“Because there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in.”

Rick Rubin, writing in The Creative Act: A Way of Being (2023):

Broadening our practice of awareness is a choice we can make at any moment.

It is not a search, though it is stoked by a curiosity or hunger. A hunger to see beautiful things, hear beautiful sounds, feel deeper sensations. To learn, and to be fascinated and surprised on a continual basis.

In service of this robust instinct, consider submerging yourself in the canon of great works. Read the finest literature, watch the masterpieces of cinema, get up close to the most influential paintings, visit architectural landmarks. There’s no standard list; no one has the same measures of greatness. The “canon” is continually changing, across time and space. Nonetheless, exposure to great art provides an invitation. It draws us forward, and opens doors of possibility.

If you make the choice of reading classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that time period you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media.

This applies to every choice we make. Not just with art, but with the friends we choose, the conversations we have, even the thoughts we reflect on. All of these aspects affect our ability to distinguish good from very good, very good from great. They help us determine what’s worthy of our time and attention.

Because there’s an endless amount of data available to us and we have a limited bandwidth to conserve, we might consider carefully curating the quality of what we allow in.

This doesn’t just apply if your goal is to make art of lasting significance. Even if your goal is to make fast food, it will likely taste better if you experience the best fresh food available to you during the process. Level up your taste.

The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.

“Nurturing friendships may be a consistent way to protect against depressive symptoms throughout life.”

Eric W. Dolan:

A new study spanning over two decades reveals that nurturing friendships may be a consistent way to protect against depressive symptoms throughout life, while romantic relationships present a more complicated picture. The findings indicate that being involved in close friendships was linked to fewer depressive symptoms from adolescence into middle age. However, when it came to romantic relationships, becoming romantically involved was actually associated with increased depressive symptoms, regardless of age.

However, not all relationships are the same. Friendships and romantic relationships, for example, can function very differently in our lives. Society often places a higher value on romantic partnerships, suggesting they bring more happiness and fulfillment than friendships. It’s true that the emotional bonds we have with romantic partners can be incredibly strong.

Yet, romantic relationships often come with higher expectations, like exclusivity and intense emotional investment. These high expectations can sometimes lead to negative experiences such as jealousy or conflict. Friendships, on the other hand, tend to have more flexible expectations. We can rely on different friends for different kinds of support, which might make them a more stable source of well-being.

“When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place.”

Timothy Snyder, 2021:

Post-truth is pre-fascism, and Trump has been our post-truth president. When we give up on truth, we concede power to those with the wealth and charisma to create spectacle in its place. Without agreement about some basic facts, citizens cannot form the civil society that would allow them to defend themselves. If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions. Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around, and the era of Trump – like the era of Vladimir Putin in Russia – is one of the decline of local news. Social media is no substitute: It supercharges the mental habits by which we seek emotional stimulation and comfort, which means losing the distinction between what feels true and what actually is true.

“The lottery’s only objective is to maximize the funds you pay for educational activities.”

Salil Mehta:

One should remember that the only objective for the Lottery, anywhere in the world, is not to make you rich. Contrary to their advertisements, the objective is not to show you a good time. Wasting your money is never a good time. The lottery’s only objective is to maximize the funds you pay for educational activities. The lottery does this by taking all of the proceeds, then first diverting nearly 45% of it towards educational benefits, and also towards store commissions and advertisements designed to trick you into spending more into the system. Say you played 292 million times with hypothetically a $1 ticket, and then won exactly one time. In this case your reward would not be anywhere close to $292m. The funnel would start at a gross level of just 55% of $292m (or a loss of $131m on your ticket purchases since 45% was skimmed straight away to the government). And then your net amount would still be less than this 55% gross payout, since this reward is again taxed as income. There is nothing sexy about this arrangement; it extorts a non-tax deductible dollar from you and many others, who could least afford it. And each time putting offering 55 cents into a community savings jar, until one day that amassed jar is given to basically just one person at random (but not before the government comes back to tax that jar as “income”). The whole scheme is an educational tax for those who instead could use a free education in probability theory.

“If the shoe shine boys are buying stocks, who else is left?”

Jason Alan Jankovsky, writing in Time Compression Trading: Exploiting Multiple Time Frames in Zero‐Sum Markets (2010):

J. P. Morgan tells the story of how he would get his shoes shined every Wednesday at the same shop around the corner from his office. One day the shoe shine attendant asked him if he and his friends could buy some stock through Morgan’s brokerage. The three friends had about $40—a lot of money in 1929. Morgan politely refused, hurried back to his office, and ordered that his company was not to have a single share of stock on its books by the end of the day. Morgan simply asked, “If the shoe shine boys are buying stocks, who else is left?” Of course, the 1929 stock market crash was only a few days away, and Morgan looked like a genius. He was not a genius; he noted that the order flow was likely running out on the buy side. It wasn’t his army of analysts that showed him that. It was a public investor.

“It would be naïve to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds.”

Howard Zinn, 2005:

It would be naïve to depend on the Supreme Court to defend the rights of poor people, women, people of color, dissenters of all kinds. Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel, and violate the law in order to uphold justice.

The Constitution gave no rights to working people: no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance.

The right of a woman to an abortion did not depend on the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It was won before that decision, all over the country, by grassroots agitation that forced states to recognize the right. If the American people, who by a great majority favor that right, insist on it, act on it, no Supreme Court decision can take it away.

The rights of working people, of women, of Black people have not depended on decisions of the courts. Like the other branches of the political system, the courts have recognized these rights only after citizens have engaged in direct action powerful enough to win these rights for themselves.

No Supreme Court, liberal or conservative, will stop the war in Iraq, or redistribute the wealth of this country, or establish free medical care for every human being. Such fundamental change will depend, the experience of the past suggests, on the actions of an aroused citizenry, demanding that the promise of the Declaration of Independence — an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness — be fulfilled.

“No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.”

J. Scott Armstrong, 1980:

People are willing to pay heavily for expert advice. Economists are consulted to tell us how the economy will change, stock analysts are paid large salaries to forecast the earnings of various companies, and political experts command large fees to tell our leaders what the future holds. The available evidence, however, implies that this money is poorly spent. But because few people pay attention to this evidence, I have come up with what I call the “seer-sucker theory”: “No matter how much evidence exists that seers do not exist, suckers will pay for the existence of seers.”

Assume for a moment that the seer-sucker theory is true – that expertise is useless in forecasting change. Is there any rational explanation for why clients continue to purchase worthless information?

One explanation is that the client is not interested in accuracy, but only in avoiding responsibility. A client who calls in the best wizard available avoids blame if the forecasts are inaccurate. The evasion of responsibility is one possible explanation for why stock market investors continue to purchase expert advice in spite of overwhelming evidence that such advice is worthless.

PDF

“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living.”

Anaïs Nin, writing in The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934:

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book… or you take a trip… and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken.

“Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it.”

Dean Williams, 1981:

One of the most consuming uses of our time, in fact, has been accumulating information to help us make forecasts of all those things we think we have to predict. Where’s the evidenced that it works? I’ve been looking for it. Really. Here are my conclusions: Confidence in a forecast rises with the amount of information that goes into it. But the accuracy of the forecast stays the same. And when it comes to forecasting—as opposed to doing something—a lot of expertise is no better than a little expertise. And may even be worse. The consolation prize is pretty consoling, actually. It’s that you can be a successful investor without being a perpetual forecaster.

We have security analysts. We get research reports from brokers. We get forecasts about the economy, interest rates, the stock market. We process that information and act on the basis of it. For all of that to make any sense, we all have to believe we can generate information which is unknown to the market as a whole.

There is an approach which is simpler and probably stands a better chance of working. Spend your time measuring value instead of generating information. Don’t forecast. Buy what is cheap today. Let other people deal with the odds against predicting the future.

PDF

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War

Notes from The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (2016), by Robert J. Gordon:

* Advertising developed in part as a result of mass production; likewise, it was said that advertising made mass production possible. Firms decided that there was a limit to attracting customers through lower prices, and they tried the alternative strategy of increasing volume by brand-centric advertising. Although advertising began in the late nineteenth century with the development of the first branded products, its true explosion came in the 1920s, when it became increasingly tied to the newly invented radio.

* Electric lights are an example of a technology that had a great burst of innovation early, in this case 1880–1920, and then stood still afterwards. Although the fluorescent bulb had come to dominate lighting in commercial and industrial settings by 1950, virtually nothing changed in home illumination from 1920 until the development of the compact fluorescent bulb after 1990.

* The current system of airport security all over the world represents an overreaction to the September 11, 2001, hijackings. There was only one weakness in the U.S. airline security system on September 11, and this was that the cockpit doors were flimsy. Within days, they were replaced by completely secure doors that nobody could break through. Although the security issue was completely solved within a week, fourteen years later billions of dollars per year of passenger time continues to be wasted in unnecessary additional security precautions. The pre-2001 security system, based on a quick walk through an X-ray machine to check for guns and metal weapons, would be enough.

* If any year can be anointed as the beginning of the Internet revolution, it is 1995. The introduction of Windows 95 was a sensation, creating long lines of eager buyers waiting for hours in front of stores that would sell it before the doors opened on August 24, 1995. This version of Windows represented the transitional moment in the history of the Internet in that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, a web browser derived from Mosaic, was available as an add-on to Windows 95.

* The unrivaled autonomy of the medical profession began to erode after the 1950s. As hospitals became larger and more complex, administrative control fell increasingly into the hands of professional administrators. Patients also began to challenge the authority of the medical profession. While “for the most part, the authority of the doctor was unquestioned” in 1960, with the surgical profession even earning such high praise as being called a “religion of competence,” by the early 1970s patients were demanding greater say in how they were treated. What had always been a tradition of “doctors know best” changed in 1972 when a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., for the first time established a legal requirement for informed consent. “According to the new standard, the physician had to tell the patient whatever ‘a reasonable person’ would want to know in order to decide whether to accept the treatment.” In 1973, responding to increasing pressure from healthcare consumers, the American Hospital Association came out with a Patients’ Bill of Rights.

* One of the most important improvements in American industrial efficiency was the establishment by Herbert Hoover of the National Bureau of Standards. Its aim was to create a system of uniformly sized parts, down to screws and bolts, aimed at “simplification of practice, elimination of waste, conservation of materials, minimum training of workers, reduction and savings in supply purchasing and unwieldy inventories, defeat of confusion, and speed in production.”