Nicholas Carr - The Shallows

*** Nicholas Carr - The Shallows*** - When it came to the brain, the child was indeed, as Wordsworth had written, the father to the man. - As neuroscientists have discovered, the brain—and the mind to which it gives rise—is forever a work in progress. That’s true not just for each of us as individuals. It’s true for all of us as a species. - In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than “the sex organs of the machine world,” as McLuhan memorably wrote in the “Gadget Lover” chapter of Understanding Media.11 Our essential role is to produce ever more sophisticated tools—to “fecundate” machines as bees fecundate plants—until technology has developed the capacity to reproduce itself on its own. At that point, we become dispensable. - Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirements. - The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book. - Wallace Stevens - Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. - If the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Net indulges it. It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with. - breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. - our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined the problem. - Experiments indicate that as we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data. - What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. - Web publishers and toolmakers will continue to attract traffic and make money by encouraging and feeding our hunger for small, rapidly dispensed pieces of information. - There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. - “Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings.” So wrote George Dyson in Darwin among the Machines. - The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, in his 1512 textbook De Copia, stressed the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books, using “an appropriate little sign” to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples, and pithy remarks worth memorizing.” He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.” Transcribing the excerpts in longhand, and rehearsing them regularly, would help ensure that they remained fixed in the mind. The passages were to be viewed as “kinds of flowers,” which, plucked from the pages of books, could be preserved in the pages of memory. - Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self. - - We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. - The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. - The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion. - A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind. - In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.  has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. - Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. �� 14/12/2011 17:55:29

Joseph Nye - The Future of Power

*** Joseph Nye – The Future of Power ***

-          First, we must beware of misleading metaphors of organic decline. Nations are not like humans with predictable life spans. Indeed, for all the fashionable predictions of China, Brazil or India surpassing the United States in the next decades, the greater threats may come from modern barbarians and non-state actors.

-          A second pitfall is to confuse power with the resources that states possess and to limit our focus solely to states. Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in an information age it may be the states (or non-states) with the best story that wins.

-          Power is the capacity to do things, and in social situations to affect others to get the outcomes we want. Power is the ability to alter others’ behaviour to produce preferred outcomes.

-          There are three different aspects of relational power – commanding change, controlling agendas, and establishing preferences.

-          Today, power in the world is distributed in a pattern that resembles a complex three dimensional chessboard. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar and the United States is likely to remain supreme for some time. But in the middle chessboard, economic power has been multipolar for more than a decade with the United States, Europe, Japan and China as the major players, and with others gaining in importance. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside of government control, and it includes non-state actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme and terrorists transferring weapons or hackers threatening cyber-security at the other. This chessboard also includes new transnational challenges such as climate change and pandemics. On this bottom board, power is widely diffused and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity or hegemony.

-          Smart power is the combination of the hard power of coercion and payment with the soft power of persuasion and attraction.

-          The problem for all states in the twenty first century is that there are more and more things outside the control of even the most powerful states.

-          Power is conveyed through resources, whether tangible or intangible. People notice resources. Power conversion – getting from resources to behavioural outcomes – is a crucial intervening variable. Having the resources for power does not guarantee that you will always get the outcome you want. Converting resources into realized power in the sense of obtaining desired outcomes requires well-designed strategies and skilful leadership- smart power. Yet strategies are often inadequate and leaders frequently misjudge.

-          As a first step in any game, it helps to start by figuring out who is holding the high cards and how many chips that player has. Equally important, however, is that policy-makers have the contextual intelligence to understand what game they are playing.

-          Power resources are simply the tangible and intangible raw materials or vehicles that underlie power relationships, and whether a given set of resources produces preferred outcomes or not depends upon behaviour in context. The vehicle is not the power relationship. Knowing the horsepower and mileage of a vehicle does not tell us whether it will reach the preferred destination.

-          If ideas and institutions can be used to frame the agenda for action in a way that makes others’ preferences seem irrelevant or out of bounds, then it may never be necessary to push or shove them. In other words, it may be possible to shape others’ preferences by affecting their expectations of what is legitimate or feasible.

-          Powerful actors can make sure that the less powerful are never invited to the table, or if they get there, the rules of the game have already been set by those who arrived first.

-          If you can get others to want the same outcomes that you want, it will not be necessary to override their initial desires.

-          States are caught in a zero-sum game where it is rational to fend for themselves because they cannot trust others. If an actor disarms and others do not, the actor is not likely to survive in anarchic conditions. Those who are benevolent and trusting tend to disappear over time. They are weeded out by the dynamics engendered by the structure of the system. The path to security and survival for the actor is to develop its own military resources through growth and to form alliances to balance the power of others. In this world, gains relative to others are more important than absolute gains.

-          Occupation helps to unite what under other circumstances would be disparate populations

-          In general, threats are costly when they fail, not only in encouraging resistance in the target, but also in negatively influencing third parties observing the outcome.

-          Being less dependent can be a source of power. If two parties are interdependent but one is less so than the other, the less dependent party has a source of power as long as both value the interdependent relationship. Manipulating the asymmetries of interdependence is an important dimension of economic power. Perfect symmetry is quite rare, so most cases of economic interdependence also involve a potential power relationship.

-          We live in an interdependent world, in which we will probably harm ourselves if we take unilateral action aimed at harming another side.

-          States struggle to shape the structure of markets to their advantage by manipulating market access with tariffs, quotas and licenses; diversifying supply chains; pursuing equity shares in companies; and using aid to gain special concessions. P62

-          Even where natural resources are scarce within a nation’s borders, their absence is not an index of low economic power. Much depends on a country’s vulnerability, and that depends on whether substitutes are available and whether there are diverse sources of supply. P63

-          It turns out that oil is the exception, not the rule, in judgements about economic power derived from natural resources. P64

-          When a transnational corporation goes into a resource-rich country with a new investment, it can strike a bargain in which the multinational gets a large part of the joint gains. From the point of view of the poor country, having a multinational come in to develop its resources will make the country better off. At the early stages when the multinational has a monopoly on capital, technology and access to international markets, it strikes a bargain with the poor country in which the multinational gets the lion’s share. But over time, the multinational inadvertently transfers resources to the poor country and trains locals, not out of charity but out of the normal process of doing business. Eventually, the poor country wants a better division of the profits. The multinational could threaten to pull out, but now the poor country can threaten to run the operation by itself. So over time, the power of the transnational company to structure a market, particularly in raw materials, diminishes in terms of its bargaining with the host county. P65

-           Information creates power, and today a much larger part of the world’s population has access to that power. Technological advancements have led to a dramatic reduction in the costs of processing and transmitting information. The result is an explosion of information, and that has produced a paradox of plenty. Plentiful information leads to scarcity of attention. When people are overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting them, they have difficulty knowing what to focus on. Attention, rather than information, becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power. Cue-givers become more in demand, and this is a source of power for those who can tell us where to focus our attention. P103

-          Two types of power shifts are occurring in this century; power transition and power diffusion. Power transition from one dominant state to another is a familiar historical event, but power diffusion is a more novel process. The problem for all states in today’s global information age is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful states. We have not so much a multi-polar world as a no-polar world. P113

-          States will remain the dominant actor on the world stage, but they will find the stage far more crowded and difficult to control. A much larger part of the population both within and among countries has access to the power that comes from information. P114

-          In principle, as costs and barriers of entry into markets diminish, the Information Revolution should reduce the power of large states and enhance the power of small sates and non-state actors. But in practise, international relations are more complex than such technological determinism implies. Some aspects of the information revolution help the small, but some help the already large and powerful. Size still matters. Economies of scale still remain in some of the aspects of power that are related to information. P117

-          No matter how power is measured, an equal distribution of power among states is relatively rare. More often the processes of uneven growth means that some states will be rising and others declining. P153

-          British columnist Martin Wolf calls India a ‘premature superpower’, meaning a country with low living standards but a huge economy. P173

-          China is another of Wolf’s premature superpowers. China’s current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. P178

-          China does have impressive power resources, but we should be sceptical about projections based primarily on current growth rates and political rhetoric. P179

-          Moreover, linear projections of economic growth trends can be misleading. Countries tend to pick the low-hanging fruit as they benefit from imported technologies sin the early stages of economic take-off, and growth rates generally slow as economies reach higher levels of development. P181

-          The power paradox – The fact that power is given to those individuals, groups, or states that advance the interests of the greater good in a socially intelligent fashion, but what people want from leaders – social intelligence – is what is damaged by the possession of power. P207

-          Noble causes can have terrible consequences if they are accompanied by excessive optimism or wilful blindness about the probabilities of success. P209

-          Empires are easier to rule when they rest on the soft power of attraction as well as the hard power of coercion. P212

-          The world is neither uni-polar, nor multi-polar, nor chaotic – it is all three at the same time. Thus a smart grand strategy must be able to handle very different distributions of power in different domains and understand the trade-offs among them. It makes no more sense to see the world through a purely realist lens that focuses only on the top chess-board or a liberal institutional lens that looks primarily at the other boards. Contextual intelligence today requires a new synthesis of ‘liberal realism’ that looks at all three boards at the same time. After all, in a three-level game, a player who focuses on only one board is bound to lose in the long run. P213

-          Global government is unlikely in the twenty-first century, but degrees of global governance already exist. The world has hundreds of treaties, institutions, and regimes for governing areas of interstate behaviour ranging from telecommunications, civil aviation, ocean dumping, trade and even the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But such institutions are rarely self-sufficient. They still benefit from the leadership of great powers. And it remains to be seen whether the largest countries in the twenty-first century will live up to this role. P215

-          One of the dilemmas of multilateral diplomacy is how to get everyone into the act and still get action. The answer is likely to lie in what Europeans have dubbed ‘variable geometry’. There will be many multilateralisms that will vary with the distribution of power resources in different issues. P216

-           Centrality in networks can be a source of power, but the power that flows from this kind of connectivity is not the power to impose outcomes. Networks are not directed and controlled as much as they are managed and orchestrated. Multiple players are integrated into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts – in other words, the network provides power to achieve preferred outcomes with other players rather than over them. P217

-           

Atheism and Rap

Some note I had written back in the day compiling all the religious references from some of my favourite rap songs.
 I'll go put a rhyme to reason,
Coz Nietzche said 'God is dead' & I believe him.
Sadistik - Playing God.

I searched for truth since my youth,
went to church since birth,
But it wasn't worth the loot that I was paying.
GZA - B.I.B.L.E

Fuck the Bible! Get on your knees & praise my rifle.
Dead Prez -Assassination,

No respect for the gods, I'll kill Allah;
 hang Christ on the spikes of the Sinner's cross.
DZK - Treachorous Abbott.

God's love is like a conjugal visit,
Coz u just get fucked while u locked in a prison.
Sadistik - Absolution.

I believe man made God out of ignorance  fear,
If God made man, then why the hell did he put us here,
I thought he was supposed to be the all-loving,
The same God who let Hitler put the Jews in the oven.
Dead Prez - Propaganda.

I'm the strong hold around your neck that never lets u breathe, Stronger than the fake image of God in which u believe in.
Immortal Technique.

Fuck your Crucifix, Your religion  its uselessness.
Jedi Mind Tricks.

Gotta lose my religion just to see the light,
Gotta lose my religion just to see what's right.
L-Universe - Losing my Religion.

Religion is like a prison for the seekers of wisdom.
Killah Priest - One Step.

Am tired of this shit,
Coz each every single day ,
I kneel down and I pray,
Then I wish,
To a false God that even forgot that I exist.
Helix C - Lunch Break.

A wise man once told me,
Nothing is holy.
Dead Prez - Too Smart.

I stay ready for combat,
While the ignorant praying and wondering where their God at.
JMT - Philosophy of Horror.

If your God loves you, hope you make him use a condom.
Greydon Square - Stockholm Syndrome.

Wè don't worship Christ, we worship the thieves crucified next to him.
China XL - Nunca.

Thou shall not believe in bullshit.
Greydon Square - Judge Me.

I'm a step above God my apostles cheer me.
AOTP - Dump The Clip.

Calling on his name and screaming hallelluia,
When he hardly knew ya, that's how the Devil fooled ya.
GZA - B.I.B.L.E.

I know I haven't been walking a humble path,
I know I cursed at your name and then laughed,
 though I found it inane to bend calf,
The servitude of grovelling framed as pained task.
El-P - Flyentology.

The devil exists only coz of your belief in him,
Same goes for the other guy.
Sage Francis - Sun v Moon.

Someday I'll form an opinion,
Either stand up to God or fall for religion.
Sadistik - Playing God.

Robert Pirsig - Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

This book has been on my reading list since high school. Finally got around to reading it and these are the notes I took.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

- Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

- a thing that exists here because everything else does not and can be noticed because other things are absent.

- Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as education.

- The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost, the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha, and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.''

- Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking cycles until some sort of climax is reached.

- And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all.

- Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence. Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary intelligence.

- But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.

- The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple,

indeterminate, relative ones.

He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.

- ``I think maybe it's because every teacher tends to grade up students who resemble him the most. If your own writing shows neat penmanship you regard that more important in a student than if it doesn't. If you use big words you're going to like students who write with big words.''

- You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.

- To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years ago, his mental stability would be challenged.

- The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which had  been built into him by years of carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, ``If you don't whip me, I won't work.''

- Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression that some have learned and some have not.

- To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the sides.

- When you are trained to despise ``just what you like'' then, of course, you become a much more obedient servant of others...a good slave. When you learn not to do ``just what you like'' then the System loves you.

- technology is ... not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.

- The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.

 +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

END

Pirsig goes on quite a philosophical bender but the book is still an amazing read.

Gleanings

I've decided to be posting notes that I make from any books that I've been reading. Don't know about the legality of it (the fact that I'm doing law is irrelevant here. Copyright law is incomprehensible) but I'll reference to the author. Again, none of these ideas are mine.
Will start by posting books I've read before.

Jeremiadus

"Finance is about money. Politics is about power. Neither can exist without the other. Together, they make a mockery of democracy. But democracy cannot exist without both."

"Taleb doesn’t say this, but I will. I propose that the fundamental problem with both finance and politics is that no one reads. And to put a finer point on the proposition, risk would not scale inappropriately if people did read. And to extend this argument even further, technology does a lot to explain this absence of reading. Not just technology viewed as the impact of computers and cell phones and now tablets in our work lives (and personal lives). But technology as a kind of ray gun that annihilates ideas and thought. So we should read and cherish books as physical objects, not as lifeless digital decompressors of meaning."

Interesting blog post.  Don't agree with his beliefs but I'm wowed by his analysis of the current economic system. Plus I'm an ardent fan of NNT and any comprehensible analysis and extrapolation of his ideas is definitely a good read. That and the LOTR references.
http://jeremiadus.com/2011/12/18/scaling-risk-and-political-decline-or-the-triumph-of-the-dark-lord-sauron/

Pull Ups

You know you're obsessed with fitness when you want to hang off everything in sight and do some pull ups on it.
Say whatever you will, I think the pull up is the best strength exercise for your upper body. But it can be a humbling experience for most gym rats who think just coz they can row a bar loaded with plates, then they should be able to kill it on the pull up bar. I just managed to get to a PB of 14 and I'm beaming. And maybe the last 2 don't count coz I barely got my head over the bar but who care? 12 is still impressive from where I'm coming from.
Trying to get to a muscle up and its the most frustrating thing ever. For those who don't know what a muscle up is, its when you complete the pull up motion by pushing your body above the bar and transitioning into a dip.
Not as easy as it sounds. After reading a million web tutorials and watching a bunch of videos, I'm still struggling to get above the bar. Still at the first step of my 4 step progression and progress ain't happening.
Sooner. Later. Whenever. For now, my pull ups will do. Maybe when I'm able to do 5 reps with a 20 kilo plate..... Maybe it gets easier.