Quotes

To procrastinate is to be entitled. It is arrogant. It assumes there will be a later. It assumes you'll have the discipline to get to it later (despite not having the discipline now).

A plan is just a guess you wrote down. … There's nothing wrong with guessing, dreaming, or predicting, but it's not planning. Planning's too definite a term for most things. … So next time call a plan a guess and just get to work.

Strong opinions are very useful to others. Those who were undecided or ambivalent can just adopt your stance. But those who disagree can solidify their stance by arguing against yours. Even if you invent an opinion for the sole sake of argument, boldly sharing a strong opinion is very useful to others.

[T]here's a meme, which is central to EA as it actually developed, and which is toxic in that it is upstream of these cognitive distortions. I think you've named it well enough: "the One Best Thing". The EA hope and ideology is to not just do a lot of good, but to do the most good. And so if someone can credibly claim to you, or argue from authority to you, that some problem, which you struggle to think about clearly, is the most important problem, you'll steer yourself into regions of the world where you can't actually reason or plan with your own mind, which means you're ripe for exploitation by people telling you what to do and what to think.

The advice that I give to EAs is "you should do the best and most ambitious thing that is straightforwardly good to do, by your own reasoning. What's the best thing you can see to do, where you can understand all the parts of why it's a good thing to do, such that the goodness feels obvious and mundane?"

Law of one player: Any specific thing you just thought of will never happen unless you (yes, you specifically) make it happen.

Make it part of your identity to be an agent. Make it a point of principle to do things, not because the thing is necessarily the perfect action, but because I choose the life where I do things, over the life where I always wait for the perfect opportunity.

AGI and ASI are very novel. You're basically limited to three options: anthropomorphize the technology, mechanomorphize the technology ('it's just a tool, it's not really thinking, it can't have its own goals or agency', etc.), or think about the technology on its own terms, with brand-new concepts and frames. The third option is the only workable one, but it comes with its own giant list of pitfalls and traps.

“Is this the game you really want to be playing?”

Sincere disagreements about AI are usually disagreements about future AI capabilities.

Nobody waves, but everybody waves back.

In other words, positivity and pro-social behavior is easily elicited by an initial gesture of goodwill.

Nobody waves, but everybody waves back.

In other words, positivity and pro-social behavior is easily elicited by an initial gesture of goodwill.

As a kid you have this glorified view of the world, that when things get real there are the heroic scientists, the uber-competent military men, the calm leaders who are on it, who will save the day. It is not so. The world is incredibly small; when the facade comes off, it’s usually just a few folks behind the scenes who are the live players, who are desperately trying to keep things from falling apart.

The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly" (Ausubel, 1968, p. vi)

Some people are kind, but have no fear of being disliked--these people are worthy of emulation

Some people are unkind and have no fear of being disliked--these people should be avoided

The goal of philosophy is to be correct, and you should expect that, sometimes, adopting a correct view will mean you have to sit with questions you don’t know how to answer yet.

The signature act of the American founding is not the seizure of power but the relinquishment. Every republic before ours had eventually met its Caesar and the Founders realized that a true constitutional order must instill an allergy to power. Power must never be fully trusted — not because the powerful are unusually wicked, but because they are ordinarily human.

"I understood none of this 5 years ago and thus sympathize with anyone still in that boat" is the best attitude with which to write explanatory material. After a subject feels obvious for a while, it becomes too tempting to skip some of the "obvious" little details.

Only bad security relies on secrecy; good security works even if all the details of it are public.

Grief is the price we pay for love, and its the best deal we'll ever get.

Anthropic wants to be seen as the safe and responsible and ‘good guy’ AI company, and in relative terms they are indeed those things, but that doesn’t mean they are meeting the bar in absolute terms of what a responsible AI company would look like, especially on policy communication.

I find such essays difficult to force my way through, as they seem to belabor the point, and at core seem to focus on avoiding ‘errors’ in theoretical senses while ultimately largely dodging the question of what exactly we actually care about in all this.

My way of selecting problems is basically—well, you know when scientists talk about how they work, they have theories about how they work which probably don't have much to do with the truth. But my theory is that I look for something where everybody's agreed about something and it feels wrong. There's a slight intuition there's something wrong about it and then I work on that and see if I can elaborate why it is I think it's wrong

When you deal with an exponential your choices are too early or too late. No longer plausibly too early means definitely too late.

The International System is a pile of abstractions. The abstractions are dense and intertwined, and there is no coherent catechism for what they are, why they are, or why they ought to be. It has no central actor, so its outputs appear incoherent, ineffectual, or pathological, and there’s no one obvious person to blame when things go wrong. Being driven by consensus, its strongest bias is to preserve the status quo, a status quo that seems increasingly untenable or undesirable. In short, the whole thing feels fake and gay.

But it’s also what lets us all be fake and gay together and I think people will miss it when it’s gone.

Political power is fundamentally grounded in violence. Power is based on the physical ability to kill other human beings, or the ability, by whatever means, to compel others to kill on your behalf. Human rights, popular sovereignty, equality under the law. Rules of engagement, due process, bodily autonomy, freedom of conscience. Everything else is an abstraction.

Devise general theories with broad applicability, but retain a willingness to disregard or reevaluate those theories when something contradicts them.

I do think for some people some things are meant to be unthinkable right up until you’re supposed to think them which is, something like the opposite of a philosopher’s mode of thought.

So many people seem eager to rush to sell their souls, without first checking to see if the Devil’s willing to fulfill his end of the bargain.

At this point, anyone paying even modest attention knows AI is not ‘hitting a wall’ except in the style of the Kool Aid Man.

Personally, I find that current practitioners are often not prepared to explain the most fundamental concepts and assumptions in their sub disciplines. So I spend a lot of time studying history, looking for the moment when these ideas had to be consciously articulated and defended, before they were forgotten like the invisible water in the fishbowl.

I guess there's a way that people use probabilities in practice which is like there's the main line the thing that you're kind of centrally expecting the maximum post scenario that you're kind of expecting to live and then you have sort of this abstract ideas of other things that might happen and ideally you take actions where those sort of other branches you don't want to be like

screwing over the world in those other branches um but you're not necessarily like living in that scenario. And then there's other things that you just view as so improbable that it's okay to, you know, do things that are counterproductive if if those things are true.

You don’t train your emotional brain with logic, you train it by giving it the chance to experientially notice contradictions in its expectations.

Reality: the world we live in may be an illusion, but it's the only place you can get a good cup of coffee. (Dan Dennett)

Voices: Are voices real? What's a voice? What's it made of? Is it a bodily part? Is it biological material? But you can record a voice; you can recognize a voice; it has causal power in the world. Voices, if you say what category of thing they are, you, you run out of—it seems to be almost in a category by itself. Well all right, fine. We don't need a voice-throat problem to go with the mind-body problem. We may not know how to answer the question of what voices are, but we're not mystified. We're not puzzled. We're not baffled. -- Dan Dennett

academia is the most dispositionally conservative institution on the planet.

The way I think about it is there are lots of possible things that the AI can learn to attend to or steer to. In any environment where you give it some training signal, it will learn to seek all of the things that were present when that signal was being given, or learn to suppress or minimise the things if it’s a negative signal. So if you care about one particular  aspect of the environment, then you really need a diverse set of environments. You need a set of environments such that the only common factor is the thing that you care about. And that’s quite hard.

Dean W. Ball: No single AI complaint/fear is salient enough to enough people to form a durable political movement, so what is happening instead is that an omnicausal anti-AI sentiment is forming. “Kids and electricity and water and jobs and dontkilleveryoneist memes and also it hallucinates.”

If your response to reality is ‘that doesn’t feel real, it’s too weird, it’s like some sci-fi story’ and not believable then I remind you that finding reality to have believability issues is a you problem, not a problem with reality.

Every analytic philosopher has had the desire for clean and exceptionless first principles beaten out of them; this is the first thing they do when you start grad school.

I run a forever campaign and my advice for keeping it going is just don't get too attached and die on hills. I think a lot of the early survivability of my game was due to my players enjoying it enough to keep me motivated and trudging through the slumps and burn outs, but later down the line, a lot of it's been coming to terms and accepting loss in and out of game. Accepting that schedules change, people lose interest, plot threads get forgotten, things don't always go the way you planned and you might lose days worth of notes or combat prep, your players aren't always interested in plot hooks as you hoped. manage your expectations.

Write. Write until the words peter out, and you’re no longer sure what to say next, and the flow sputters to a halt.

Go back up. Five lines, maybe, or maybe ten or fifteen (to be safe). Go back up to a place where you knew what you were saying.

Put your cursor at the start of that paragraph, and hit enter three times.

Go back to the tail end, the break you just created in the text. Start typing that next paragraph all over again, literally rewriting it, just straight-up copying from down below, looking at the old words. Pay attention as you go—hearing what you’re writing, tasting the words, savoring them. Roll them around in your head. Make small changes. A word here, a phrase there. That didn’t sound quite right…

(This process may not flow all that well. You may stutter a lot.)

The key is, any time you stall, you go back. You go back to where you were sure, where you were confident, where you could feel the rightness of what it was you had to say.

And then you hit enter three times. You hit enter, and you start rewriting, letting the words flow through you like poetry, like lines in a play, the cadence carrying you onward until you hit another boulder.

It will be a different boulder, this time.

Usually.

Remember that doing the horrible thing is miserable for two minutes and then it’s over, while dreading the horrible thing is miserable for hours and you still have to do it after.

The most important skill for doing research is not thinking you know things when you actually don't.

What persons are and what the laws of logic are turn out to be two problems that have to be solved jointly. Now, each problem on its own has given rise to a great deal of the wrong kind of philosophy: I mean, philosophizing that proceeds by table-thumping and insisting on whatever opinion one happens to already have.

Share strong opinions.

Strong opinions are very useful to others.

Those who were undecided or ambivalent can just adopt your stance.

But those who disagree can solidify their stance by arguing against yours.

Even if you invent an opinion for the sole sake of argument, boldly sharing a strong opinion is very useful to others.

The alternative to getting a proper philosophy is continuing to use a bad one. It is not avoiding philosophy altogether, because that is impossible.

The conservative position often isn’t “I don’t want [good thing]”, it’s “I am skeptical [good thing] will actually happen, and there’s a risk we will make things worse”.

Teaching isolated facts is almost aways a waste of time; the unit of learning should be the link, because retrieval speed comes from connectivity, not accumulation.

If you want something to be true, you will unconsciously accept weaker evidence and interpret weird data as being in favor of your hypothesis.

If people say, “I don’t want to do this, but I have to do it because of X.” But they show almost no interest in finding out with confidence whether X is true or not, and they don’t stay up to date on whether it’s true or not. They also maybe show no interest in changing X, taking steps that would fix X and make their actions no longer required. And also when X stops being true, they don’t change their actions. These are kind of giveaways that maybe X isn’t the real reason.

The best way to survive suffering is through meaning. If your suffering serves a purpose, or if you have deep meaning in your life, you can endure almost anything. But you've optimized away meaning in your quest to optimize away pain.

“It is good,” wrote Machiavelli, “to appear clement, trustworthy, humane, religious, and honest, and also to be so, but always with the mind so disposed that, when the occasion arises not to be so, you can become the opposite.” As with much of Machiavelli, the quote contains a deep insight into how self-interested individuals balance the demands of cooperation with the demands of egoism.

There are, obviously, some bad faith actors out there. And there’s nothing wrong with being reluctant to engage. But the “bad faith” accusation has morphed into something far worse than “don’t feed the trolls.” Rather than a prudent move, it’s become an abdication of basic democratic values.

The problem is that there are two operative principles of bad faith.

1. It’s wrong to engage with anyone acting in bad faith.

2. Virtually everyone on the other side is acting in bad faith.

Either of these on its own is perfectly harmless. But if you believe both of them (or anything close), you are effectively giving up on democracy. You’re saying that we shouldn’t be resolving conflicts by talking and listening—which of course raises the question of what we should be doing instead.

At some point, we all have to stop waiting for other people to be the first to make a change. Otherwise we’ll be waiting forever.

The moral realist who admits they cannot persuade the tiger to spare them is still faced with the problem of explaining how they know their morality is correct and the tiger has the defective intuition. And, perhaps even more importantly, the moral realist has conceded everything to the tyrant, the sophist, and the egoist.

[There's a] quite common pattern of reasoning that people have where ... there's some claim, they process that claim at the level of like, "what could that claim be used to justify," or like "could that claim [lead] to like, something bad," and then they they conclude that the claim is false. And unfortunately that's just not how truth works.

If we’re going to use intuitions as evidence, the question is, whose intuitions are right? How do we decide who’s right when intuitions conflict?

Galileo famously turned his telescope to Jupiter, and he saw that Jupiter had four moons. This challenged some of the assumptions of the Aristotelian worldview that helped support the Copernican revolution. Now, imagine if it were consistently the case that when astronomers looked at Jupiter through a telescope, some of them just didn’t see any moons. So, two groups of astronomers could go to look at Jupiter at the same time through equally good telescopes. One group would say they see four moons, while the other group only sees the planet. And there’s no a priori reason to think that either group is crazy or anything like that. Well, I mean, I think that would have seriously undermined Galileo’s evidence. If we don’t have consensus on what the basic data is, then we can’t use that data to support our theories.

Not only can you have opinions and hunches and thoughts about stuff you can barely even see, it is sometimes important to have opinions and hunches and thoughts about stuff you can barely even see. How else are you going to get started?

It is the profession of philosophers to question platitudes that others accept without thinking twice. A dangerous profession, since philosophers are more easily discredited than platitudes, but a useful one. For when a good philosopher challenges a platitude, it usually turns out that the platitude was essentially right; but the philosopher has noticed trouble that one who did not think twice could not have met. In the end the challenge is answered and the platitude survives, more often than not. But the philosopher has done the adherents of the platitude a service: he has made them think twice.

As the Dutch say: fail and fail and fail, but less and less and less.

You create more pain by procrastinating than by just facing this thing. So close the loop and just do something.

There's this peculiar thing that happens in philosophy: ... philosophy students find themselves working on one topic or another and then they they adopt it. They figure out a view, often in their dissertation, and that's their view for the rest of their life, just by accident. And they become identified with that position. And so it's always a puzzle if somebody has a view that deviates from what you think is his position. And actually people are expected to defend the same position lifelong; other philosophers get disappointed if you have a new idea or you change your mind.

But actually in my view that's a terrible way to do philosophy. ... If you defend a position against all comers, and that's what you do, then you don't understand other positions from the inside, and so you're not really defending it against all comers. You have to occupy different competing positions [to understand them].

Sylvia Brownrigg is a novelist and i think a fairly well known one right now. But she used to be a philosophy graduate student, and I had a conversation with her once during that phase of her life in which she explained what was wrong with the standard views of sincerity. So the standard views of sincerity and philosophy are more or less this: there's something you think then there's something you say, and if what you say matches what you think, you were sincere. And she said "look, how do I find out what I think?" Suppose the question is whether some proposition p is true. Well I argue for p as forcefully as I can, and then i argue for not p as forcefully as I can, and then I find some other position that's maybe orthogonal to both of those to argue for as forcefully as I can. And when I argue for each of these things it has to seem to me like i really believe it. And then I step back and I ask myself what's plausibly right. And then she said, following up, none of this works unless i'm sincere throughout. And so sincerity has to precede what I believe. And so the standard account can't be right. And I woke up and I thought, oh that's very cool, that sounds right to me. So you have to develop all of these positions fully sincerely, and believe them although they're incompatible with each other, in order to have a decent chance of finding out what you think.

Some heuristics are well-known and useful enough that we gives them names, a subset of which are the philosophical razors. Hanlon's—"never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"—is one of my favorites, but with the added qualification "or miscommunication."

So what stops most of us from seeing the world more clearly? Mere speculation on my part, but I think most of this is downstream of one core superpower of superforecasters: They’re not strongly psychologically committed to being right about any particular fact or in any particular instance.

This is one of life’s delicious ironies: The way to be right more often is to care less about being wrong.

What actually hurt was the feeling of resistance to being wrong, the cognitive dissonance between who I was at my outermost and innermost layers — a feeling that would build and build for as long as the dissonance was maintained.

Being wrong, and saying so, is by contrast liberating — like your mind is tangled up in a very complicated knot of stories and anxieties, but by pulling out just the right thread, the whole thing falls apart. Acknowledging what is true is so much cleaner, psychologically, than maintaining everything necessary to avoid acknowledging it. Feynman famously said, “you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool,” but I think I disagree. Fooling yourself takes work.

By highlighting the underlying need this part of you wants to fulfill, rather than just the action it wants you to perform, you open yourself up to multiple different options of how to fulfill this need.

You're not addicted to the pleasure you get from doing that thing. You're addicted to avoiding the discomfort of being in a low dopamine deficit state, so you try to shoot back up by doing that thing again.

Becoming a prolific writer is not about motivation or intensity. It’s about redefining ‘writing’ so it becomes a fun, edifying, sustainable activity.

Once you start getting the words out on the page you can work with them and upcycle them

If you take all of the time you dabble away in a hundred quixotic ways and concentrate it on two or three goals you truly prize, you’ll probably succeed at what you value the most. Pick your battles, friends. And wherever do you choose to fight, **do ten times as much.**

When consequences are the result of categorization, people will perform categories to attain their desired consequences.

One of the ways that we increase alignment between agents so that they cooperate is by making sure that their actions here and now, in “this” game, spill over into future games. If they defect, that will jeopardize their ability to enter coordinative agreements in the future. This reputation staking lets us do things we couldn’t otherwise

It is terrible to see how a single unclear idea, a single formula without meaning, lurking in a young man’s head, will sometimes act like an obstruction of inert matter in an artery, hindering the nutrition of the brain, and condemning its victim to pine away in the fullness of his intellectual vigor and in the midst of intellectual plenty. Many a man has cherished for years as his hobby some vague shadow of an idea, too meaningless to be positively false; he has, nevertheless, passionately loved it, has made it his companion by day and by night, and has given to it his strength and his life, leaving all other occupations for its sake, and in short has lived with it and for it, until it has become, as it were, flesh of his flesh and bone of his bone; and then he has waked up some bright morning to find it gone, clean vanished away like the beautiful Melusina of the fable, and the essence of his life gone with it.

Among dilettanti it is not rare to find those who have so perverted thought to the purposes of pleasure that it seems to vex them to think that the questions upon which they delight to exercise it may ever get finally settled; and a positive discovery which takes a favorite subject out of the arena of literary debate is met with ill-concealed dislike. This disposition is the very debauchery of thought.

A reframe I’ve found helpful when it comes to “should” - I’ve heard people say to replace “should” with “could,” but that never felt like it quite made sense to me. It doesn’t express that I WANT to do the thing and know it would benefit me. Instead of thinking “I really should shower” when I’m facing The Wall, I’ve started changing it to, “man, it would be good if I could shower.” “It would be really good if I could do the dishes”. Not only does it reduce the pressure, but I feel like it naturally invites you to think of the “because”. Eg.“It would be good if I could shower because it’s nice to feel clean and I won’t feel stressed about running an errand feeling gross.” It directs me towards the benefits of doing the thing rather than focusing on how much I’m struggling to do the thing.

Every utterance or expression we make actively bets, and is backed by, our reputation.

I think the fact that our culture particularly venerates heroes who follow their principles against the opinions of the crowd is a weird idiosyncratic quirk; in China, or in Native American folklore, or in the world of the Brothers Grimm, following your principles instead of heeding the established wisdom gets you killed or maimed or ostracized. We have a myth about principles, that’s probably downstream of stuff like Protestant pilgrims and the Revolutionary War and beating the Nazis in the name of freedom and stuff like that.

But ultimately people don’t actually do all that well, when they push against the crowd. As often as not, the mob just kills them, and then we go on to tell heroic stories about them after their death. And this is something people know down in their bones, and ignore at their peril, and it’s (understandably, perhaps even correctly) pretty rare for someone to actually care That Hard.

You might need to include boring parts, or at least parts that are more boring than the rest, but if you do, please don’t place them at the beginning. Not for a book, and not for a podcast, a movie, or a Substack post.

There are huge quality of life improvements downstream of “let me take this off future me’s plate.” You don’t just shift work earlier, you also save yourself all the mental friction between now and when you do it. Psychic cost is the integral of cognitive load over time — so do the things you most want to avoid first.

Service is the only thing that makes anything feel better in a real, lasting way. This is because acts of service provide a temporary respite from the inherent cognitive dissonance of living selfishly.

Heaven is a set of gradually increasing but attainable challenges.

You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.

The aim of most metaethics then is to vindicate morality. Metaethics is often about trying to find out how and why some kind of moral realism is true. Put more negatively, one could say the motivation for a lot of metaethics is a fear that moral realism might not be true, and thus that there would be no solid ground or foundation for one's moral views.

Philosophy was never only the quest for knowledge or insight for its own sake, but for the sake of the provision of some sort of relief or consolation. In fact, we have evidence of many ancient Greek and Roman philosophers proclaiming the non-philosophical status of any philosophy that did not fulfll a certain medical function. Epicurus is quoted as saying, "Empty are the words of that philosopher who offers therapy for no human suffering. For just as there is no use in medical expertise if it does not give therapy for bodily diseases, so too there is no use in philosophy if it does not expel the suffering of the soul."

Sorry but if sincerely defending your beliefs is clearly and easily distinguishable from trolling then your beliefs are basic.

Here’s other things philosophy can do—in popular work, in the classroom, and even in “proper” academic work. You can give a conceptual tool. You can offer an alternate framing. You can offer a conceptual distinction, that might offer a little finer-grained resolution. Maybe the right question to start, especially with work oriented towards popular audiences and towards teaching, is not what’s the argument, but rather: what tool do you want to give your readers? And argument is one kind of tool, but not the only one.

When you experience someone else’s genius work, a little part of you feels, “That’s what I could have, would have, and should have done!”

Someone else did it. You didn’t.

They fought the resistance. You gave in to distractions.

They made it top priority. You said you’d get to it some day.

*They took the time.* You meant to.

When this happens, you can take it two ways:

You could let that part of you give up. “Oh well. Now I don’t need to make that anymore.”

Or you could do something about that jealous pain. Shut off your phone, kill the distractions, make it top priority, and spend the time.

When you think something nice about someone, you should tell them. People don’t hear enough compliments.

Let’s say you’re a musician. I say to you, “Write me a piece of music. Anything at all. Go.” “Umm … anything?” you say. “What kind of mood are you looking for? What genre?” There are too many possibilities. The blank page problem. How do you begin with infinity? Now imagine I say, “Write me a piece of music, using only a xylophone, a flute, and a shoe box. You can only use four notes: B, C, E, F, and only two notes at a time. It has to be in 3/4 time, start quiet, get loud, then get quiet by the end. Make it sound like a ladybug dancing with an acorn. Go.” Ah … your imagination has already begun writing the music as soon as it hears the limitations. This is easy! Those of us in developed countries — on fast Internet connections, reading books on subtraction just for fun — have a blank page. We can do anything. Anything we want. No restrictions. And that’s the problem. We’re paralyzed by the infinite possibilities. Give yourself some intentional restrictions in life and you’ll finally get inspired to act. Restrictions will set you free.

- Derek Sivers is a musician and the creator of CD Baby, which became the largest online seller of independent music, and the author of the bestselling book “Anything You Want”.

Ideas that seem obvious to you may be incredibly profound to others, but you may be inclined not to share them because of a fear that they will be perceived as too shallow. Are you holding back insights or actions because they seem too obvious to you? Brilliant work doesn’t need to be complex. Sometimes the deepest truths are hiding in plain sight.

You can do what you love as an avocation, neither career nor hobby.

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. This often requires breaking old ideas, which is much easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.

“Can I keep doing this, *in the same way*, for a year?”

That’s the question you ask yourself if you’ve been struggling to stay consistent. And then, you adjust your process until the answer is yes.

To bend thought round so that it looks critically at itself is quite hard. That is why, in any culture, philosophy is a relatively late development.

When things go wrong, however, we do have to do this. We must then somehow readjust our underlying concepts; we must shift the set of assumptions that we have inherited and have been brought up with. We must restate those existing assumptions—which are normally muddled and inarticulate—so as to get our fingers on the source of trouble. And this new statement must somehow be put in a usable form, a form which makes the necessary changes look possible.

That is the need that philosophy exists to satisfy.

[Johnson] said that for general improvement, a man should read whatever his immediate inclination prompts him to … He added, ‘what we read with inclination makes a much stronger impression. If we read without inclination, half the mind is employed in fixing the attention; so there is but one half to be employed on what we read … He said, ‘if a man begins to read in the middle of a book and feels an inclination to go on, let him not quit it to go to the beginning. He may, perhaps, not feel again the inclination’.

There are — he said — three kinds of scholar. There is the ant, who ranges the Earth and gathers crumbs of knowledge and piles them, raising his ant-mound, higher and higher, competing to have the greatest pile to sit and gloat upon–he is the encyclopedist, who gathers but adds nothing. There is the spider, who spins elaborate webs of theory from the stuff of his own mind, spinning beautiful, intricate patterns in which it is so easy to become entwined — he is the theorist, the system-weaver. And then there is the honeybee, who gathers from the fruits of nature and, processing them through the organ of his own being, produces something good and useful for the world. Let us be honeybees, give to the world, learning and learning’s fruits. Let us found a new method — the Scientific Method — and with it dedicate ourselves to the advancement of knowledge of the secret causes of things, and the expansion of the bounds of human empire to the achievement of all things possible.

*The delusion is: commitment is a thing that you feel. The truth is: commitment is a thing that you make.* It’s a living system of obligations and consequences that cause you to rise above your temporary frailty and work towards a goal you believe in, whether that goal takes a week or a lifetime.

Commitment architecture is a skill. It requires a deep understanding of just how far you can push yourself, and you can only get that through experimenting over time.

What you’re trying to do here is hurl yourself off progressively higher diving boards. You want to create a forcing function that makes it likelier that you’ll follow through on a project that’s outside of your comfort zone. Then, if it works, you up the stakes. You are looking to find yourself repeatedly in a zone of productive discomfort, where you’re pushed just beyond what you think you’re capable of. Over time, you’ll develop a sense of what your real capacity is.

Best mental reset I’ve learned:

If your mind is loud — *Write.*

If your mind is empty — *Read.*

If your mind is racing — *Walk.*

If your mind is tired — *Sleep.*

If your mind is sharp — *Build.*

Most problems are just mismatched energy. Get the inputs right, the rest follows.

We might paraphrase this with the Machiavellian principle: when choosing between virtue and survival, survival must come first, because, in order to practice any kind of virtue, a people must first be alive.

Since academia is the source of most new knowledge, its biases are inherited by every information source downstream of it, including the mainstream media, Wikipedia, Google, ChatGPT, social media algorithms, policy papers, Hollywood movies, and societal consensus itself.

"Is this gonna be on the test?"

Yeah, about the test... The test will measure whether you are an informed, engaged, and productive citizen of the world. And it will take place in schools, and bars, and hospitals, and dorm rooms, and in places of worship. You will be tested on first dates, in job interviews, while watching football, and while scrolling through your Twitter feed. The test will judge your ability to think about things other than celebrity marriages, whether you'll be easily persuaded by empty political rhetoric, and whether you'll be able to place your life and your community in a broader context. The test will last your entire life, and it will be comprised of the millions of decisions that when taken together make your life yours. And everything—everything!—will be on it.

Reciting the text from the Wikipedia page minimizes the risk that we say something “wrong”, but it also makes us harder to understand, so try to say things in your own words.

If you take up the mantle of influencing anything, you have to know that you may influence things wrong. That risk is always present. It is pleasant to pretend this isn’t an issue, and doesn’t matter, but of course it is and it does. You might say you couldn’t have known, but often you could have. What we know, even about ourselves, is not a matter of intelligence, but of dedication and persistence.

Pretending that no relief from ignorance is possible feels good because it resolves or indeed itself relieves the internal demand for discernment. (This is the same reason that forming the judgement “being judgmental is bad” feels so good.) It is very pleasurable to pretend that since we will never know for sure on many of these questions, there can never be any updating; that there is nothing between proof and ignorance. But all of life proceeds between these poles. The implacable demand that we navigate that terrain creates inside of us a lot of tension, but it is never going to go away. It is present in every field, in every area, from romantic life all the way to mathematics.

When you're convinced a philosopher or idea is wrong—especially on something you care about—read them more thoroughly than those you agree with. You'll either be converted to their truth faster, or you’ll learn from their errors.

Most philosophical errors don’t come from a lack of intelligence, but from: (1) lack of courage to follow an argument to its odd or unpalatable conclusion; (2) mistaking personal intuition or worldview for universal truth; (3) confusing words and concepts for the reality they represent; and (4) fear of death.

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just...” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

The reason it’s hard to get going on personal goals is that you’re already using all of your time. No matter who you are, you’re already using all 24 hours, every day, for something. Because this will always be true, goals that happen at all must happen now, while you still don’t yet have time.

*Follow up.* Most people are super sensitive to being seen as annoying, and that’s the primary reason they don’t follow up and therefore watch opportunities go down the drain. Super simple solution, follow up! Most people just forget to respond, haven’t prioritized your request, or something else along those lines. But don’t just follow up, make it easy for the other participant to act on this too. For example, if you are following up on a due-to-be-scheduled meeting with someone, offer multiple specific times (including “now”), offer to meet them where they are (if possible), and send them light talking points so that they know the meeting won’t be a waste of their time. This will make it a lot easier for them to want to accept and actually turn up.

**** Remember how long you’ve been putting this off and how often the gods have given you due dates of which you’ve not taken advantage. It’s high time now for you to recognize what kind of universe you’re a part of, and what kind of universal directing power you’re an emanation of, and that a limit has been set on your time, and if you don’t use it to dispel the mists it will pass, and you will pass, and the opportunity won’t come again.

**** Your mind will come to resemble your frequently repeated thoughts, because it takes on the hue of its thoughts.

**** The command center, the ruling part of the soul, should not be swayed by any smooth or rough motions in the body. Make sure, then, that it doesn’t get caught up with them, but isolates itself and restricts those feelings to the bodily parts. But when these feelings are transmitted to the mind (since, as is bound to happen in a unified organism, the two interact), there’s no point in trying to resist the sensation, which is involuntary, but the command center should not add, as its own contribution, any belief about the goodness or badness of the feeling.

I feel like before committing ourselves to some important issue, we should ask ourselves 2 things:

1. How much work is required to get true beliefs on this issue?

2. What can I do about it once I have true beliefs?

It’s not a sin to say you have no opinion on a subject. In fact, sometimes you should! To have a strong opinion on everything is a kind of arrogance. It assumes you’re able to grasp everything that needs to be grasped about every complex issue - some of which scholars spend their entire lives trying to understand. Where does this confidence come from? A YouTube video? An article in the Washington Post? I wish it were that easy.

In order for new information to truly impact your life, it needs to be coupled with action.

But if you don’t think for yourself, if you don’t have a point of view through which new information can be processed in a way that is relevant to you, then there will always be a gap between learning and action.

The sage is calm, but not because he declares calmness good.

You don’t have a thinking problem, you have an action problem

Miserable people try to think their way out of problems that can only be solved with action.

Make action your default mode.

As you become an adult, you realize that things around you weren't just always there; people made them happen. But only recently have I started to internalize how much tenacity everything requires. That hotel, that park, that railway. The world is a museum of passion projects.

Fun is underrated. The best and most creative work comes from a root of joy and excitement. You can feel this in your body.

Later, you’ll be nostalgic for right now.

Do things fast. Things don’t actually take much time (as measured by a stopwatch); resistance/procrastination does. “Slow is fake”. If no urgency exists, impose some.

Doing as much as you can every day is a form of life extension.

Figure out what your primary focus is and make progress on that every day, first thing in the morning, no exceptions. Days with 0 output are the killers. (Tyler Cowen)

Doing things is energizing, wasting time is depressing. You don’t need that much ‘rest’.

Form opinions on things and then find the strongest critique of those opinions. Repeat.

Stop asking for approval and permission from others. School and work trains people to have this mindset. Instead, figure out what you want to do, and plant the “this is happening” flag. People will come along for the ride.

Figure out what gives you new ideas, and make sure you incorporate that into your routine. For me this is talking to people, tweeting, writing in my notebook, long conversations with friends (especially late night or while walking). For other people this is showering, baths, long walks, runs, etc. Make sure you “harvest” these ideas too, i.e. write them down somewhere so they don’t get lost.

Once in awhile, put away all concepts you read about online and reason “up” from the base of your experience and what you’ve seen and done. (e.g. What were some of the best decisions you made? The worst? Why? Can you apply those lessons now? etc.)

If you want think originally and differently, seek uncorrelated inputs. Read minor works, older things, obscure journals.

What is the number of readers that justifies writing something down? Often the correct answer is zero, even a definite zero. Even if it’s only about those who read it, twenty readers is actually a lot of value to put out there, and a lot of potential connection.

To get a well-rounded understanding of a news story, act like a juror trying to understand a case. You can't just hear from one lawyer.

Choosing to deny reality doesn’t change reality; it just makes you less safe within that reality.

The misunderstanding around how these brain circuits work has led to this idea...a kind of obsession with the idea that we have to feel good in order to be productive. And nothing could be further from the truth.

The truth is it’s the reverse: we have to be productive—we have to start working, we have to lean in and get going, accepting the initial agitation—in order to feel good.

When a student says something, instead of thinking that I am depriving her by not responding (either assuringly or interestingly) I think to myself that I am depriving her precisely by responding and depriving her of the interaction with her peers, the reasons they can give to her, and the opportunity to surprise them.

Focus on your likes, not your wants.

• You may not want to exercise, but you like how it makes you feel.

• You may not want to write, but you like the feeling of accomplishment.

• You may not want to wake up early, but you like the calm beauty of morning.

Wanting is the desire you feel before doing something. Liking is the satisfaction you feel after doing something. Let your likes guide you.

This is the way that I think about my life and I hope you'll think about your life too. He said, you should think about your life hoping that there will be many moments in it about which you can say, "There's no place I'd rather be, there's nothing I'd rather be doing, there's nobody I'd rather be with, and this I will remember well." I think if you can aim to fill your life with moments like that, it will be a meaningful one.

What bad things are you afraid of happening? Imagine in detail what it would be like if they happened. (prompted by Kamilé Lukosiute)

There’s often a tradeoff between the work of discipline and the actual work itself. Like it’s very easy to end up spending time and effort recording, optimizing, etc etc instead of doing.

Jake would (and did!) tell me that no amount of grief, or fatigue, or pain, or struggle should stop a person from writing a draft of an essay or an e-mail in a timely fashion. Now is always better than later, was his credo.

If you don’t know what you want but you find yourself beating yourself up over your supposedly limited attention span, I think this may actually be a sort of capitalistic self-flagellation; whipping yourself in shame for not paying attention to The Teacher, The Boss

*

But the reason The Teacher and The Boss have to bark “Focus! Pay attention!” is because they know in their heart of hearts that they’re not interesting.

A book is a sort of prosthetic. A book is a frame, put together by an author and her support team, a specific window, a specific lens, a particular way of seeing. The book is FOCUSING FOR YOU. Am I making sense?

'Self discipline' is a patch for being conflicted about what you want to do.

Often, productive people are interpreted as 'having discipline': able to force themselves to do the work even when it's unpleasant.

But creative productivity only ever works in spite of that.

If there’s something you’ve been wanting to change about your life (eg: “fix my sleep”), and you’ve spent maybe 10+ years making failed attempts at it despite having done the reading, etc - the problem is probably upstream. Ie it’s not actually the sleep, it’s something else

When someone hands you a “really” claim, try making it into an “in some sense” claim, and then ask the obvious questions.

When you find yourself making “really” claims (which we all do, sometimes), try and backtrack and restate them as “in some sense” claims. And then try to say which sense, and why you think so.

A healthy individual can trust his inclinations, which jointly project unified and internally coordinated agency. Once that’s no longer possible, the Socratic innovation—to a first approximation, substituting argument for inclinations—postpones the collapse of a disintegrating personality. But Nietzsche is quite insistent that it does no more than mask and temporarily arrest the process:

Seems like one of the highest leverage stories for many ppl (me included) to reprogram is the one that goes like:

I am struggling I am struggling and it is my fault I am struggling and it is my fault and I have to deal with this on my own I am going to isolate myself until I am presentable for other humans

(Note: in philosophy papers, concepts—e.g., WOMAN—are normally capitalised, to distinguish them from the thing the concept is a concept of—i.e., women. Heretoforeafter, I shall be utilising this convention, in addition to every other convention of academic writing, such as saying ‘such as’, jarringly plugging in citations (Cf. McClurg 1995), and being unbelievably entertaining and well-written.)

You should never be confident in an idea until you’ve read the rebuttals. It’s possible to construct a case that appears overwhelming for anything.

The beautiful thing about life is that you can "waste" 10 years & still come out on top, making up a decade's worth of grounds all in a few months.

the way people in society talk about "experts" is exactly the same way kids talk about "adults"

The idea that the conflict of parties will, by means of public discussion, bring out necessary public truths is a kind of political watered-down version of the Hegelian dialectic, with its synthesis arrived at by a union of antithetical conceptions. The method has nothing in common with the procedure of organized cooperative inquiry which has won the triumphs of science in the field of physical nature.

Acceptance in advance of the inevitability of violence tends to produce the use of violence in cases where peaceful methods might otherwise avail.

Write about everything. Write it immediately. Edit afterwards.

"[A]ny large classification fits each single fact very badly." Walter Lippmann

"Cats ... is dogs, and guinea pigs is dogs, but this 'ere tortoise is a hinsect"

To save the world, I will start by doing the proper and humble things I know how to do within the confines of my own life.

A well-connected and useful Babble graph is thickness (not to be confused with thiccness). It is written: attack from thickness. When thinking from a thick Babble graph, you’re not wandering lackadaisically, building an argument from scraps lying at the side of the trail. You’ll have the weight of your entire intellectual life at your back.

I have a rule inspired by Solzhenitsyn, which is that every battle which occurs between human beings also plays out within each human heart.

Satan is the voice in your ear who says, “You will never do this well enough for it to be worth doing.” This is the burrowing anxiety that puts me off writing for weeks at at time, the anxiety that anything I produce will not justify its own existence. The subroutine in your head constantly constructing impossibly high standards and handing them to you to use as excuses to do nothing. Satan is characterized by inaction, the inaction caused by paralyzing perfectionism.

When you say “I want to make the world a better place,” you add an implicit “I want power and should be trusted with it.”

If we never feel like, "oh I'm finished now for today," basically the nervous system isn't getting any signaling that "rest now, finished," a gratitude for what it has allowed you to do that day, for its cooperation. So we want to be feeling regularly, daily, like "I'm finished, everything's done."

2 suggestions on finding unthinkable thoughts:

1/ Write down a belief that only terrible people have. Or one that repulses you. Write down what you would do if this were true. How you would act, work and vote. Sit in the discomfort of that belief.

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2/ Follow a few really hard-nosed accounts, people who will say uncomfortable things eg @Aella_Girl @robinhanson @RichardHanania

Can I look at their tweets without discomfort? Or do I fear reading them?

*

If I can't do these on an issue I consider that a flag. If I cannot bear to consider different beliefs, that suggests I might be hiding some things from myself.

One afternoon a student said "Roshi, I don't really understand what's going on. I mean, we sit in zazen and we gassho to each other and everything, and Felicia got enlightened when the bottom fell out of her water-bucket, and Todd got enlightened when you popped him one with your staff, and people work on koans and get enlightened, but I've been doing this for two years now, and the koans don't make any sense, and I don't feel enlightened at all! Can you just tell me what's going on?"

"Well you see," Roshi replied, "for most people, and especially for most educated people like you and I, what we perceive and experience is heavily mediated, through language and concepts that are deeply ingrained in our ways of thinking and feeling. Our objective here is to induce in ourselves and in each other a psychological state that involves the unmediated experience of the world, because we believe that that state has certain desirable properties. It's impossible in general to reach that state through any particular form or method, since forms and methods are themselves examples of the mediators that we are trying to avoid. So we employ a variety of ad hoc means, some linguistic like koans and some non-linguistic like zazen, in hopes that for any given student one or more of our methods will, in whatever way, engender the condition of non-mediated experience that is our goal. And since even thinking in terms of mediators and goals tends to reinforce our undesirable dependency on concepts, we actively discourage exactly this kind of analytical discourse."

And the student was enlightened.

If people do not appear to be consistent with what they say they believe, look for something else they are being consistent with

Almost every time I said something was too hard for me what I actually meant was that it would take too long.

Civilization is fragile. It’s easy to sit in Periclean Athens (or 1891 Paris, or 2017 Seattle) and think “wow, the march of progress is inexorable!” But it isn’t. Civilization is something to be lovingly nurtured and ferociously guarded; the wolves at the door haven’t gone away just because your lamp burns too bright for you to see out into the dark.

Almost half of all people have a vicious inner critic, an internal monologue that ruthlessly judges and shames them, everyday.

These ppl should disregard any spiritual advice about losing their ego. They need to be BUILDING ego, strengthening it, so it can stand up for itself.

“We must all suffer from one of two pains: the pain of discipline or the pain of regret.

Recognize your "no"s.

Until you can actually get clear on what is a no in your life, your yes isn't actually a yes.

a lot of smart people are stuck on extremely easy and solvable problems because they keep shaming the system they're trying to debug

"it's not SUPPOSED to work this way..." ok but it does. now what?

most people who say they have attention deficit disorder actually have sacredness deficit disorder.

they lack things in their lives that truly matter, that seem bigger than just them - and somehow get surprised when the other things don't hold their attention.

curiosity and skepticism aren't opposed if you're genuinely curious, you'll also be skeptical (because you're curious for the real truth, not someone's explanation)

“Rule Thinkers In, Not Out.”

2-3. Some people are obviously better than others in terms of talents and skills, including genetically, there's no need to deny or minimize that. However, having better talents and skills is a totally different thing from having more moral worth. Everyone has equal moral worth, everyone's wellbeing deserves to be taken into consideration with equal weight. (Or if not, that's determined by the (im)morality of their actions, not their talents.)

Most people are not Machiavellian. People can be extremely empathetic, friendly, nice, fair-minded, and trustworthy. They can be completely sincere when they say they view people as ends in themselves. Any theory of humanity that denies these plain facts and hence fails to distinguish psychologically normal humans from Machiavellian schemers is wrong.

Nevertheless, although one can be too cynical about human nature, one can also be insufficiently cynical. Humans are not angels, even if we sometimes present ourselves as such. We are apes that evolved through a competitive Darwinian process, and our motives and instincts must reflect the constraints of this process*.* Unconditional and un-strategic cooperators cannot evolve.

Yes, the revealed preferences of most people is Wall-E.

We need authoritarian paternalism to avert this catastrophe.

Things fucking suck, but the only thing to do is make them better. This will always be true, forever.

How I found my framework for truth

I started trying to predict things, and paid attention to feedback.

I think this is pretty much it. Try to predict and get feedback from reality. I think doing this over and over leads to a few things:

1. It forces me to create a mental model

(even if I only have one data point, it forces me to extrapolate a line. Even if I have NO data, it forces me to articulate my priors. So, I can ALWAYS come up with a model)

2. I practice updating my model

(the continuous feedback is critical. It becomes kind of a game: every time I make an incorrect prediction, it feels like progress, not a failure. It’s a clue about what a better model’s output should look like)

3. I develop an internal source of discernment

(just like riding a bike, or any process that comes with immediate feedback, I can tell for myself if I’m doing well. It’s simply whether my predictions are getting better or not. This allows me to be totally open to advice/models from experts, but I assign my own level of confidence to it based on its predictive power in my everyday life)

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Intuition comes first, strategic reasoning second.

I’m not saying that both sides are necessarily equal; centrism doesn’t commit me to splitting the difference, or saying that both sides are always partially right in any dispute. But centrism does commit me to listening carefully to arguments from both sides, and taking my own biases into account, before trying to render any verdict.

What you do if you really want to have an argument with someone is you help them … You want to make their argument as magnificent as you possibly can, and then see if you can undermine it … Because then you’re getting somewhere … Any idiot can make a strawman and light it.

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'

[Y]ou have no idea how difficult it is to successfully renegotiate the terms of a timeless Platonic contract that doesn’t literally exist.

[I]ntellectual honesty demands that, occasionally at least, we go out of our way to confront strong arguments opposed to our views. How else are we to protect ourselves from continuing in error? It seems only fair to remind the reader that intellectual honesty has its dangers: arguments read perhaps at first in curious fascination may come to convince and even to seem natural and intuitive. Only the refusal to listen guarantees one against being ensnared by the truth.

One view about how to write a philosophy book holds that the author should think through all the details of the view he presents, and its problems, polishing and refining his view to present to the world a finished, complete, and elegant whole. This is not my view. At any rate, I believe there is also a place and a function in our ongoing intellectual life for a less complete work, containing unfinished presentations, conjectures, open questions and problems, leads, side connections, as well as a main line of argument. There is room for words on subjects other than last words.

[D]efects in one account do not obligingly disappear with the appearance of defects in another.

With the truth, all given facts harmonize; but with what is false, the truth soon hits a wrong note.

You’re probably wrong in some important way. And you might think, ‘Well, so what?’ But […] it’s not so simple. Being wrong in some important way is like having a map that doesn’t correspond to the streets. If you’re wrong in some important way, when you go to where you’re going you will get lost. And you might end up in a neighborhood that you don’t want to visit. So it actually matters if you’re wrong. And so now if you’re talking to someone who is acting in opposition to you, it’s possible that during your contentious discussion, they will tell you something about how you’re wrong, that’s accurate. Now you’re not going to be very happy about that. Because […] who wants to discover that they’re wrong? But it’s better to figure out that your map is inaccurate than it is to get lost. And so one of the things you have to remember when you’re discussing things with people, even if they’re out to defeat you, let’s say, is that there is some glimmering of the possibility that you can walk away with more knowledge than you walked in with. And […] that can be worth paying quite a price for.

[Philosophy comprises] a tradition that’s at least 2500 years old. And now that tradition is produced in tiny little articles, 4-5 page articles, in journals that are read by a number of people, that’s a small enough number that if they were all on a boat, and it sank, they would have no readership. And it could be a small boat, it wouldn’t need to be the Lusitania; it could be a raft, perhaps.

The popular view that scientists proceed inexorably from well-established fact to well-established fact, never being influenced by any improved conjecture, is quite mistaken. Provided it is made clear which are proved facts and which are conjectures, no harm can result. Conjectures are of great importance since they suggest useful lines of research.

The view that machines cannot give rise to surprises is due, I believe, to a fallacy to which philosophers and mathematicians are particularly subject. This is the assumption that as soon as a fact is presented to a mind all consequences of that fact spring into the mind simultaneously with it. It is a very useful assumption under many circumstances, but one too easily forgets that it is false. A natural consequence of doing so is that one then assumes that there is no virtue in the mere working out of consequences from data and general principles.

As the old saying goes, ‘First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they fight you half-heartedly, then they’re neutral, then they grudgingly say you might have a point even though you’re annoying, then they say on balance you’re mostly right although you ignore some of the most important facets of the issue, then you win.'

Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung unseres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache.”: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of our intellect by means of our language.

I am much more sure of the significance of this question than I am of the answer to it.

迷いながらでもいい歩き出して｡(Even if you're lost, just start walking!)

[T]here are some assumptions that go [so] deep [that] … [s]ometimes you don’t even realize they’re assumptions until you meet someone who assumes the opposite, and try to figure out why they make you so defensive.

The impulse to research must take its start not from philosophies but from issues and problems.

A detective novel written by a good philosophy student would begin: ‘In this novel I shall show that the butler did it.'

There’s something really liberating about having some corner of your life that’s yours, that no one gets to see except you. It’s a little like nudity or taking a dump. Everyone gets naked once in a while. Everyone has to squat on the toilet. There’s nothing shameful, deviant or weird about either of them. But what if I decreed that from now on, every time you wanted to evacuate some solid waste, you’d have to do it in a glass room perched in the middle of Times Square, and you’d be buck naked? Even if you’ve got nothing wrong or weird with your body — and how many of us can say that? — you’d have to be pretty strange to like that idea. Most of us would run screaming. Most of us would hold it in until we exploded. It’s not about doing something shameful. It’s about doing something private. It’s about your life belonging to you.

To achieve something of value within the modern, disciplinary university, insisted Weber, a scholar must put ‘blinders on’ and devote himself to one question within a defined domain. He had to be satisfied with productive questions not definitive answers; industrious; committed to method; patient and reconciled to the fact that insights come to those who work; and, finally, resigned to the inevitable obsolescence of his own work.

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.

Every man of science whose outlook is truly scientific is ready to admit that what passes for scientific knowledge at the moment is sure to require correction with the progress of discovery; nevertheless, it is near enough to the truth to serve for most practical purposes, though not for all. In science, where alone something approximating to genuine knowledge is to be found, men’s attitude is tentative and full of doubt. In religion and politics, on the contrary, though there is as yet nothing approaching scientific knowledge, everybody considers it de rigueur to have a dogmatic opinion, to be backed up by inflicting starvation, prison, and war, and to be carefully guarded from argumentative competition with any different opinion. If only men could be brought into a tentatively agnostic frame of mind about these matters, nine-tenths of the evils of the modern world would be cured!

There’s lots of evil in the world, and everyone wants to run out and fix it, in fact there’s this immense moral pressure to run out and fix it, but whenever someone tries, something goes horribly wrong. I mean, that’s what Hitler tried to do, and the Communists. Trying to fix the world, any more than just the boring kind of fixing the world where you hold a bake sale to support your local school – that’s hubris. But refusing to do that, when you know people are starving and dying all around you – that’s monstrous. So which are we? Monstrous or arrogant?

Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.

It is important to understand that the authors of huge catastrophes need not be evil, nor even unusually stupid. If we attribute every tragedy to evil or unusual stupidity, we will look at ourselves, correctly perceive that we are not evil or unusually stupid, and say: ‘But that would never happen to us.'

[O]ften the intensely destructive person will show a front of kindliness … he will speak of his ideals and good intentions. But not only this. There is hardly a man who is utterly devoid of any kindness, of any good intentions. … Hence, as long as one believes that the evil man wears horns, one will not discover an evil man.

In general, politically wicked movements are mixed, standing also for some good, however ill-conceived, and those opposing them have to understand that good if their opposition is not to become distorted by a mindless destructive element.

I believe that much of the trouble with philosophical writing springs from the author’s failure to strike up the right kind of relationship with his reader, his audience. Above all, much philosophical writing is defensive. Many philosophers try to write in what you might call perfectly true sentences. A perfectly true sentence already contains all the qualifications it would need to make it true. It is unassailable. But it is often therefore unintelligible. What you should do is write something that is clear, and striking, and makes an immediately vivid impression on the mind so that the reader can get hold of it. Then you can add the qualifications later. That’s more like the way we think, and it’s the way we should write. Why would someone try to write in perfectly true sentences? It’s because he’s afraid of his reader, whom he thinks of as ready to pounce. He thinks if the reader catches him sayings something that isn’t unassailable, then for sure he is going to get assailed. Actually, the opposite is true. If your reader knows that what you say needs qualification, he now has a narrative expectation. He is waiting to see if the needed qualifications are about to come. You have his attention, so you have made him a better reader. …

Philosophy is very hard, but it is not inevitable that philosophy should be esoteric; we just need to keep in view a certain conception of our reader. Our reader, our proper audience when we write philosophy, is not a journal referee, looking for a reason to reject our paper. Our reader is not a harsh philosophical critic, eager to catch us out in contradiction. Our reader is not someone who is unwilling to entertain a surprising hypothesis long enough to see where it goes. Our proper audience in philosophy is a reflective human being who is puzzled and confounded by her own condition, and who seeks understanding, meaning, and moral clarity. Philosophy is so difficult that we are afraid to try to address ourselves to readers conceived simply as human beings prone to philosophical perplexity. But if you think about it, you’ll realize that you understand the needs of that reader, because that reader is you. This is why I believe that when we write philosophy, we should shut out the inner voices of the journal referee and the harsh philosophical critic and the impatient skeptic. Instead we should try to write things that we ourselves would find it rewarding to read. Only then do we have any hope at all of reaching the readers to whom philosophy should aim to speak.

Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!

Anyone who tells you they’re certain about how the world works is either a mathematician, or they’re selling something.

We wake up every day with 100 ten-minute time blocks at our disposal. If you feel like you’re in a rut, try doing something different than normal with two or three of today’s blocks.

People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things we have done. Innovation is saying no to 1,000 things.