public personal library

Still, I can’t help but think that people’s priorities are enormously out of touch with what will actually matter most to their future selves. It feels as if people seem to have this mental model where medical progress simply happens. Like there’s some natural law of the universe that says “treatments improve by X% per year” and we’re all just passengers with a dumb grin on this predetermined trajectory. They see headlines about better FDA guidelines or CRISPR or immunotherapy or AI-accelerated protein folding and think, “Great, the authorities got it covered. By the time I need it, they’ll have figured it out.”. But that’s not how any of this works! Nobody has it covered! Medical progress happens because specific people chose to work on specific problems instead of doing something else with their finite time on Earth.

Their eyes are slowly decaying, and that if they manage to hit fifty, there is a one-in-ten chance that there will be a creaking, incurable black hole in the middle of their sight, expanding day after day. Think! Think! Do something about it!

To be fair, most people go through their first few decades of life not completely cognizant how terrible modern medicine can be.

Startups don’t care about marginal features because their success is entirely dominated by finding a single successful feature that anybody wants to pay for.

Why would analogies give genuinely new ideas? Well, intelligence is messy! If everything is so uniform, then there is no way to make a far-flung analogy – everything is pretty much the same already. Besides, just look at all the broken dreams of logical AI – their corpses tell us that no elegant theory of intelligence exists. Programming a genuine AI is a messy job. Messiness is a hideous strength. This is the 4th lesson.

2th lesson: Representation matters a lot. AM worked so well for mathematics, because AM used Lisp code as data. Lisp is the perfect tool if you want to search over the space of interesting mathematical functions.

With what goals do we engage in introspection? There’s always the grand plenitude to come, the promised comedy when everything comes out, but this is just another labyrinthine day in the life, etc., with fence fibers half buried in rain.

Her past is only a receding dim version of the woman who repeatedly steps slightly away from the life she has led, leaving dull fragments of it behind.

In the (loose and close) grip of ambivalence, one is both deep inside the zone of choice and on the fringes of the conditions and circumstances that demand one.

One can’t be a scholar of the future, one can’t learn from it, one can’t even learn about it.

To establish the character and value of something; we negotiate with the future, we barter with what we think we see ahead, what we expect to come.

. We traffic in what we hope for, what we fear, what we can’t finish by ourselves.

You think it’s a man in the distance coming along the country road, but as Husserl remarks, “it might be a tree moving in the wind, which in the gloom of the late afternoon at the edge of the field resembles a man in motion.” We define things by their peripheries, their proximities, the things around them to which they are bound but from which they differ. Trust has little to do with it; we cast out tendrils of interpretation as if with a paranoiac’s perspicacity and lucidity. “You utter fools, you senseless people,” says the Sophocles’s Old Slave in Electra, “do you take no heed any longer for your lives, or have you no inborn sense, that you fail to see that you are not merely close to but are in the midst of the greatest dangers?”

Five city pigeons fly into the air, driven from their perch under the eaves of a gray house by a homeowner bombarding them with tennis balls. A disheveled man goes by pulling a wagon and shouting curses to the curb and then to the corner store. Brotherfuck mothermouth turd-on-a-rock-in-your-face, do you hear me, do you hear me? Definitely—one should nurture one’s private sensibility (one’s “inner life”). One should deploy it in social spaces, pitch in, speak up, participate in “public life.” You can belong where you are for a moment. When everything gets loud enough—which is to say when sounds coalesce into a din—everything achieves synchrony, orchestration, and synonymy.

Characters are necessary to human microhistories, but those histories are of what has happened and is happening and not revelations of intelligent inevitability nor milestones along a road to progress.

Of course one can imagine death as rapacious, greedy, an impatient predator, a scavenger charged with clean-up, or, then again, as a supreme and theatrical deity, over inked or underground. Well, as a skeptic once put it, it’s wisest to follow the principle of the one no more than the other, which is as applicable to interpretations of allegory as to personifications of death.

The thought—a proposition, or perhaps a phantasm drawn from an impression—serves a sentence. There isn’t all that much distance between the prospect of death and the concept of beauty. A ridge, a sunset, a blossoming redbud—all are beautiful and, in their beauty, they assert their distance from us, but even today’s unvarying dull sky maintains distance, as if to make beauty itself inaccessible.

The “so muchness” of modern life has given us commitment anxiety.

The more options surround you, the less likely you are to make long-term commitments. That’s why I can read a book on a Kindle, but not on my iPhone Kindle app.

Instead of thinking about building intergenerational family wealth, people are thinking about their own desires and their own freedom.

Long time horizons change our incentives, usually in good ways. This is one of the core findings of game theory: people treat each other better when they intend to interact repeatedly in the future.

Commitment also has opportunity costs. You can only commit to things that matter to you if you’re discerning about those that don’t. For example, committing to your kids means saying no to other obligations.

When it comes to commitment, I’ve created my own twist: “All young relationships are alike; each committed relationship is deep in its own way.”

Because they have cause and effect backward. In Orthodoxy, G.K Chesterton writes: “Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.”

But if commitment is such a worthy enterprise, why are people so hesitant to commit to things?

The optimist loves their country because it’s on an upward trajectory, while the patriot loves something simply because it’s worthy of their love — and the trajectory is irrelevant. Being an optimist is easy. Being a patriot is hard. But with patriotism comes wisdom. Patriots know things can be worth caring for even when they’re imperfect. Often, their love expands in moments of difficulty.

Long story short, commitment is undervalued.  So here’s how I suggest responding to this trend: whatever your tolerance for commitment is, raise it.

If today you’re comfortable committing to something for two hours, try committing for a weekend. If you’re comfortable committing for two weeks, then raise it to two months; once you’re comfortable with two months, raise it to two years; and once you’re comfortable with two years, raise it to two decades. It’s okay to start small. All big things do. But they have to start somehow and with commitment comes momentum. Commitment happens in stages, and only by embracing it can you stop hugging the X-Axis and climb the compounding curve.

People are more likely to grind for their own success instead of their family name