brainrow

Nice quote, by way of A Blog Around the Clock:

Wisdom is the reward you get for a lifetime of listening when you’d have preferred to talk. —Doug Larson

Does this explain the recent inactivity of this blog? Highly unlikely.

Another quote, swiped from the same blog for efficiency’s sake:

The most dangerous words in the English language are, “This time it’s different.” —Sir John Templeton

Highly unlikely.

Via Keith Olbermann’s Countdown: Colin Powell is interviewed by GQ magazine. The interviewer asked about the threats of World War II and the Cold War, and how they compare to today’s threats:

Q: Isn’t the new global threat we face even more dangerous?

A: What is the greatest threat facing us now? People will say it’s terrorism. But are there any terrorists in the world who can change the American way of life or our political system? No. Can they knock down a building? Yes. Can they kill somebody? Yes. But can they change us? No. Only we can change ourselves. So what is the great threat we are facing?

Ooh! I know! I know! It’s George W. Bush, right?

Where were you when we needed you, Colin?

Garrison Keillor explains a particular strain that still runs through American political life:

My ancestors were Puritans from England. They arrived here in 1648 in the hope of finding greater restrictions than were permissible under English law at that time. —Garrison Keillor

(Via A Blog Around The Clock.)

Via Corpus Callosum, here’s another way to handle uncertainty:

And the child asked:

Q: Where did this rock come from?
A: I chipped it off the big boulder, at the center of the village.
Q: Where did the boulder come from?
A: It probably rolled off the huge mountain that towers over our village.
Q: Where did the mountain come from?
A: The same place as all stone: it is the bones of Ymir, the primordial giant.
Q: Where did the primordial giant, Ymir, come from?
A: From the great abyss, Ginnungagap.
Q: Where did the great abyss, Ginnungagap, come from?
A: Never ask that question.

The author says we have lots of “semantic stopsigns,” signalling “do not think beyond this point.”

The stopsigns are up wherever the questions start to get hard. That’s where the most interesting answers lurk.

It’s not just the usual suspects that signal “no thinking”:

I know someone whose answer to every one of these questions is “Liberal democracy!” That’s it. That’s his answer. If you ask the obvious question of “How well have liberal democracies performed, historically, on problems this tricky?” or “What if liberal democracy does something stupid?” then you’re an autocrat, or libertopian, or otherwise a very very bad person. No one is allowed to question democracy.

I once called this kind of thinking “the divine right of democracy”. But it is more precise to say that “Democracy!” functioned for him as a semantic stopsign. If anyone had said to him “Turn it over to the Coca-Cola corporation!”, he would have asked the obvious next questions: “Why? What will the Coca-Cola corporation do about it? Why should we trust them? Have they done well in the past on equally tricky problems?”

The problem with blind faith — no matter what it is we believe in — is that we don’t even realize where we’ve stopped thinking. We’re blind to our own blind spots.

Eolake Stobblehouse considers the dead horse problem:

Dakota Native American tribal wisdom, passed on from generation to generation, says:

“When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount and get a different horse.”

Governments, he says, employ “more modern strategies,” including:

Buying a stronger whip. …

Appointing a committee to study the horse. …

Lowering the standards so that the dead horse can be included. …

Harnessing several dead horses together to increase speed. …

Providing additional funding and / or training to increase dead horse’s performance. …

Rewriting the expected performance requirements for all horses.

This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it…

Physicist Richard Feynman tells how his father taught him “the difference between knowing the name of something, and knowing something.”

The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still, unless you push on them hard. This tendency is called “inertia,” but nobody knows why it’s true.