustrate an idea. It has a negative feeling to it. As if people are objects to be used and thrown away. But it’s important to keep that model in mind. People can be made to do things. People can be manipulated. A doctor that doesn’t get sleep will perform poorly. An assembly lineman who believes they can do better and will be supported by everyone from their foreman to the president will consistently try to find ways to exceed expectations. Humans have limits, limits mean there are certain properties, and properties can be manipulated with to create different results.
In an organization, these results are largely not a function of what you and I do. It’s not nothing. But it’s not everything. Organizations invariably have some kind of division of labor, a hierarchy, and idea behind it: a “culture”. A company culture, or a civilization’s culture, more or less rests on the shoulders of what the elite do. Do they just say things? Do they just do things? Or do they technically implement what’s necessary to get what they want?
GM had terrible human technology: Fremont Assembly made garbage cars.
Toyota had better human technology: NUMMI couldn’t stop getting quality awards.
“Maybe they don’t say explicitly “Don’t tell me,” but they discourage communication, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a question of what has been written down, or who should tell what to whom; it’s a question of whether, when you do tell somebody about some problem, they’re delighted to hear about it and they say “Tell me more” and “Have you tried such-and-such?” or they say “Well, see what you can do about it” – which is a completely different atmosphere. If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed back, pretty soon you decide, “To hell with it.””
One can say NUMMI treated the workers “more like human beings”. But that’s also just the opposite of the negative “make people work together”. They’re not wrong. They could be, that’s not important. What’s important is they’re not technical statements.
It wasn’t all sunshine and roses after Toyota took over day-to-day operations; one common complaint under the new system was favoritism. And so what? What was any worker going to do about that? Nothing. Or at least, close to nothing. Nothing that’d change the system. Nothing he could easily do would be equivalent to upper management descending from the heavens and smiting whoever was doing the thing in question.
Revolutionary rhetoric (and rhetoric reflects ideas) invariably has lines like, “If we all rose up tomorrow and” this or that or something or other. But “we” don’t exist. You and I exist. You know what kinds of things you and I will rise up tomorrow for? No water. No food. That’s called a riot. Beyond that, it’s not happening. There has never been and will never be a “we all rise up tomorrow”. Revolutions are always a result of extensive cooperation, usually coordinated by a small group, headed by an even smaller handful of people. Those people are called the elite. Revolutions are that way, corporations are that way, civilization is that way. And the rest of us largely do what they want, not because it’s right or wrong, it could be right or wrong, that’s not important, but because human action space exists. It’s implicitly admitted anyways: suppose something is bad. Why do we need to rise up? Why don’t you take care of it?
Because there are things you can and cannot do. There are places you can and cannot go.
It’s true of civilizations, it’s true of organizations, it’s true of you – and it’s true of your mind.
You can’t go just anywhere anytime with your mind. Remember that?
“It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters only what you can think of in time.”
Sleep, nutrition, emotions, what ideas you were raised with, what situations you’ve encountered, how other people treat you, what you want to do with your life: these influence what you can think of in time. And there is always a time. It takes time to think, it takes time to remember, it takes time to go to a friend for a second opinion and go even just, “oh yeah, I knew that”. The purpose of thinking, that is to say, envisioning how things works and what you are going to do in your next few steps, is to come to accurate conclusions quickly so the correct technicals can be enacted and get the results desired before the world has turned, and the situation has changed. Sometimes, it’s the wrong conclusion. Sometimes, bad technicals are used. Sometimes, there is no tomorrow, and the right answer arrives too late.
There exists a human cooperation space, a human action space, a human thought space – and each has their limits. In each, there are things you can and cannot do. There are places you can and cannot go.
“There are places you can and cannot go.”
There’s a “can”.
Where can you go? What can you change?
Well, there’s all the obvious stuff. Obvious doesn’t mean it’s therefore wrong.
Your business. Your team. Your family. Your room. One habit. A single good deed every day. Did you look into their eyes, stop for a moment, and say thank you? Did you pay attention to something you wanted to change for once and do something about it? Did you eat dinner at the table, making sure everyone was there? Did you find out something a teammate needed done, and do it for them? I don’t know anything about running a business, so I probably shouldn’t list any specific examples. But I could guess. You could too.
It’s not nothing. There’s something you can do.
There are outside influences too of course, from those on the situation to on your mind. But whatever control you have on your decisions – which isn’t nothing – is up to you. There are things you can do.
Industrialized society in the information age has a lot of rules and a lot of managing, but it’s not a monolith. It can’t control everything. It exists: therefore, it has limits. It thinks it doesn’t, and everyone thinks it doesn’t, and that’s why everything sucks. Not just the vast majority that the elite control, everything sucks. People think things should magically i.e. by invisible magic and naturally i.e. by the leaves of nature perform the way they’re supposed to, without a care in the world as to what they can and could do. So they do nothing. Or, they think you can do anything you want, all you have to do is put your mind to it, just start a multi-billion dollar business or run for office if you don’t like it so much, sum total of which, surprise, is absolutely nothing. Or, and this is the worst of the three, they believe “the truth is always somewhere in the middle”. As if you could take two things, any two things at all, and the best option is always to throw the two things into some fuzzy goodness-maker that does ????? and out comes exactly what’s perfect for the situation. It’s garbage. All of those are garbage. They’re dickwavers. They don’t tell you anything useful. They can’t even conceive of what it means to do something.
Where you can really go: depends on how you do it.
First, you’d need to believe the place exists.
You need to decide this place is somewhere you can go.
Then, you need an idea on what you’re going to do to get there. The technical implementation. “But how will I know?” That’s the wrong question. Start with what you know, the results are not the structure. Do what seems reasonable. It doesn’t have to be great. It doesn’t even have to work. It just has to do something you can already understand, and from there you get results and it can be improved. If you need to find a cable on the bottom of the ocean and all you have are sextants and a hook, that’s what you’re going to use.
Then it’s a matter of whether or not you happen to get there.
If you don’t get there, but can try again, then first you’d need to still believe it’s possible. Try changing up your technicals somehow. Then take another shot.
Of course, there’s also the possibility that you can’t try again, because you’re dead. Either literally dead, or lost hope, or decided it was impossible – any of these things informs action, namely, to stop, which means that it will no longer happen. If, for whatever reason, it comes to you, you wouldn’t be able to recognize it. It’s gone. Because you stopped believing in it, the place is no longer there.
There is a world outside of you, a world outside of your organization, a world out there outside of civilization. No one knows the future: no one knows what is going to happen next. We can make some guesses, some of them pretty good guesses. But no matter how good they are, they are 1) guesses, and 2) not actually the future. So they’re probably going to be wrong at one point or another. Once upon a time, Rome ruled the world. Then, it was Mongolia. Then it was Britain. Currently it’s the United States of America. Yesterday the biggest car company in the world was General Motors. Today, it’s Toyota.
Each time something changes, it was due to things that didn’t exist – until they did. They were causes that could’ve probably been found out, but “no one” believed them, and if you don’t believe in something, it doesn’t exist. And there’s always something you don’t believe in. That’s why there’s change.
It’s not wrong. That’s just how it is. Human thought space is limited. You have believe some things and not others, focus on some things and not others, if you are going to get anywhere. You can only think and know a few things. It’s impossible for anyone to know all what’s really going on in a civilization, in an organization, in a building, in their own mind. People can spend their whole life and not get a hold on a single one of those, let alone do all of it “in time”.
There’s always more things.
Always more unknowns. Always a greater, savage beyond.
What we can do is recognize where our knowns end and the unknowns begin.
What I can do is help you remember where your knowns end and the unknowns begin.
It’s easy to have the right idea. It’s hard to keep it.
Having the right idea is as simple as someone giving it to you. There are details there too, like discovering the person with the right idea to begin with, but more or less that’s as hard as it gets. All you need to do is hear or read it, and then you have it.
But you only have it for that moment. You may have spent a couple of minutes, a couple of hours, a couple of days, a couple of years, or even your whole life hearing about it. Some people go their whole lives without learning anything. Being given something means it can only stick for so much. There’s the time part: even if you’re a live-in apprentice, the master only spends an amount time with you. It’s some amount. It’s not like he’s actually there watching literally everything of every step of every second.
Then there’s the complexity. If you tell a kid that thing over there is a tree, what do they understand out of what you said and did? They could’ve seen the pose. They could’ve seen the forest. They could’ve seen the tree. Or, they might’ve seen the color green.
Let’s suppose that the master did actually hold your hand everywhere, did the parts for you, put food in your mouth for you, and so on. Imagine something like watching a livestream of someone’s life through their eyeballs, except you can also feel the heat, your muscles get exhausted from exertion, and all the other experiences in life. Suppose the master shows you literally everything. That still doesn’t mean you understand any of it, much less understand it the way they wanted you to understand it. The world is complicated, there’s an infinite number of moving parts. What parts relate to which other parts? How do they relate? How should they be simplified and understood? Words and experience can only point out a limited amount of things – the rest is up to you. There has never been an apprentice that fully copied his master, and if there was, and the next apprentice did the same, that’s where the tradition died. There are always more unknowns, and you have to constantly fill it in.
And you can only do things in your own way.
Keeping the right idea involves doing things your own way.
An idea is a piece of equipment. It has certain requirements, takes up a certain amount of space, and has certain uses. Your mind has some sort of environment to it; presumably, you’re familiar with a decent amount. That’s where all your other ideas/equipment are. If you are to keep an idea, your new equipment must integrate properly with all your other equipment. If you don’t integrate it, and instead put it “somewhere over there”, it’s probably going to get lost, and you’re going to forget it. It doesn’t mean it’s gone, it’ll just take a while to find it. That’s a “oh yeah, I knew that”.
How to integrate your new idea with your old ones is up to you. You could just jam it in and hope for best. You could find out that it does basically the same functions as one already existing, throw out the old one, make slight modifications and you’re set. It could turn out to be the case that, while it sounded nice, you picked up the idea for reasons you don’t really understand yet, you don’t really know how to integrate it, and you really do have to just put it “somewhere over there” for now.
The ideal case is the new idea fits neatly and easily into the old ones.
The ideal method of organization of ideas maximizes the ideal case.
How you organize ideas is an ideology.
Throughout this piece I have repeated myself a number of times. I did do some of it intentionally, most of it wording for rhetorical effect. The rest of it is because it’s what I found. I started off trying to understand the world, and everywhere I looked, this is what I found, connecting all the parts.
“All things are built on technical implementation”.
“Start with what you know, the results are not the structure”.
“Human thought space has certain properties”.
“It matters only what you can think of in time”.
It was true at the top level, it was true at the bottom level, it was true at every level in between – and more. There turned out to actually be a top level, civilization does actually stop at very obvious points. But the bottom turned out to not exist.
It’s easy to say people only have sight in a some-degree cone which can see to such-and-such size details at such-and-such distance, have hearing that can only detect this amount of pressure/decibels, beyond this it’s a matter of what they hear or read from other people etc.. But there was more than that. People don’t really know or control themselves either. Just because it’s in your vision cone doesn’t mean you see it. What you see depends on what you’re looking for, how well you’re looking for it depends on how you feel, and a whole number of other things, things that cannot be discounted.
And I knew all this. But that’s not the point. I never thought of it in time.
And suddenly, I was thinking of it in time. Suddenly, a single principle could toke me from the heights of what civilization can do all the way to the depths of a single man’s emotions. No longer was it this “physics” this and “psychology” that. No “well [that saying] is true but what about [this other saying]”, no “oh yeah, i knew that”, no “duh”. This was true everywhere I looked, and it took me anywhere I wanted. It covered everything that was possible to know, from the start of discovery, to the recall of memory.
It’s a transportation system across ideas, and it itself is an idea with the same properties.
It’s fractal.
Usually my problem with new ideas is I forget.
This idea was the opposite: I couldn’t stop seeing it.
I know that that means it’s better than a lot of the ideas that came before. But I also know that I will eventually stop seeing it everywhere. It has to be that way. People forget. People try out new things, and when trying out new things you have to, to some degree, let go of existing methods. There’s also all the things already discussed ad nauseum about the human thought space. Even now, there’s probably areas and things where I’m not actually applying the principle to, I just don’t know it.
For when I forget, I’ve come up with something that recalls the idea.
I felt the “think of in time” line could be improved. Like the red button vs the andon cord, it was invoking things in ways that weren’t as useful as they could be. Perhaps it’s because I really liked, read, and reread the books around the principle. Hagakure is a bunch of short stories and morals about honor, involving cutting down people like this or that. The Book of Five Rings – the actual source of the line – was huge chunks about the literal techniques on how you go about the swinging of the sword cutting down of people like this or that. Perhaps it’s because I’ve run into a bunch of “oh yeah I knew that” types, and I really don’t like invoking those kinds of people when trying to understand anything.
The line is a good line, for acting in the moment. And life is always in the moment. A very good line on which to build a decision theory. But the concept behind it can be used to do more.
Like make a map of the territory.
A map that recognizes that it is a map, and not the territory, and reminds you that when you go out into the territory, it’s more than you can ever see.
A good line recalling this concept needs to carry its fracticity. It’d need to talk about the qualities of what you know and what you don’t know, and how one becomes the other. It’d need to talk about you, in such a way that you’d naturally and willingly – you want to – insert yourself into the idea. It’d need to talk about how all knowns have limits and all unknowns have no limits, without doing things like inflating or squashing egos. It’d need to be short; long things are hard to remember. Preferably, it relies on as little technical knowledge as possible so it’s not field-specific, removing resistance against generally using it.
Preferable, it doesn’t rely on the words at all, but calls some image, with feeling, from instinct.
These and other similar conditions are ones I believe I have largely fulfilled. I’ll tell a short story now, but other than the first few paragraphs and unlike basically the rest of this piece, I didn’t plan what was going to be in it. I’ve never known an oral tradition, but I imagine it’s something like this: made of small yet important bits consisting of how to start and how to expand, and then expanding it.
I call it:
“A Mountain in the Jungle”
The jungle is the unknown. The jungle is endless. You can stop anywhere in the jungle, look at something, and the more you look, the more you will find. You can’t see very far; twenty steps any direction and it’s all different again. You have to be careful, or else you’ll get lost. And who knows what’s out there savoring for a taste.
The mountain is your home. There’s only one, but it’s high up, and it’s clear. When you’re on it, nothing can hurt you here. You still can’t see an end to the jungle. But at least here, all things are known. Everything works exactly like it should. And every day, you build the mountain, larger and taller. Up towards the sky.
The mountain has existed since before time began. You remember bits and pieces of the past, when the mountain was smaller here or there, but there was always a mountain, and you have always been building it.
Given that all you know how to do is build and how large the mountain is, it’s probably true that the mountain was started a long time ago. Your parents built it, your parents’ parent’s built it, all the way back, everyone was building. That’s your best guess, because you can’t talk to them about it. You can’t talk to anyone about it. You see many people on the mountain, usually they’re building it too, but they don’t know what you’re talking about. Occasionally they say some things that makes sense, most of the time it’s just words and sounds that don’t amount to anything. Once, every couple of ages, you happen to stumble upon someone in the jungle that seems to understand what you mean. But when you bring them back to the mountain, they don’t recognize that anything has changed. As far as they can tell, they’re still in the jungle. They say you must be tired and confused; they’ll bring you back to the *real* mountain. And once you’re supposedly there, you don’t see anything either. About the only things you can really talk about is what’s in the jungle. Which you both agree is very dangerous and full of things no one knows.
And the jungle is always expanding. Every day the jungle is expanding. It’s probably expanding out there somewhere too; as far as you’re concerned, it’s expanding up the mountain. Or the mountain is being eaten down by it. It’s hard to tell. It also doesn’t really matter, what matters is that the mountain gets smaller every day, unless you work hard chopping away at the jungle, go out for materials, and build the mountain higher. You’ll always remember the one time you decided to take a break, see what happens if you just don’t do anything. You stayed right on your spot on the mountain. How long it was isn’t clear anymore. What was clear: the jungle came up the mountain. Frighteningly fast. That was scary.
But some time later, you did it again. You forget why you did it, but you didn’t intend to do it. It might’ve been overexertion after building too hard for too long, might’ve been going on a long journey and failing to find a new place to mine for stone and other materials, might’ve been that one time you followed some guy who said he’d show you a new plant and got lost for a while trying to come home. In any case it happened again.
That time, you decided to measure it.
You placed a few rocks where the mountain stops and the jungle starts. It’s not clear where exactly the boundary is, but it’s as good as you can make it. Did nothing that day, checked back tomorrow, sure enough it was in the jungle now. But it wasn’t gone. The rocks were still there. And it wasn’t that far either. Just a few paces. Did the same thing again, waited another day (that day you remember – you played with really pretty butterflies) and again the rocks are still there. The rocks from the first time are still there too, though toppled over and spread out a bit. Maybe some animal tripped over it? But where they were was just a few paces from yesterday’s rocks, which in turn was about the same few paces from the mountain – and more importantly, the same number of paces you found the first time!
It was a revelation:
The jungle could be known.
Or at least, its border with the mountain could be known. And approximately which way from where the sun rises relative to the mountain you get your building materials, which in turn was about this way from where you got water, and… hmm.
You tell some people about it, most responded in their usual basket of assorted syllables, the rest, as far as you could tell, said, “you are crazy”.
Nevertheless, you start getting ideas.
You do it over and over again (not all back to back; have to keep clearing the jungle and finding food and all the other things) and every time, you find the same result. Well, almost every time. The usual amount is such-and-such number of paces per day. Sometimes it’s a bit more, sometimes it’s a bit less. One time you tried measuring by finger lengths instead to be more accurate, and that worked too. But every once in a while a tree falls down and it expands faster for a while, and sometimes for reasons you couldn’t quite figure out it expanded slower. It was more easy to screw up the finger measurement, and the pace count was about right anyways. Such-and-such number of paces per day. Assuming the sun crossed the sky in the same amount of time every day. And you’re the same size. Seemed like safe enough assumptions. The number of paces wasn’t always the same, but it wouldn’t off by very much, and when it was, there was also usually something obvious that showed why it had changed.
One day you decide to do something different.
You decide you’ll clear a path to the mine.
(Or was it the river?)
You reason, perhaps rather than just clearing the mountain, perhaps other things could be cleared too. Yesterday trying to get a lot of berries you cleared a fairly large area in the middle of nowhere, and, today, when you finally found it again… it was there. It had shrunk, the jungle expanded here at a rate somewhat differently than back home. But it didn’t just disappear. Or at least, you think you found it. It’s probably the same patch though, it was in this direction about this amount of time’s walk from the mountain.
The sun is great and all, but sometimes it’s cloudy, and sometimes, you don’t wake up until the middle of the day. If only you could see in the jungle like you could on the mountain… then there wouldn’t need to be any wondering about where to go, and how to get back. If it’s a straight path, anywhere on the path there’s only two ways to look, one of them is going to be the mountain. If it’s not a straight path, then at least there’s a guide, again with two directions, and one of them is going to head to the mountain.
And it worked. Or it did, after some adjustments.
As discovered earlier, the jungle expanded differently out here, some places really fast, and that meant that some paths were simply not viable. While one place worked just fine with a straight path, most others needed to include a number of funny turns and workarounds. You didn’t know where to go to get around the problem beforehand, but you knew there was a problem, and you knew where it was you needed to go, so you tried this or that and eventually one would get through. Usually. Sometimes it was too much of a bother and there’d just be a patch of jungle inbetween.
For a few of them that were too far, you eventually decided to just build mini-mountains instead. And why not? You know how to build a mountain, the jungle has some height; building a small mountain, one that’s tall enough to see straight from the one back home sort of serves the same purpose. Would still need to trek through the jungle, but it could save a lot of trouble. Smaller mountains have a smaller area that needs to be maintained, which also means a shorter amount of time required to climb and build…. it seemed like a good idea. And for some of them, it was. Others, it just didn’t happen. Tree canopies happened to be too tall, jungle expanded abnormally fast, too far from the mines; the reason was different for each.
But some paths were cleared. And some new mountains were made.
And of course, the real meat and the original objective:
Your mountain is bigger and better than ever.
Some people believe it. Most people don’t. They all seem to make more sense now… maybe something to do with all the new things you’ve been doing? Fewer grunts and yells, more comprehensible signals. It’s still not really how you’d do things, when they say some word they usually don’t mean what you say it to mean, but you’ve gotten more accurate at guessing what they’re saying. And that’s better than before.
Those random guys that came around once every forever, some of them see your mountain now. And you see some of theirs, too – one day they just popped out, like they’ve been there the whole time. You’re able to discuss how to build this or that part, this or that way, this or that material. There’s also those mini-mountains, some of which people have started clearing and building themselves. A couple of them have gotten quite large. So have some of your paths, which some of the people you try to talk to insist are mountains. They could see what was going on for such a long way – how could they possibly be in the jungle?
Just the same – some of your creations could not survive.
As some got built, others got destroyed. The faster you built, the faster some died. On rare occasion you’d see someone take material from one mountain to build another, but often it just disappeared – you’d follow them in the jungle and then at some turn, they’d be gone. It was as if people were making the jungle grow faster than normal.
As if people were becoming the jungle themselves.
Where you could get an answer, through as best you could figure out whatever symbols and sounds they used to mean, they would always say the same thing. As you asked more and more, it turned out, it really didn’t change, whether it was someone who was building or destroying. Now, as you harken back, back when it was just one mountain in the jungle, you remember and see, they have always been saying the same thing:
“I’m building the mountain.
What are you doing?”
Epilogue / References and Other Rulesets
All things have a domain. This is where the domain of this piece ends.
In college I once asked an English grad student a question. She was the TA for the writing class I was in, which covered stuff I learned in fifth grade. At some point it was mandatory to make an appointment with the TA to discuss our writing or something, and I wanted to come up with something to impress her (she was hot. those were some big titties). Something good has to be something I was interested in and knew something about. My problem around that time was I didn’t know when to stop writing. The question I asked was, I forget the words, but it was something along these lines:
“A thesis is supported by an essay. An essay is supported by paragraphs. Paragraphs are supported by concrete details. Presumably, concrete details are supported by further concrete details.
How far down am I supposed to go?”
She failed to give me a good answer.
And I continue to have that problem today.
My first iteration of this piece went 17,500 words in the wrong direction. This piece is written in a file titled “setup6d” (there’s also about that many “collection” .txt’s), and I had a lot planned for this final section. But it’d be too long. Length matters. It’s “all related”, but these technical details matter. So it’s time to stop. It’s time to pull up the hook.
And all the miles of rope.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand a little more about the nature of the problem.
Ever since I started taking drawing seriously, many things not in drawing have simply revealed themselves to me. Drawing is spatial, and I have always thought spatially. “I have always thought spatially” is currently in words, but I didn’t discover that until I took drawing seriously. “Taking [anything] seriously” too. Etc., ad infinitum. Basically anything regarding learning, I learned through drawing. And all things have to be learned – learning just means “input”. Which for me makes sense if I think of it as “seeing”. That’s why all examples I used highlight seeable things.
Drawings can be measured into correctness. You know that one pose artists in movies do? The holding up of a pencil? That’s measuring. This amount of space on the pencil is this amount of space as it appears in reality. You don’t need to know what the ruler says, just how big this looks in proportion to that. Plus or minus 10% is fine, so long as it’s the right 10% – choose what you’re measuring and in what order wisely. Art may be harder to grasp, but drawing is a technical skill. You need eyes, hands, a pencil, and paper: the rest is followthrough.
When I started, all I did was measure.
But one time, I measured my way into something better than the original. It looked good, I overlayed it with the picture I was copying from, but it didn’t match. Traced the lines myself, overlayed with the measured version, still didn’t match. But one was obviously better than the other. My eyes weren’t lying. Photoshop wasn’t lying. And one was better than the other. So the measured one had to be better. That was a breakthrough. That gave me confidence.
Obviously real artists don’t measure everything. That’s not what they do. But that doesn’t matter. Measuring is extremely slow; that doesn’t matter either. What matters is results. And doing something I could do, doing something I understood, I made better results.
“Something I can do and I can understand can make better results.” That was the breakthrough.
I called it,
“Capturing the Essence”.
I never encountered anything that worked like that for writing. In drawing I not only learned how to draw, I learned how to export learning to other things. Now, I at least think of writing as something that can be improved, a skill that exists independently of any ideas that are talked about inside. Make this section longer, make that section shorter, rearrange the sections, change that word out for one that’s more memorable, change that word out for a couple of sentences that would smooth things out… and so on.
Does that make for better writing? I imagine it does. I hope it does. Taste I couldn’t really port over. I couldn’t port over tracing either. Nor my lack of care for intricate detail.
But I do have some taste, here and there. Including one for bibliographies.
I have a taste for bibliographies.
I think saying the purpose of bibliographies is “to prevent plagiarism” is absolutely insulting.
A trick that can only be played on children. No, that insults children, I should be more specific: people with no understanding of the world. It’s the same trick with intellectual property. “If someone has done it before you need to give them credit”. Question: How am I going to know that? How are you going to know that? I’m going to search the whole library to see if someone did it before me? What if the library’s incomplete? What if the Library of Congress is incomplete? And it is incomplete. Even the Library of Alexandria was incomplete. Even 10,000 pages of Google is incomplete, and you’re not going to look past the first 10. Everything is a mountain in the jungle, and the jungle is infinite. Trying to find out if something has been done before you, ever, anywhere, is trying to search the entire jungle. You can’t do it. You are being sent on an impossible task. To make it exceedingly clear: You are being fucked with.
Plagiarism is really about who’s going to come after you for not giving them credit. That is to say: it’s about “who”. It’s power. If you’re small and they’re big, they can take whatever they want and claim it’s theirs. They can even claim they did it first and you stole from them (search: art plagiarism). If you’re really small though, you can take whatever you want, because no one cares about you. No one even sees you. In academia, we see the end goal of this anti-plagiarism device meets perfect information: citations absolutely everywhere. Everyone knows everyone, and everyone is looking for a slice. Names and titles and dates everywhere, every sentence, clogging up the flow of the actual stuff. It’s ugly.
I’m a nobody so it doesn’t matter. I do what I want.
I largely can’t be bothered because citations eat up my time: any time and energy I spend looking into who said what is time I’m not spending doing and finding out new things. All thinking, plus or minus, cites all the way back to the Buddha or Socrates. Guess who the Buddha and Socrates cited? And we want to be like those two guys, right? Not the academics?
It doesn’t matter if someone else found it before me (especially not if I don’t know who did it), I didn’t do it so I don’t get it, and when I do it it’s new to me. The most common thing is people say things that are too vague, the less common but still frequent case is they say things that are obscure; anything that is useful to me I’ve basically had to do myself anyways. So either I spend energy figuring out what people are talking about, and then do it myself, or, I just do it myself. It’s usually not a very hard choice.
But I like bibliographies.
Bibliographies help me remember things.
Other than being spatially gifted/verbally impaired, I have a really terrible memory. The primary reason why I wrote all this and do any thinking is because I can’t remember jack squat. Normal people with good memories, I imagine, are just fine with a bunch of disparate pieces of information. That’s presumably why they enjoy that trivia stuff so much. But I can’t do that. I can hold only a few things. So I need to hold the best few things. As it turns out, there are different types of things, and this type is better than the rest, because it is a single thing yet also multiple things. It requires thinking to produce, and is usually called a “principle”.
“Ideology” is what I’ve called a principle of principles. It’s usually called “epistemology”, but I don’t like that word too much. I like the sound of the word “ideology”. And I can see what it is: idea, logic. Logic of ideas. What the heck is an “epistem”? But back to book-graphing.
Good ideas are not randomly distributed. Someone who’s had a good idea before is likely to have a good idea again; someone who’s had multiple good ideas before is more likely to have good ideas in the future. The world is really big and there’s a lot of ways to see about and think around it. You can only see and do so much yourself. It’s nice to have people who you can use to do additional thinking for you and run into real problems “beforehand”. There’s still the minimum reverse-engineering and implementation costs stated earlier, and it is pretty hard to find someone who’s not just being deliberately obscure (for dickwaving purposes) – but that’s why bibliographies are great! Once you’ve found one good thinker, if he has a bibliography, it significantly increases your chances of finding more good thinkers.
As for the creation side of it, naming sources helps me remember the lineage of ideas.
Lineages are something that turns the dots of ideas into lines: it’s another type of principle.
Some lineages are very important. You need to know who said it and what it was used with etc. to figure something out. Other lineages basically don’t matter and external factors could be rederived offhand. I think it’s rather good practice to keep at least a couple of notes on lineage of each thing around. It tells you where the minimum domains on the things are: “at least according to this guy”.
This section, apart from the bibliography, was originally going to be more detail about me. All things have domains; “of course [A Mountain In The Jungle] is my opinion, it came out of my mouth“. But what do I mean to you? Earlier when I said I wrote 17,500 words in the wrong direction: that was an autobiography. Mostly about the two months that were the primary impetus for this idea. But I don’t think the particular details of that are important anymore. The final theory survives just fine without it – as it was intended to. As for what purpose that served, that is to say, giving you some idea about me, I think what actually appeared in this section is sufficient. More than enough self-referential stuff.
Okay, maybe a bit more. Since I have written them already.
I picked some fights at the beginning. Here are a few of their illustrations before the end.
– Utopia/Equalists: They will say you can’t separate people into different groups.
Equality is mostly a useless concept.
Equal enough isn’t, but then it gets into details, technical details, which these people don’t want to talk about. Is it IQ? There’s literal apes with no whites in their eyes that have higher IQ than some africans and aborigines. “Can function in society” If you ask me, 10x the murder rate and (infinity)x the riot-and-loot-stores rate is a disqualifier. “You’re just a racist” You will find that anyone you ask, from any angle, once you get down to these technicals, will have a different answer for what is equal enough. It’s a fact of life that different things are different. It only becomes a pressing problem when you emphasize this impossibility. That’s why non-“racists” have the “the progressive stack”: they’re always finding more inequalities.
The technicals will get you eventually.
The jungle will get its fair share.
Here’s the bottom line for me: children born from the same parents, raised in the same household, and fed the same food, turn out different. Even the lengths of your fingers are different. Suppose equality is good and you have infinite power (which, I’ll remind you, you don’t). Is it good enough to change that? Go in there and replace parents with government employees? Finger surgeries for everyone? I don’t think equality is good enough for that. I don’t think it’s good enough for basically anything. There’s science men on TV who like to say things like “we’re all made of the same star stuff”. Are you going to start treating cabbages like people? Equalists don’t even treat racists like people, let alone cabbages (which they tend to treat more poorly than cows/chicken/pigs/fish, also made of “star stuff”). Granted, they’ve recently stopped eating cabbages and started eating “Soylent”. That just makes my opinion easier.
Equality is mostly useless.
Using useless things in important and critical ways will get you the obvious results.
– Bigotry/Womanism: They will say you can’t think things because someone might feel bad.
I once passed by Forever21 fairly regularly. Forever21 is a women’s clothing store, presumably the idea is wearing their clothes will keep you forever 21. Now one day I was passing it a thought occurred to me,
“When does a lady become a woman?”.
Or maybe it was “When does a girl become a lady?”.
The answer came fairly quickly: It’s long after it’s already happened. Thirty year old females are girls. Then they’re ladies, and have been ladies since they were twenty. Sixty year old females are ladies. Then they’re women, and have been since they were forty. They are whatever they say they are, whenever they say it. Which naturally extends to: things are whatever they say they are, whenever they say it, and whenever they change their minds. I wasn’t able to truly generalize this at the time. But this was also before the current iteration of MeToo and Rolling Stone.
These people are very skilled manipulating your thought space. And the less in control you are of your thought space, the less understanding you will have of what’s going on, the higher the probability you are going to help cause results you are not going to like. There’s a reason why the Greeks made up the concept of Sirens.
Keep your wits about you around these types. Choose your actions wisely.
They don’t have your best interests in mind.
– NAXALT/ESID/Platonism: They will say you are wrong because you are not perfectly consistent.
ESID is a version of NAXALT used among those who move to Japan to teach English. ESID stands for “Every Situation Is Different”, and it’s used to remind people that, whatever idea they had about Japan before, whatever they had heard, isn’t therefore going to apply to them. NAXALT is fairly popular, “Not All [X] Are Like That”; generalized version of “Not All Women Are Like That”.
I believe the purpose of ideas is to help gain understanding about the world. So, NAXALT/ESID, if it’s a good idea, helps expand understanding. Start with principle, find exception, re-evaluate new possible general case, expand principle.
I ran this idea backwards and I found it didn’t work.
It just permanently destroys principles.
We’ve already done race and women, so let’s use this travel one this time.
Suppose you moved to Japan. You don’t move to “Japan”, you move to a house on such-and-such street in such-and-such city, probably with people to help you with everything being Japanese, and a job doing such-and-such things with Japanese clients… you get the idea. Suppose you do that for a day. ESID, you don’t know everything. Fine. What can you know in a day.
But no matter what you do, it’s the same result.
A week. ESID. A month. ESID. A lifetime. ESID. You know what it means to live in that house, that street, etc.. What about another house on a different street? A different city, a different province? A different job, seeing different people, being in different networks? ESID, ESID, ESID. You can’t say Japan means this or that because ESID. You’re just talking about you.
Someone else though can say things about Japan, because ?????, then it’s not ESID.
“But I wouldn’t say things like that, I’d say it’s because you hadn’t” Exactly.
The jungle is infinite. We can’t clear the jungle. We can build the mountain.
So build the mountain.
All you need to do is keep track of who’s saying what, and know that all these limits also apply to the other guy. If someone says you can’t say something about your experience in Japan, just know he has some background too.
– Studies/Experts/Numericism: They will say you need the fancy letters and tabled numbers.
I fucking hate science.
“Exact science” isn’t an exact science. Even rocket science isn’t rocket science. I would know, I’ve taken some rocket science. There’s some really fucking inane shit in there. “But you haven’t taken all of rocket science” Fuck you.
For example, they have tables for making decisions. That sounds neat you say, make decisions as objective as possible. But tables aren’t magic. All things are built on technical implementation. Tables only say what you fill them with, and you can only fill them with what you have ideas for. What do rocket scientists know about decisions? Not much more than you, because our philosophical tradition doesn’t take decisions seriously, it only talks about “facts”. Rocket scientists know plenty about tables, but when they have to measure the importance of having this feature versus that feature or measuring budget against quality, guess what they do? They say this feature has an importance of 0.3 and that feature has an importance of 0.5.
How did they do that?
It felt that way.
No really, that’s the extent of it. Experienced or not, they pulled it out of their ass, and if the tables end up saying something they don’t want, they change the tables or the numbers until it says what they want it to say. Which is invariably going to happen because people don’t feel or think about those things in fucking numbers. At which point you might as well have just chosen something “subjectively” the first time and written an essay instead. But no. It has to be science. Which means it has to look like science. Which means dickwaving tables.
Doctors are the same way. “On a scale from 1 to 10, how much pain are you feeling?” My chin is detached from my skull and blood is spilling from my hands, what the fuck do you think? Am I talking to someone? Is this a person? Hello in there??
Human thoughts and experience don’t fit perfectly in numbers, believe it or not. They don’t fit perfectly in words either. There may be uses framing things this way or that, but how they’re framed is of utmost importance. And no one pays attention to this.
In highschool AP Statistics the first time p-values were brought up, I asked, “What does it mean to be 95% confident?”. No good answer. Then I was told to assume things are normally distributed, and I asked, “Why would we assume things are normally distributed?”. No good answer. I got the department award for statistics that year. Perhaps that was a coincidence. Perhaps getting a 5 on the AP test was also a coincidence. I wouldn’t know. I still don’t take statistics seriously.
Or maybe, I take it seriously, and no one else does.
But words mean what people use them to mean, and people use science and statistics etc. to mean ^that kind of shit, and I have no particular attachment to the word, so if that’s the name the enemies desire, that’s the name they will get.
– Management/Authoritarianism: They will say you don’t know all the details.
They don’t know all the details either.
Transatlantic cable, SR-71, ABMs, battleships, NUMMI…
Actually, let’s wrap those two big stories up.
The Transatlantic Cable eventually became part of a greater system. The British Empire repeated the feat, pulling a cable across Canada, the Pacific Ocean, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, India, South Africa, and back to the homeland. The system was completed, half a century later in 1911, and was called, “The All Red Line“.
In World War 1, British worldwide communications went uninterrupted.
German connections were cut immediately.
NUMMI produced the world’s best cars until 2010.
In 2009, after nearly three decades of failing to improve its quality and under the 2008 recession, General Motors filed for bankruptcy. Among other things, it pulled out of the NUMMI joint venture with Toyota. NUMMI had a no-layoff policy, one that it demonstrated its commitment to shortly after opening in 1987 and 1988, when slowed production and slowed sales meant 264 workers were technically not needed. Most of the workers were assigned to “kaizen” projects.
Kaizen is another japanese loanword made famous here, meaning “continuous improvement” (“改善”, lit. “change line”). Kaizen was the philosophy of Toyota and NUMMI: everyone can always improve. It was the philosophy my dad taught me. My dad worked at NUMMI. I’ve heard the song of kaizen since before I could speak.
Toyota offered to keep NUMMI open in exchange for some pay cut. I forget the number, but it was a rate that, as my dad said, if anyone had heard about it at the time, “everyone would raise their feet in agreement”. But UAW was “the sole bargaining agent for the NUMMI labor force” by the original contract.
And UAW wanted more.
Toyota pulled out, and opened a few more elsewhere in the country. NUMMI was the first time Toyota had closed down a factory in its 70+ years of existence.
From a business perspective it wasn’t particularly a good idea to begin with. Toyota didn’t specifically need to do a joint venture – at the time, such a thing was unheard of. It was big news. Apparently one headline announcing it read, “Hell Freezes Over”. Especially using a plant known to be sin city. But they did it. Because they wanted to, in their words, learn what working with Americans would be like. It was about learning. After thirty years and now running multiple plants in the country, perhaps they decided they had learned enough.
And yet, they gave huge severance packages.
Every year you worked there, you got one week’s pay. On top of some amount of bonus. And 20,000$ cash – to buy health insurance while you look for your next job.
No one got a penny when GM closed Fremont Assembly down.
Hell, no one got a penny from GM when it pulled out of NUMMI either.
Toyota also did some things under the table – “They told me, “What we are talking about now is not in black in white. There will be no records of this. You talk about this to no one. Not your boss, not your coworkers, not even your wife””. One by one they went behind closed doors with that man in the suit and talked about ?????. (The water cooler ran out a lot that day.) I have no qualms talking about it, but my dad said not to, so out of respect for him I’m cutting out most of it. But I think the concept of it is important. You can guess what was occurring, a hook off the back is mostly sufficient.
The end result: Some people took it. Some people didn’t.
My dad didn’t.
Toyota gave it anyways.
– Straight Up Lying/Journalism: They will fabricate things simply to contradict you.
Fake news is not a problem. I have long since learned not to take them seriously. I keep track of who says what, and if anything comes from “CNN”, or “NBC”, or anyone of the fourth estate, I know what that information means. It’s not a problem.
Does it cause problems? Yes. But it’s a known quantity. I know what to do with it.
In this case: minimize my exposure to it.
All this discussion about how you need to give us a second chance, we check our facts now, you’re taking things out of context, when things are always changing there’s bound to be mistakes, our job is hard, blah blah blah. I don’t care. I could care. But that’s clearing out the jungle. That’s called buying Hanlon’s razor. That’s called not learning your Aesop’s fables. When have these guys shown they cared? Do you know what happens when you turn your back to the enemy?
NUMMI and some other jungles are fun to look around in; this one just sucks. It fucking sucks. There’s not a single thing I can point to like with NASA, “oh we had to time our mars landing at exactly the right moment” fuck you, it takes 7 minutes for a signal to even reach mars and “exact” is a measurable amount of time, either larger than 7×2 minutes (data signal here, command signal back), in which case, fuck you, or it’s smaller than 7×2 minutes, in which case, you’re trying to trick me, fuck you. I’d be amazed if you just told me what kinds of difficulty you were dealing with instead of directly talking about how big your dick was. But journalism is worse. There’s no reference point. Or rather, there’s infinite reference points. And it is all dicks.
Easier to just tell them to go fuck themselves. Which achieves approximately the intended results anyways, and results are what matter. Only people who don’t like it are journalists.
Who can go fuck themselves.
– Bootstraps/Americanism: They will imply only the lazy embark on your endeavor.
These are the kinds of people who say things like, “If you don’t like Amazon or Facebook or Google, why don’t you start your own business?”. Or, “I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, I paid my own way through college working part-time in the summer”.
I hope I’ve impressed upon you by now what the problem with this is.
More importantly, I hope I’ve impressed upon you now how its solution begins.
I’d like to do more. I could go on forever.
But I have other things I want to do.
And you have an approximate idea. So long as you know about where to look, have the some resources, and you start looking, you’ll get approximately what you want.
Throw a hook off the back.
Start with what you know, the results are not the structure.
All things are built on technical implementation.
There are things it can and can’t do; there are places it can and can’t go.
Start with the proposition:
So long as you attempt to understand the world, it can be understood.
I
“Mastery does not normally cross fields.
Epistemology is the exception. Every field of inquiry involves epistemology.”
Alrenous
II
“There are at least three psychological reasons for why most people are deterred from finding the true theory of history. The first is that the vast majority of people only have an implicit theory of history.
(Which is to say: most people do not even have the concept of a theory of history.)
Here’s the problem with relying on your implicit theory of history: it’s wrong, without a doubt. The world is complex, and your theory of history has to explain how everything in the world works. So, without explicitly trying to improve your theory of history, there is no hope: there will be countless things that you have not had the time or the psychological freedom to take into account. Improving your theory of history implicitly is not systematic enough to work.”
On Building Theories of History
Samo Burja
“One of my favorite stories about my wife and myself, when we were in New Jersey, our breakfast table was right next to some windows looking on the garden. We’re having breakfast prior to me going to work. And she says, “Dick, it’s raining.” I look at her and think “What’s wrong with her? She must know that I can see it’s raining”. Then I say to myself, what did she really say?
What she said was: “I’ve had my second cup of coffee and I’m fit to talk to.”
I spent much of that day at Bell Labs watching how much of what we say is not what it appears to be. And it is amazing. The enormous amount of how much of what we say is literally not correct. No way. So the language has a great deal of thing of things more than what you think; our natural language has a great deal of features, which in a language to a computer would not have to have.
Well we have not studied the problem. When I heard the Japanese were planning to write fifth generation computers, the speed was alright, but when they were going to do AI to do things, I thought they would not succeed. And they didn’t. Because they were not profoundly studying the nature of language. And until we do, we will get language like ADA, which are logically alright, but they don’t fit the human analogue to do the kinds of things that a human animal does with language.
Now I point out there are two languages: there is you to the machine, and the machine back to you. They need not be the same language. You want a terse one in, and you’re willing to put up with a rather verbose one coming out. Frequently what comes out is so terse you can’t figure out what it means, and you’re willing to settle with a lot more printout – but not too much. It’s a problem of designing language to communicate ideas to machines.
But unfortunately we don’t know what ideas are, so we don’t know how to do it.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“The story of this factory is a famous one among car people-
it’s taught at business schools.”
This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015
Ira Glass
III
“There isn’t really a problem of induction.
There really is a problem of intentionality. How the fuck do things refer to other things?”
Alrenous
“Suppose you have two theories, A and B. Both completely different psychologically, different ideas and so on. But all the consequences they computed are exactly the same. They may even agree with the experiments. The two theories, although they sound different at the beginning, have all the consequences the same. […] Suppose we have two such theories: how are we going to decide which one is right?
No way. Not by science. Because they both agree with experiments there’s no way to distinguish one from the other. So two theories, although they may have deeply different ideas behind them, may be mathematically identical, and usually people say then in science ‘one doesn’t know how to distinguish them’. And that’s right.
However, for psychological reasons, in order to get new theories, these two things are very far from equivalent. Because one gives a man very different ideas than another. By putting a theory in a certain kind of framework you get an idea what could change. Which in theory A would talk about something, you say I’ll change that idea here, but to find out what corresponding things you’re going to change in B could be very complicated. It may not be a simple idea. In other words, a simple change here makes maybe a very different theory than a simple change there. In other words, although they are identical before they’re changed, there are certain ways of changing one which look natural, which don’t look natural in the other. Therefore psychologically, we must keep all those theories in our head. Every theoretical physicist that’s any good knows six or seven different theoretical representations for exactly the same physics, and knows that they’re all equivalent, and that nobody is ever going to be able to decide which one is right – at that level – but he keeps them in his head, hoping that they’ll give him different ideas.”
The Character of Physical Law
Richard Feynman
“There has to be an answer. You must not doubt that.
If you can’t believe that, why don’t you cry yourself to sleep, and then just give up and die?”
EVA-Beatrice
Umineko no Naku Koro Ni Chiru: End of the Golden Witch
IV
“There was no vocabulary, even, to explain it. I remember one of the GM managers was ordered from a very senior level– it came from a vice president– to make a GM plant look like NUMMI. And he said, I want you to go there with cameras and take a picture of every square inch. And whatever you take a picture of, I want it to look like that in our plant. There should be no excuse for why we’re different than NUMMI, why our quality is lower, why our productivity isn’t as high, because you’re going to copy everything you see.
Immediately, this guy knew that was crazy. We can’t copy employee motivation. We can’t copy good relationships between the union and management. That’s not something you can copy, and you can’t even take a photograph of it.”
Jeffrey Liker
This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015
“Managers tend to believe that if they only knew what was going on, they would know what to do.
It’s called micromanagement.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“The foreman, Mr. Fichtel, said he wrote a memo with this suggestion to his superiors two years ago, but nothing had happened yet. When he asked why, he was told the suggestion was too expensive.
“Too expensive to paint four little lines?” I said in disbelief.
They all laughed. “It’s not the paint; it’s the paperwork,” Mr. Fichtel said. “They would have to revise all the manuals.”
The assembly workers and other observations and suggestions. They were concerned that if two rocket sections scrape as they’re being put together, metal filings could get into the rubber seals and damage them. They even had some suggestions for redesigning the seal. Those suggestion weren’t very good, but the point is, the workers were thinking! I got the impression that they were not undisciplined; they were very interested in what they were doing, but they weren’t being given much encouragement. Nobody was paying much attention to them. It was remarkable that their morale was as high as it was under the circumstances.
Then the workers began to talk to the boss who had stayed. “We’re disappointed by something,” one of them said. “When the commission was going to see the booster-rocket assembly, the demonstration was going to be done by the managers. Why wouldn’t you let us do it?”
“We were afraid you’d be frightened by the commissioners and you wouldn’t want to do it.”
“No, no”, said the workmen. “We think we do a good job, and we wanted to show what we do.””
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard Feynman
“While this is THE classic book on lean production […] They give short-shrift to the real key.
The original researcher for this study was John Krafcik (he later became the President and CEO of Hyundai Motor America). In his own report of the data he pointed out that the skills and motivation of the work force has the greatest explanatory power of assembly plant performance.
Yet this is given remarkably little attention in this book. Had the authors look beyond the automobile assembly even as nearby as the turnaround at Harley Davidson this focus on people might have gotten much more attention. In the case of Harley, there was no way to miss that the key was the people in every factory floor function.
Get the people environment right, and everything else will sort itself out.”
Bill B.
Amazon reviews for “The Machine That Changed the World”
“One thing I really like about the Toyota style is that they’ll put in a machine to save you from bending down. The Toyota philosophy is that the worker should use the machine and not vice versa. Not like some of these plants you read about where it’s automation for automation’s sake.
I visited a plant a while back – they had robot sealer guns but they also had workers who had to check that the robots had done it right and to redo it manually when the robots screwed up. It would be fine if the robots worked perfectly – and the engineers always seem to imagine they will. But they don’t and so the worker ends up being used by the machine.
At NUMMI, we just put in a robot for installing the spare tire – that really helps the worker, because it was always a hell of a tiring job. It took a while, and we had to raise it in the safety meetings and argue about it and then do some kaizen. But they knew. They understood. And they came through. Same thing with installing batteries – they put in a machine to help the worker do a better job. That would never happen at GM-Fremont – you never saw automation simply to help the worker.”
George Nano
The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
Paul S. Adler
“Maybe they don’t say explicitly “Don’t tell me,” but they discourage communication, which amounts to the same thing. It’s not a question of what has been written down, or who should tell what to whom; it’s a question of whether, when you do tell somebody about some problem, they’re delighted to hear about it and they say “Tell me more” and “Have you tried such-and-such?” or they say “Well, see what you can do about it” – which is a completely different atmosphere. If you try once or twice to communicate and get pushed back, pretty soon you decide, “To hell with it.””
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard Feynman
“Ted Holman, a Team Leader in the body shop, argued this way:
“I don’t think IEs are dumb. They’re just ignorant. Anyone can watch someone else doing a job and come up with improvement suggestions that sound good. But they don’t usually take into account all the little things that explain why, from the worker’s point of view, they couldn’t work. And it’s even easier to come up with the ideal procedure if you don’t even bother to watch the worker at work, but just do it from your office, on paper. Almost anything can look good that way. Even when we do our own analysis in our teams, some of the silliest ideas can slip through before we try it out.
There’s a lot of things that enter into a good job design. Little things can make a big difference, like how high or low the stock is placed or how the tools are organized or where the hoses are. The person actually doing the job is the only one who can see all those factors. And in the U.S., engineers have never had to work on the floor – not like in Japan. So they don’t know what they don’t know.
In the typical U.S. plant, you never even saw the IE – they stayed in their cozy offices upstairs. They never talked to workers about how to improve their jobs.
Today, we drive the process, and if we need their help, the engineer is there the next day to work on it with us.”
Smith put this contrast in a broader perspective:
“In most plants, management assumes the “divine right” to design jobs as they see fit. And in the U.S. auto industry, workers have historically agreed to that in exchange for higher wages. Management was willing to pay a ton of money to the workers to preserve its prerogative.
But in practice, the old way of setting standards was just ridiculous. An Industrial Engineer would shut himself away in an isolated office and consider how long it took for somebody to twist their wrist and move their arm in such and such a way, and calculate from some manual and try that way to come up with a task design. The IE would take this “properly” designed job to the foreman. The foreman would not his head, but then said “screw you” to the IE’s back and redesigned the task to his own liking. Then he’d take his task design to the worker and said “Do it this way or you’re out.” The worker would not but would pull the same trick on the foreman. In the end, the job got done however the worker could. When the boss walked by, the worker might pretend to do the job the way the foreman had told him. Everybody involved knew this was going on but no one cared to do anything about it.
Multiply that game by the number of shifts and the number of different people involved and you’ve got a process you can’t control. You can’t build a quality car like that. You can’t even go back and improve the process, because the IE lives in dream world, doesn’t have a clue how the job is actually done, and doesn’t have any impact. The foreman’s impact is also zip. Nobody talks to the worker even though he’s the one guy who can do something about the problem. Nobody wants to listen to him. That’s basically how most of the auto industry operates even today.
So you can see why standardized work is so revolutionary.
And why most IEs are pretty uncomfortable with it!””
The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
Paul S. Adler
“I said, “In order to speed things up, I’ll tell you what I’m doing, so you’ll know where I’m aiming. I want to know whether there’s the same lack of communication between the engineers and the management who are working on the engine as we found in the case of the booster rockets.”
Mr. Lovingood says, “I don’t think so. As a matter of fact, although I’m now a manager, I was trained as an engineer.”
“All right”, I said, “Here’s a piece of paper each. Please write on your paper the answer to this question: what do you think is the probability that a flight would be uncompleted due to a failure in this engine?”
They wrote down their answers and hand in their papers. One guy wrote “99-44/100% pure” (copying the Ivory soap slogan), meaning about 1 in 200. Another guy wrote something very technical and highly quantitative in the standard statistical way, carefully defining everything, that I had to translate – which also meant about 1 in 200. The third guy wrote, simply, “1 in 300.”
Mr. Lovingood’s paper, however, said.
“Cannot quantify. Reliability is judged from:
– past experience
– quality control in manufacturing
– engineering judgment”
“Well”, I said, “I’ve got four answers, and one of them weaseled.” I turned to Mr. Lovingood: “I think you weaseled.”
“I don’t think I weaseled.”
“You didn’t tell me what your confidence was, sir; you told me how you determined it. What I want to know is: after you determined it, what was it?”
He says, “100 percent” – the engineers’ jaws drop, my jaw drops, I look at him, everybody looks at him – “uh, uh, minus epsilon!”
So I say, “Well yes; that’s fine. Now, the only problem is, WHAT IS EPSILON?”
He says, “10^-5”. It was the same number that Mr. Ullian had told us about: 1 in 100,000.
I showed Mr. Lovingood the other answers and said, “You’ll be interested to know that there is a difference between engineers and management here – a factor of more than 300.””
What Do You Care What Other People Think?
Richard Feynman
V
“You build 3-dimensional things. The design space [however] is n-dimensional. You design in n-dimensional space, one dimension for every parameter you can adjust. Therefore it is not 3-dimensional space that matters in design, it is n-dimensional space.
And n-dimensional space is vast. Very, very large.
To convince you of this, I will start by your own experience. You think you know 3-dimensional space, but you really don’t. You are really familiar with 2 dimensions. In 2 dimensions, a random walk will come back to the same place: if you meet a person, there’s a good chance you’ll meet them again.
In 3 dimensions, that is not true. In 3 dimensions, say the ocean where the fish live, what do they do? They go around on the bottom, they go around on the surface, they go around in schools, they assemble at the mouth of a river. They cannot wander the open ocean and hope to find a mate. That’s how vast 3 dimensions is. You can wander around 2 dimensions and sure enough, you can get a mate. Probably. In 3 dimensions, not a very good chance.
In higher ones, forget it.
But that is the space of design. You’re out there in that tremendously vast space.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“Imagine you knew a guy. Imagine this guy was willing to say for you, “Yeah, if she has her tits chopped off, she’s totally a man now.” Like, doesn’t that give you a warm fuzzy feeling? He must really like you to be willing to lie that flagrantly to help you out.
Problem is if you make too many friends, the lie will become a thing. Is he lying for you, or just because everyone is doing it? So now you have to come up with an even bigger lie, and see if he’ll still say it.”
“#pointDeerMakeHorse”
“But would you be willing to ride the deer?”
“If you’re not then it shows that you don’t really believe it’s a horse, no?”
“The future is fucking a man to signal you think he’s a woman, forever.”
Alrenous, Covfefe Anon, Parallax Optics
“So Zhao Gao brings a deer into the palace. Grabs it from the horns, calls the emperor to come out, and says “look your majesty, a brought you a fine horse”. The Emperor, not amused, says “Surely you are mistaken, calling a deer a horse. Right?”. Then the emperor looks around at all the ministers. Some didn’t say a word, just sweating nervously. Some others loudly proclaimed what a fine horse this was. Great horse. Look at this tail! These fine legs. Great horse, naturally prime minister Zhao Gao has the best of tastes.
A small bunch did protest that this was a deer, not a horse. Those were soon after summarily executed. And the Second Emperor himself was murdered some time later.”
The Purpose of Absurdity
Spandrell/Bloody Shovel
“No idiot, it’s the opposite. How you mouthbreathers are let loose in society is beyond me”
“The premise of democracy is to let loose all the mouthbreathers.”
Unknown, Alrenous
“What percentage of people do you estimate believe democracy should be valued for its innate value and not simply its ability to on average deliver better results than authoritarian states?”
“So this economist here means to tell us that “value” and “results” aren’t the exact same thing.”
Unknown, Spandrell/Bloody Shovel
“Can you imagine an ethnologist observing gorillas for years only to conclude that their behaviour is “wrong” and that they ought to do something else instead? How ridiculous would that be? Now consider our humanities and social studies professors who supposedly study human nature.”
Unknown
“We need to be subject to critique by people who know what they’re doing.”
“This is hard when the West largely rejects the idea that some people know what they are doing better than others.”
various/Unknown
“Primogeniture, inheritance of the family fortune by the firstborn. This practice has since been replaced by the more humane system of inheritance by lawyers.”
Samo Burja
“the CDC performs a very important function, which is to render legible that which the government wishes to define as disease”
Literal Banana
“It’s increasingly clear, if it wasn’t already, that the “Rule of Law” that is supposedly the core of Western society is in reality just Rule of Lawyers. Or Rule of Judges, who by far have the largest discretion of any power holder. They can ban and overturn anything.”
Spandrell/Bloody Shovel
“It’s amazing. You have all of these oppressed brown people – excuse me, let me use the worshippable, sacrilizing term – people of color.
And by color, I mean the color brown.
The people of color brown, they’re constantly trying to get into these places, these white spaces, white organizations, white institutions, that are oppressing them!
Imagine if the Armenians in Turkey had some march in Istanbul, demanding to be served by Turkish diners, or staged sit-ins in Ankara. They would be killed, and the government would look the other way. Or if the Kurds marched into Baghdad and demanded equal funding for their schools, and that the people of Baghdad should pay for it because Baghdad has more money, that this was their right, equal rights meant that the Baghdadis had to pay for their schools, to pay for their stuff.
Actually oppressed people don’t behave this way.
In the United States, who is trying to gain access to the other? Who is trying to escape the other? Who would rather have an hour commute than live in a neighborhood predominated by the other?
Is it called “Black Flight”? Or “White Flight”?”
Ryan Faulk/The Alternative Hypothesis
“It’s *after* you apologize that you get in trouble. People smell weakness. They detect the difference between an action caused by principles and one driven by fear.”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“The wasted space (and its contribution to overall impoverishment) in our stagnant cities is definitely on my mind a lot–but it’s not surprising that high real estate costs in other cities haven’t changed things for them, mainly because they’re just too far away to benefit from places which are still thriving–they only *work* when they have functional economies of their own.
It’s like that tedious cliche about “why do Americans need to build dense when we have S P A C E” as if all the acreage in, say, Wyoming makes an ounce of a difference to people trying to live and work in, say, Boston.
Or for that matter, all the acreage in WESTERN MASS vis-a-vis the people trying to live and work in Boston.”
Alex Forrest
“Well, ok, but why? How did this mistake happen? He of course does no attempt at explaining. Because his job, the job of Pat Buchanan is to be a conservative, and the job of conservatives is not to understand a thing. The job of conservatives is, and has been for decades, to state their confusion with a tone of strong indignation. I don’t understand this! Hmm! I am angry, yes I am, this makes no sense, and that makes me angry. Join me in my indignation, oh and buy my book. Hmph!
[…] if you don’t get something, that’s a statement about the limits of your intellect rather than about the nature of the problem. If you don’t get something, the problem is with you, not with the issue. Go try and understand it, and then come back. Your indignation solves exactly nothing.“
Mistakes Happen for a Reason
Spandrell/Bloody Shovel
“Slave ownership has traditionally taken very curious forms. The best slave is someone you overpay and who knows it, terrified of losing his status.
Multinational companies created the expat category, a sort of diplomat with a higher standard of living who represents the firm far away and runs its business there. All large corporations had (and some still have) employees with expat status and, in spite of its costs, it is an extremely effective strategy. Why? Because the further from headquarters an employee is located, the more autonomous his unit, the more you want him to be a slave so he does nothing strange on his own.
A bank in New York sends a married employee with his family to a foreign location, say, a tropical country with cheap labor, with perks and privileges such as country club membership, a driver, a nice company villa with a gardener, a yearly trip back home with the family in first class, and keeps him there for a few years, enough to be addicted. He earns much more than the “locals”, in a hierarchy reminiscent of colonial days. He builds a social life with other expats. He progressively wants to stay in the location longer, but he is far from headquarters and has no idea of his minute-to-minute standing except through signals.
Eventually, like a diplomat, he begs for another location when time comes for a reshuffle. Returning to the home office means loss of perks, having to revert to his base salary – a return to lower-middle-class life in the suburbs of New York City, taking the commuter train, perhaps, or, God forbid, a bus, and eating a sandwich for lunch! The person is terrified when the big boss snubs him. Ninety-five percent of the employee’s mind will be on company politics…
…which is exactly what the company wants.
The big boss in the board room will have a supporter in the event of some intrigue.”
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“If you have ten loyal, conscientious workers, the advantage over having ten sullen nihilists is easily destroyed by having one truly bad hire who you can’t fire without invoking a lawsuit. Some (enough) companies have responded by making working conditions bad enough that everyone wants to leave, then trying to entice good ones to stay on the sly.
[… M]anorial nobles offered good working conditions because if you really pissed them off they could have you executed. Work is terrible to the extent it is protected. See also: communism.”
Alrenous
“I find it very disturbing how people can casually recommend working two or three jobs as a long-term solution to life’s problems, because it demonstrates the reality that in the post-industrial west, you are no longer a citizen of a national body or a society with a clearly defined identity and culture. You are a citizen of an economy, and your life’s purpose and value is reduced to being a menial laborer in a larger body whose sole ideology is simply production for purposeless expansion. You are a cog in a machine, and exist for that purpose only to be discarded when your utility to the religion of production has exhausted itself. For fuck’s sake, your value as a person is literally measured by your economic productivity and the money that you accumulate from it.
A fucking peasant in the twelfth century has led a more meaningful life than the majority of the machinated zombies that call themselves “people” we are surrounded by today. Contemporary society is too focused on work and not focused enough on living. In prior historical epochs work was viewed as a means towards living. It is a sacrifice to be done and gotten over with in order to realize a goal. Today, it is conflated WITH living. Post-industrial society views the act of work to be the very essence of life. You work, and therefore you live. We have built the ultimate materialist society.”
Unknown
“16th century: They promised us religious freedom and tore up the commons, slaughtered the monks and crushed the statues of our saints.
18th century: They promised us political freedom and exchanged our village councils and manor courts with a vote for a distant parliament.
19th century: They promised us financial freedom and led us into dark and noisy factories and crowded slums rife with disease and debt.
20th century: They promised us national freedom if only we would stand up to be counted for the draft, learning to bayonet our brothers.
21st century: They promised us the freedom from identity, from family and descendants, if only we gave up all that our ancestors left us.
And here we are today: with nothing left to offer and nothing left to take.”
Wrath of Gnon
“Part of being a historian is that you quickly learn to become a hater of all things.
And you realize we’re on a small boat in a world of shit and there’s a leak.”
Jason Scott
“If you can’t plan or make decisions, you will have trouble with everything you touch.”
[But this is ridiculous! He got hit in the head with ten pounds of steel, and then less than a minute later he went at it again! This is a professional handyman?!]
“People can live their whole lives without learning anything.”
Dad
“It’s not a problem. It’s a predicament; it has no solution, only outcomes.”
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money
Strong Towns
Charles Marohn
VI
“You’re thinking, “I don’t want to hear about how everything is interpretable through the artificial paradigm of narrative structure–” as if it was me and not your god who made it this way, as if I was better able to invent a convenient fiction that happened to apply to you rather than describe a process that’s been used for millennia. You think you’re the first? You think no one but you has lived your life? Do you think you are so unique? Do you think I just took a guess? This isn’t the first time this game has been played, there’ve been over 100 generations of Guess What Happens Next and it is the exact same answer every single time. All of this has happened before and it will happen again.
But you want “why”, you’re drawn to “why” like you’re drawn to a pretty girl in the rain. Let me guess: she has black hair, big eyes, and is dressed like an ingenue. “Why?” is the most seductive of questions because it is innocent, childlike, infinite in possibilities, and utterly devoted to you.
“Why am I this way? Why do I do what I do?” But what will you do with that information? What good is it? If you were an android, would it change you to know why you were programmed the way you were? “Why” is masturbation, “why” is the enemy, the only question that matters is, now what?
But you want “why”. Ok, here we go.”
Amy Schumer Offers You A Look Into Your Soul
The Last Psychiatrist
“Whenever anything unexpected happens, the programmed role has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the future, and when it isn’t, Rome falls.”
Alrenous
“It doesn’t matter what you know. It matters only what you can think of in time.”
The Book of Five Rings
Miyamoto Musashi
“It is a principle of the art of war that one should simply lay down his life and strike. If one’s opponent also does the same, it is an even match. Defeating one’s opponent is then a matter of faith and destiny.”
Hagakure
Yamamoto Tsunetomo
VII
“But I didn’t prove it for the skater. The skater uses muscle force. Gravity is a different force. Yet it’s true for the skater.
Now we have a problem: we can deduce, often, from one part of physics, like the law of gravitation, a principle which turns out to be much more valid than the derivation! This doesn’t happen in mathematics, that the theorems come out in places where they’re not supposed to be.
In other words, if we were to say that the postulates of physics were this law of gravitation, we could deduce the conservation of angular momentum, but only for gravitation. But we discover experimentally that the conservation of angular momentum is a much wider thing. Newton had other hypostulates by which he could get the more general conservation law of angular momentum. But Newtonian laws were wrong. There’s no forces, it’s all a lot of baloney, the particles don’t have orbits, yet – the analog, the exact transformation of this principle about the areas, the conservation of angular momentum is true with atomic motions in quantum mechanics and is still, as far as we can tell, exact.
So we have these wide principles which sweep across all the different laws. And if one takes too seriously its derivation, and feels that this is only valid because this is valid, you cannot understand the interconnections between the different branches of physics.
Someday, when physics is complete, then maybe with this kind of argument, we know all the laws, then we can start with some axioms, and no doubt somebody will figure out a particular way doing it. But while we don’t know all the laws, we can use some to make guesses at theorems which extend beyond their proof.”
The Character of Physical Law
Richard Feynman
VIII
“Modernism did its immense damage in these ways: by divorcing the practice of building from the history and traditional meanings of building, by promoting a species of urbanism that destroyed age-old social and, with them, urban life as a general proposition; and by creating a physical setting for man that failed to respect the limits of scale, growth, and consumption of natural resources, or to respect the lives of other living things. The result of Modernism, especially in America, is a crisis of the human habitat: cities ruined by corporate gigantism and abstract renewal schemes, public buildings and public spaces unworthy of human affection, vast sprawling suburbs that lack any sense of community, housing that the un-rich cannot afford to live in, a slavish obeisance to the needs of automobiles and their dependent industries at the expense of human needs, and a gathering ecological calamity that we have only begun to measure.”
The Geography of Nowhere
James Howard Kunstler
Wrath of Gnon
“[…C]ommunities are not for justice, peace, defense, or traffic, but for the sake of the good life, the Summum Bonum. This good life has always meant the satisfaction of four basic social desires, desires to which earlier designers have always given material and structural shape. These desires are conviviality, religiosity, intellectual growth, and politics. […] If a new region is to be successfully developed, decentralized, and open-ended to many possibilities, some interventions are simple. What will be needed is the construction of focal points at primitive crossroads: a sidewalk cafe, a restaurant serving excellent meals, a little concert hall or theater, a charming church, a well-designed meeting hall.
To sum up the success of old and the failure of modern community design in one sentence: ancient planners, recognizing the invariable Aristotelian purpose of why people live in communities, put all their talent into the building of the communal nucleus […] The rest of the settlement then followed naturally.
In contrast, modern designers are forever building the rest of the city.”
The Idea of Design
Victor Papanek
Wrath of Gnon
“You know, they never prohibited us from walking through the plant, understanding, even asking questions of some of their key people. I’ve often puzzled over that– why they did that. And I think they recognized, we were asking all the wrong questions. We didn’t understand this bigger picture thing.
All of our questions were focused on the floor, the assembly plant, what’s happening on the line. That’s not the real issue.
The issue is, how do you support that system with all the other functions that have to take place in the organization?”
Ernie Schaefer
This American Life #561: NUMMI 2015
“You’re going to find within your lifetime, but not much within mine, that you have moved more than you would have expected from L2 to L1 or Linfinity, and you will find that statistics does not support you. The chi-squared test is a good example of this: an L2 fit. They haven’t bothered to work out the L1 or Linfinity qualities of it. The mathematics are a little more ferocious. It’s a little more difficult.
But with modern machines, who cares about how difficult math is, we just let the machines grind away, they can do a few billion operations a second, what do I care.
It is better to get the right problem solved a little bit slowly, than to rapidly solve the wrong problem.
I announce that as a very general theorem. The tendency is to try to solve the wrong problem elegantly and rapidly. And I have seen that enormous times in my life; grabbing something I can cope with and solving the wrong problem, announcing the exact answer to the wrong problem.
Generally speaking, I would rather have an approximate answer to the right problem. And that is where the difficulty arises: identifying the problem. The greatest step in creativity is recognizing that there is a problem. The second greatest step is identifying the nature of the problem.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“I think the best definition of politics is one I found in an American dictionary, which said, ‘the art or science of governance of a country, and how it runs its internal and external relations’.
Translated in real life, it means “How is my life affected by the government?”. Do I have a job? Do I have a home? Do I have medicine when I need it? Do I have enough recreational facilities? Is there a future for my children? Will they be educated, will there be a chance to advance in society?
If you do not have any of these things, you are going to find agitation.
You have no recollection of this because you were not born, but in the 1950s and 1960s, Singapore was in a state of agitation every day. You look up your old Straits Times and [other newspapers], archives. Look at the riots, the strikes. Why? No homes, half the children were not in schools. 14% unemployment and underemployment. Pirate taxi drivers. No job, so I take a car, pay no license, no insurance, come in I give you a ride. 50 cents, 20 cents, so on. Hookers all over the place.
Today, over 40 years, we have transformed it, because assiduously we attended to the politics of life.
That’s what it’s about.
‘What is the future?’.
If I can have another political party, you can have another political party, to look after you, the way the PAP has, I say, my job is done, finished. I can go home, and sit back, and read the books I want to read.”
Lee Kuan Yew
IX
“Mechanical innovations, including mechanized cities, can add to our experience and stimulate our perceptive capacities, but they do not eradicate the mechanisms of human physiology.
The proper size of a bedroom has not changed in thousands of years.
Neither has the proper size of a door nor the proper size of a community. If cities have become immense, so much more is the need for subdividing them into comprehensible sections. Transportation systems may render the outlying parts of the city more accessible, but communities must remain individual entities whose size and appearance are comprehensible. The physical fact of scale must also be visually apparent. When these principles are violated the results are cities without human form, cities without sympathy, cities without pride. Worse still are the effects on the spirit and human sensitivities of its people.”
Paul D. Spreiregen
Wrath of Gnon
“Authoritarian systems have many problems but pork isn’t one of them. The guys who gotta eat aren’t that many, and you don’t need an elaborate faith argument to set up a system for pork distribution.
Say China.
China makes their high speed rail system, spends untold trillions on it, trillions paid by public debt which will probably never pay themselves. 90% of the stations built 30km out of the main cities, many in the middle of rice paddies where proper roads haven’t even been built yet. How many billions were skimmed of it? I don’t know but the Railway Minister is in jail and the Ministry itself was abolished, which means even the Chinese government is embarrassed by it. But hey China now has a pretty cool high speed rail network which they sorely needed, works like a charm, and out of the hugest budget in human history they only had to pay off some local officials and the railway minister. I’ve seen estimates of 5%.
The waste on pre-K education is 100%.”
Pork and Hamsters
Spandrell/Bloody Shovel
“The fact that it’s large is why censorship matters. Nobody cares about small forums censoring people.”
“Just because something is on the internet does not mean it’s a “public space”.”
“Yeah so what? We need to make sure large companies aren’t able to control who can go where and do what. You can’t kill somebody just for being in your house. So obviously there’s a line that needs drawing.”
“You’re forgetting that another entity could provide the well for the other demographic, seeing as there’s money to be made there.”
“It’s an example of there being limited availability in resources. In the example of the water, there’s no time to wait for the market to dig another well to save the person. Any excuse can be made, but the end result is the person dies, not that property rights have been saved. The same thing is happening with social media. […] If it’s the greater races at stake. The future of civilization at stake. Then there’s no length we shouldn’t go to to save it. Property becomes less important. It’s a hierarchy of needs for civilization to survive.
[…] The entire premise is virtual or not, private or not, when something dominates how we live our lives, we need to look at how we can update those areas to reflect our values. Those values conflict with private property every day and we have to make hard decisions. Private property is an ideal just like freedom of speech, belief, etc. […] Property rights are incredibly important, but there are times they hinder civilization. If it allows us to get run over and civilization destroyed, and property rights destroyed as a result, then they weren’t very good ideals. This is why libertarians have mostly become fascists of some sort. At least until we get control of things like borders and universities.”
“There is no comparison between forcing a company to manage it’s website a certain way and border control.”
“It’s not a comparison. It’s about taking every ground we can to support the existence of civilization. Property rights are good at that, but only to a point. We also need to think in terms of collective property rights.
We can’t just wait until something reaches our doorstep. Collective power always has and always will matter.”
Arman, Unknown
“No one rules alone, thus when the King attempts to gather all power in his own hands, he finds he has in fact gathered all power into the hands of dangerous powerful people dangerously close the throne. To fix this problem, the official Church need to remind the people that the God who commanded obedience to Kings, also commanded that Kings, like other men, should refrain from coveting that which belongs to someone else.
Repeating: Freehold means that the peasant in his hovel possesses Kingly power under his hovel’s roof, which Kingly power the King has no right to mess with, even if the peasant abuses it. That power is not the King’s to interfere with, even if the peasant is arguably mistreating his wife and his children. If the lord stops that peasant from mistreating his wife and children, pretty soon King George the Fourth gets cuckolded, as he cuckolded others. […]”
Throne, Altar, and Freehold
Jim’s Blog
“Even compared to other ancient societies, Roman law and culture gave the head of household extreme power over their family. For example, children did not have separate property, including unmarried adult children, and a patriarch faced no legal punishment for killing his own children or slaves.
Practices of this type, combined with the feelings people naturally have for their immediate family, made households internally coordinated to a ludicrous degree. For instance, you didn’t have to worry about your second-in-command leaving to work for a competitor, because law and custom were on your side if you physically drag him back. Thus, a skilled patriarch would have a power base that was effectively immune to most attacks short of murder. This greatly lessened the Problem of Local Focus, making the household much more formidable.”
Production of Elites in the Roman Republic
Ben Landau-Taylor
“Centralization leads to complexity, complexity leads to crisis, attempts to fix the crisis have, because of complexity, unintended consequences, which escalate into further crisis, leading to further centralization, Hence Soviet Russia, Hitler’s Germany, Venezuela, and now America.
This is the crisis of socialism, explained in “I pencil”, which makes the point that no one actually knows how to make a pencil, hence socialist production of pencils will fail.
In order to manage complexity, you need walls, so that one man can make decisions without having his decisions mucked up by another man’s decisions. Hence, private property and local authority, the authority of the father, the authority the business owner, the authority of the CEO. And, not so long ago, the authority of the local aristocrat, who tended to be a high officer in the local militia, a major employer and landowner, and related by blood or marriage to most of the other high officers in the local militia.
Ideally all the consequences of a decision should be contained within those walls. Of course they never are, but if you try to manage all the externalities, things very quickly slide of control. Every attempt to manage the externalities has unexpected consequences, and attempts to deal with the unexpected consequences have additional unexpected consequences, because trying to control matters that have externalities connects everything to everything else, resulting in a tangle beyond human comprehension.”
Throne, Altar, and Freehold
Jim’s Blog
“Hmm? It is a staple of theater, though I am not so fond of it. I prefer an ending where the many plots are resolved, yes.
But without a god’s intervention, human animosity and love cannot easily be erased. The playwright must have reached the end of his rope. Most writers know the tangled web of human emotions cannot be undone by humans themselves. So, the deus ex machina is an expression of hope.
A last hope, to be sure, a mirage created by those on the verge of ruin, wishing for a savior.”
Nero Claudius
Fate/Extra
X
“If you go to India, you’ll find sadhus, holy men, people who abjure the world, who go around giving land away or begging from the rich to give to the poor. It’s a totally different culture. There’s the sort of Gandhi saintliness.
It’s not the model in China. In China, the model is either Three Kingdoms or Shui Hu Zhuan, Water Margin, the kind of hero who forms a robber band and kills off wealthy people. You don’t go begging from the wealthy to give to the poor. You just kill the wealthy and take from them.
So it is a completely different philosophy to guide a man in life.”
Lee Kuan Yew
“To grasp the essence of a political culture that does not recognise the possibility of transcendental truths demands an unusual intellectual effort for Westerners, an effort that is rarely made even in serious assessments of Japan. The occidental intellectual and moral traditions are so deeply rooted in assumptions of the universal validity of certain beliefs that the possibility of a culture existing without such assumptions is hardly ever contemplated. Western child-rearing practice inculcates suppositions that implicitly confirm the existence of an ultimate logic controlling the universe independently of the desires and caprices of human beings. This outlook, constantly reaffirmed in later life, inclines Westerners to take for granted that all advanced civilisations develop concepts of universal validity, and they are therefore not prompted to examine the effects of their absence.”
The Enigma of Japanese Power
Karel van Wolferen
“There are two types of societies. This isn’t a theory of evolution, or about which is better than which.
There are societies that respect their relationship with nature, and others that do not. This is about how societies view change.
The native people of Canada tried not to break the bones of salmon they ate, and returned the bones to the rivers. Native people from eastern and western parts of Russia decorated the skulls of the seals they captured and dismantled, and returned them to the master of the sea along with their poetries. They thought fur and meat were gifts from the animals as a proof of their friendship, and they returned those gifts by adding spiritual values to the bones. They showed their respect towards nature through their meals. This is because they thought the true form of animals were gods who wore the skins of animals. Because they wanted the gods to visit them again, they served by giving back to them respectfully. There are similar beliefs in Northern Eurasian and North American cultures, and many myths remain.
But in modern day Japan, there probably aren’t that many people who still believe that animals are able to talk and that gods live inside of them. They’re looking down on nature. They see animals as something they can naturally steal from, and if they feel like they took a little too much from it – they can just start protecting them. That’s how they see it.
When did that kind of arrogant society form…?
The key factor is the appearance of technology.
Specifically, weapons made of iron.
After obtaining these excellent weapons, man’s respect towards animals faded. In the tales told around Sakhalin, there is a verse that says, “Swords that cut extraordinarily well were passed on from Japan, and after that, bears were killed easily”. A certain individual born in a heretical land one day realized: this is a weapon that god gave, but it is a weapon able to kill god.
The origin of the word technology is the Greek word “Techne”.
“Techne” means “to artificially draw out the blessings that an object is hiding”.
A good example is heating up a rock and taking the iron out of it.
The sword and technology stolen from god gave man power that even gods will fear. For them to visit again, giving back to them respectfully… there’s no need for such things anymore.
Now, we can simply take everything.”
Ch. 148 – “Human Society – The Grave of Bears”
Terra Formars
“So it basically all goes back to when a gay kiddly fiddler named plato once foolishly agreed with some sophists that the senses were unreliable, setting up 2000+ years worth of fanboys who took him seriously after to fruitlessly retread the same ground over and over and produce schizophrenia in written form attempting to make systems of thought around taking such an assumption as a given. Blunder of the millennium really.
But anyways, skipping a lot we arrive at Descartes, who could perhaps be considered a seminal example of the needless handwringing brought about by taking the athenian pederast seriously. Like many of his unfortunate fellows (and unfortunate countrymen who had(and have)to live in a society subjected to the (ostensibly)intellectual output of such unfortunate fellows), he made an attempt to produce an epistemology while assuming the premise that senses are essentially unreliable as a given. His attempt at a solution to this intractable thought exercise (for intractable, and a thought exercise, it both is) was what some might recognize as ‘categorically imperative’ avant la letre, before Kant himself gave the irascible mode of thought its name.
In the most simplest terms, the ‘enlightenment project’ basically comes down to the desire to produce a system, that is wholly atemporal or universal, which can be used naively to calculate any possible knowledge, wholly separate from any particular user agent. The ultimate failure mode of all this was, of course, the fact that the capacity of any given system is necessarily contingent on the capacity of its creator; no being within Being could create a system that fully encapsulates being; for if it did, then it already does.
It was the ultimate failure of such a project that gave rise to the oft misunderstood post-modernist schools of thought, particularly the french continentals. Who, while claiming to be overturning the modernism typical of Descartes and those inspired by him, ironically retained the same modernist/enlightenment standards of evidence; standards that dictate that any valid proposition must be universally valid; that any proposition with an exception anywhere is just as worthless as any other; standards that, if you were to actually take them seriously and apply them consistently, would imply that knowledge itself is impossible.
Which means naturally, of course, that noone (least of all the baizuo lumpenproles) ever actually applies them consistently, but instead in selective, tactical manners, to rhetorically dissolve Things They Don’t Like in the acid of nominalism, while leaving their own conceits overlooked.”
Wowexuberant
“There’s an entire field of the arts that’s missing because logic isn’t sufficiently appreciated. Namely -actual- psychology, the study of the soul, starting with enumeration of all qualia. Wikipedia has a list of biases. It does not have a list of cures for those biases. Further, it’s rather half-hearted. There’s a whole nosology of thought that’s missing because philosophers have let humans believe they’re normally rational. The Greeks had four or more words for love. English has one. People might experience love differently, but, like, who cares? It’s just fee-fees.
Oh, but it turns out qualia are the basis for all life goals, and also the foundation for all knowledge.
So, uh, oops.”
Alrenous
XI
“Mathematics is a way of going from one set of statements to another. It’s evidently useful in physics, because we have all these different ways we can speak of things and permits us to develop consequences and analyze the situations and change the laws in different ways and to connect all the various statements, so as a matter of fact, the total amount a physicist knows is very little, he has only to remember the rules for getting from one place to another, and he’s able to do that. In other words, all the various statements about equal times forces, the forces in the direction of the radius and so on are all interconnected by reasoning.
Now an interesting question comes up: is there some pattern to it?
Is there a place to begin, fundamental principles, and deduce the whole works?
[…] Because all these theorems are interconnected by reasoning, there isn’t any real way to say, ‘well these are the bottom, and these are connected through logic’. Because if you were told it was this one or this one, you could also run the logic the other way if you weren’t told that one, and work out that one, like a bridge with lots of members and it’s overconnected. If pieces have dropped out, you can reconnect it another way.
[…] The Babylonian thing that I’m talking about is to say, I happen to know this and I happen to know that, and maybe I know that, and I work everything out from there, and then tomorrow, I forgot that this was true, but I remember that this was true, and I reconstruct it again, and so on, and I’m never quite sure where I’m supposed to begin and where I’m supposed to end, I just remember enough all the time so that the memory fades, and the pieces fall out, I put the thing back together again every day. […]
The method of starting from the axioms is not efficient in obtaining the theorems. In working something out in geometry, you’re not very efficient if each time you have to start back at the axioms. But if you have to remember a few things in geometry, you can always get somewhere else. It’s much more efficient to do it the other way.
What the best axioms are are not exactly the same, in fact are not ever the same, as the most efficient way of getting around in the territory.”
The Character of Physical Law
Richard Feynman
“The voyage of the Great Eastern was ended. Twice had she been victorious over the sea. Twice she had laid the spoils of victory on the shores of the New World, and her mission was accomplished. All on board, who had been detained weeks beyond the expected time, were impatient to return; and accordingly she prepared to sail the very next day on her homeward voyage. The Medway, which had on board the cable for the Gulf of St. Lawrence, remained two or three weeks longer, and with the Terrible, whose gallant officers had volunteered for the service, successfully accomplished that work. But the Great Eastern was bound for England, and Mr. Field had now to part from his friends on board. It was a trying moment. Rejoiced as he was at the successful termination of the voyage, yet when he came to leave the ship, where he had spent so many anxious days and weeks, both this year and the year before; and to part from men to whom he was bound by the strong ties that unite those embarked in a common enterprise—brave companions in arms—he could not repress a feeling of sadness. It was with deep emotion that Capt. Anderson took him by the hand, as he said, “The time is come that we must part.” As he went over the side of the ship, “Give him three cheers!” cried the commander; “And now three more for his family!” The ringing hurras of that gallant crew were the last sounds he heard as he sunk back in the boat that took him to the Medway, while the wheels of the Great Eastern began to move, and that noble ship, with her noble company, bore away for England.”
Recovery of the Lost Cable
presented by Bill Burns
“1791 to 1871 – Babbage was minor nobility, he had an idea of building a machine. He had been using tables [for integration and derivation], and the tables had errors. And he said, “If only a steam engine would make them, they would be accurate”.
So, he set out to do it.
[…] Babbage wanted to print out the numbers so that there was no possibility of human error. Well, the technology to do this was beyond his abilities. He greatly improved manufacturing and engineering techniques of building this and that, but he never got it done, in spite of government support.
[…] Babbage never completed it because what happened to him was what happened to a great many people: he no longer was well into one and he had the realization of a better machine. He had the idea of a general purpose computer. Why bother with this difference machine that can only do simple things, when I can build a general purpose computer? So he started doing that, again with government money, and again he did not complete it. It was not his fault, probably, although he was a bit irascible, perhaps with a better temperament he might’ve got it done. But probably not. The technology was not equal to him.
However, somewhere in the 1990s, the British, at a museum where some of the parts were, completed the design, not using heavy gears made out of brass but plastic gears. And the machine ran just as Babbage had designed it. It was, to great extent, a Von Neumann type machine. It has a mill, which you call the arithmetic unit, it has a store, which is typically called memory, it had branching; it had all the features.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“Fire control computers solve fire control problems.
Their solutions depend on own ship’s course and speed, target range, target bearing, target’s course and speed, wind speed and direction, initial shell velocity, and other factors up to a possible total of twenty-five. The factors occur simultaneously, and many are constantly changing.
But the computer continuously and instantly solves the problem, and sends the answer to the guns as train and elevation orders.
A computer cannot do this without men.
For example, men operate the director, which sends target range and bearing to the computer. And here at the computer, other men set in other information. Obviously computer accuracy depends on the quality of information it receives.
And that depends on the skill and understanding of the men.”
Basic Mechanisms in Fire Control Computers
United States Navy Training Film, 1953
“Why are you going that far to obey the law when that law can neither judge a criminal nor protect people?”
“The law doesn’t protect people. People protect the law.
People have always detested evil and sought out a righteous way of living. Their feelings… The accumulation of those peoples’ feelings are the law. They’re neither the provisions nor the system. They’re the fragile and irreplacable feelings that everyone carries in their hearts. Compared to the power of anger or hatred, they are something that can quite easily break down. People have prayed for a better world throughout time.
In order for those prayers to continue to hold meaning, we have to try our best to protect it to the very end.”
Kogami Shinya, Tsunemori Akane
Psycho-Pass
“I am not trying to elicit sympathy. I am providing the backdrop of how this plan of mine came to be so that you can FEEL it, from one human to another. After all, that is what this is all about.
Civilization does not exist externally. It exists between you and I first.”
Patrick Ryan
“Lastly, in a certain sense, this is a religious course. I am preaching a message, that with one life to lead, you want to do more than just get by. There are a great many religions, and I don’t want to get involved in one or the other too much, it is however an emotional matter I’m really appealing to.
It’s very frequently said that a happy life is one which has some goals achieved. Well, studying the matter over, and reading about it and talking to people, everybody pretty much agrees that it’s not the achievement of the goal that really is the best part. It’s the struggle. The struggle to success is what makes you what you will be.
Remember, at old age, you’re gonna have to live with yourself. There’s no escape living with yourself in your old age. You’re stuck. And at old age, you can’t change as much as when you were younger; consider what kind of person you wish to be in old age.
And start now, being that kind of a person.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
XII
“In the famous tale by Ahiqar, later picked up by Aesop (then again by La Fontaine), the dog boasts to the wolf all the contraptions of comfort and luxury he has, almost prompting the wolf to enlist. Until the wolf asks the dog about his collar and is terrified when he understands its use. “”Of all your means, I want nothing.” He ran away and is still running.”
The question is: what would you like to be, a dog or a wolf?
The original Aramaic version had a wild ass, instead of a wolf, showing off his freedom. But the wild ass ends up eaten by the lion. Freedom entails risks – real skin in the game. Freedom is never free.
[…] A dog’s life may appear smooth and secure, but in the absence of an owner, a dog does not survive. Most people prefer to adopt puppies, not grown-up dogs; in many countries, unwanted dogs are euthanized. A wolf is trained to survive.
Employees abandoned by their employers, as we saw in the IBM story, cannot bounce back.”
Skin in the Game
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
“Above all, don’t overestimate your own power as an individual. Founders are important not because they are the only ones whose work has value, but rather because a great founder can bring out the best work from everybody at his company. […]
To believe yourself invested with divine self-sufficiency is not the mark of a strong individual, but of a person who has mistaken the crowd’s worship – or jeering – for the truth.”
“Zero to One”: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
“I ignore polling as a method of government. I think that shows a certain weakness of mind. An inability to chart a course – whichever the way the wind blows, whichever way the media encourages the people to go, you follow.
You are not a leader.”
Lee Kuan Yew
“We have to find our way back to a definite future, and the Western world needs nothing short of a cultural revolution to do it.
Where to start? John Rawls will need to be displaced in philosophy departments. Malcolm Gladwell must be persuaded to change his theories. And pollsters have to be driven from politics. But the philosophy professors and Gladwells of the world are set in their ways, to say nothing of our politicians. It’s extremely hard to make good changes in those crowded fields, even with brains and good intentions.
A startup is the largest endeavor over which you can have definite mastery. You can have agency not just over your own life, but over a small and important part of the world.
It begins by rejecting the unjust tyranny of Chance.
You are not a lottery ticket.”
“Zero to One”: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel
“Normally, those people would never wake up from their fantasy worlds. They live meaningless lives. They waste their precious days over nothing. No matter how old they get, they’ll continue to say,
“My real life hasn’t started yet.”
“The real me is still asleep, so that’s why my life is such garbage.” They continue to tell themselves that. And they age. Then die.
And on their deathbeds, they will finally realize:
The life they lived was the real thing.
People don’t live provisional lives, nor do they die provisional deaths. That’s a simple fact. The problem – is whether they realize that simple fact.”
Tonegawa Yukio
Gambling Apocalypse Kaiji
“I want to tell you another thing, a story which I’ll use several times: the story of the drunken sailor.
He staggers a couple of steps this way, he staggers a couple of steps that way, this way and that way, this way and that way. In n steps, typically, you’ll get the square root of n distance. In a hundred steps, you’ll get about ten. In ten thousand, it’ll be about a hundred. He may be right where he started, he may be further away, but that’s typical.
On the other hand if there’s a pretty girl over there, he staggers like this, back like this, over like that – he’s going to get a distance proportional to n.
If I can create in you a vision of where you are headed, you will make progress proportional to n.
If you do not have a vision, you will wander like a drunken sailor.
[…] Now you’re gonna say to me, “But Hamming, how do I know the future?”.
It doesn’t matter much, from what I’ve examined in life, what goal you set. Whether you want to march that way, that way, or that way. If you have a goal, you’ll get somewhere near it. If you don’t have a goal, you’re a drunken sailor. My problem is to make you form your goals, and to some extent, try to achieve it. To make you something important rather than just drifting.
It’s comfortable to drift through life. And a great many people when questioned closely will assert that they’re perfectly content to drift through life.
I don’t think too good an idea of that whole thing.
[…] Those who do something generally have some kind of goals and see where they’re headed, and their lives add up. Those who don’t are just a bunch of isolated events.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“The great thing about standardized work is that if everyone is doing the job the same way, and we run into a problem, say a quality problem, we can easily identify where it’s coming from and fix it. If everyone is doing the job however they feel like, you can’t even begin any serious problem solving.”
Rick Madrid
The ‘Learning Bureaucracy’
Paul S. Adler
“Write psychological rather than logical.
Write so that it can be followed.
Write so that you, five years later, will know what you were doing.
Don’t do some cute trick. You won’t remember.”
Learning to Learn
Richard Hamming
“I don’t care where you read it. I don’t care who said it. Even if I said it. If it doesn’t fit with what you believe and your common sense, then it is not so.”
The Buddha
as relayed by Richard Hamming
“Of course it’s my opinion. It came out of my mouth!”
some Halo 3 machinima
Unknown
“Just because it’s obvious doesn’t mean it’s wrong.”
Evan
NieR:Automata
All things have a domain.
This is where the domain of this piece ends.
All Else Is Halation 