Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees
- Sonorisms I
- More than just a machine that runs along
- Nobody was doing anything
- NYLA
- Aggressively Zen
[Life] frequently sets its problems in terms which must be altered if the problem is to be solved at all.
If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.
‘You must have a vast and magnificent estate,’ said Candide to the turk.
‘I have only twenty acres,’ replied the old man; ‘I and my children cultivate them; and our labour preserves us from three great evils: weariness, vice, and want.’
Candide, on his way home, reflected deeply on what the old man had said. ‘This honest Turk,’ he said to Pangloss and Martin, ‘seems to be in a far better place than kings…. I also know,’ said Candide, ‘that we must cultivate our garden.’
Today, most work is knowledge work, and knowledge workers are not "finished" after 40 years on the job, they are merely bored.
There are three ways to develop a second career. The first is to actually start one. The second is to develop a parallel career. Finally, there are the social entrepreneurs.
There is one prerequisite for managing the second half of your life: You must begin long before you enter it. If one does not begin to volunteer before one is 40 or so, one will not volunteer once past 60.
One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.
We can easily imagine from our own experience why fire might be used as a symbol of the life of a house and the family that lives there. The fire was certainly the most lifelike element of the house: it consumed food and left behind waste; it could grow and move seemingly by its own will; and it could exhaust itself and die. And most important it was warm, one of the most fundamental qualities that we associate with our own lives. When the fire dies, its remains become cold, just as the body becomes cold when a person dies. Drawing a parallel to the concept of the soul that animates the physical body of the person, the fire, then, is the animating spirit for the body of the house.
If we reach such a very ordinary state of daily life, and then back it up with building and construction that comes from the depths in us, then that gradually accumulates our value in the world, all of us together as a whole. Later, then, perhaps hundreds of years later, people will look back at our stones and say to themselves, "My word, those people way back then — they certainly knew how to live," and they would say this because they could see the lingering whispers in the walls and mosses, and could read them, and could treasure them, and would learn from these traces how to live like that again.
People who force nature force themselves. When we grow only wheat, we become dough. If we seek only money, we become brass; and if we stay in the childhood of team sports, we become a stuffed leather ball.
To become a complete person, we must travel many paths, and to truly own anything, we must first of all give it away.
Problem
No people who turn their backs on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.
Solution
Never build massive cemeteries. Instead, allocate pieces of land throughout the community as grave sites—corners of parks, sections of paths, gardens, beside gateways—where memorials to people who have died can be ritually placed with inscriptions and mementos which celebrate their live. Give each grave site an edge, a path, and a quiet corner where people can sit. By custom, this is hallowed ground.
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
If I don't ask, I won't get.
We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, that living one's life is a skill that has to be acquired, like learning to ride a bicycle or play the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquility and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be trustworthy, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs.
This is precisely where “burglary” becomes a myth, a symbol, a metaphor: it stands in for all the things people really want to do with the built environment, what they really want to do to sidestep the obstacles of their lives.
The neurons that do expire are the ones that made imitation possible. When you are capable of skillful imitation, the sweep of choices before you is too large; but when your brain loses its spare capacity, and along with it some agility, some joy in winging it, and the ambition to do things that don't suit it, then you finally have to settle down to do well the few things that your brain really can do well - the rest no longer seems pressing and distracting, because it is now permanently out of reach. The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.
He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.
How life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach.
A regular wind-up toy world this is, I think. Once a day the wind-up bird has to come and wind the springs of this world.
Rather than convey "be like me," better parental advice should be more indirect: "This is how I lived" invites the child to reason about that example. Such advice omits "Therefore you should..." Find your own way; innovate rather than imitate.
Even if you were to live for three thousand years or ten times as long, you should still remember this, that no one loses any life other than the one that he is living, nor does he live any life other than the one that he loses, so the shortest life and the longest amount to the same.
Some day, will you be satisfied and want for nothing, yearning for nothing, and desiring nothing, animate or inanimate, to cater to your pleasures?
In our lives, this quality without a name is the most precious thing we ever have.
And I am free to the extent I have this quality in me.
If I consider my life honestly, I see that it is governed by a certain very small number of patterns of events which I take part in over and over again.
Being in bed, having a shower, having breakfast in the kitchen, sitting in my study writing, walking in the garden, cooking and eating our common lunch at my office with my friends, going to the movies, taking my family to eat at a restaurant, having a drink at a friend’s house, driving on the freeway, going to bed again. There are a few more.
There are surprisingly few of these patterns of events in any one person’s way of life, perhaps no more than a dozen.
When I see how few of them there are, I begin to understand what huge effect these few patterns have on my life, on my capacity to live. If these few patterns are good for me, I can live well. If they are bad for me, I can’t.
The most fundamental splits in contemporary life occur because of the break-up of the old unity of design, production and enjoyment.
Benjamin: It's like there's this whole life I had, but I can't remember what it was.
One thing I assume of age is weariness.
Damned if I don’t get more tired every day.
Tired of what I do, following arcs like lobbed rocks — the inevitability of truth.But the complexity and the gray lie not in the truth, but in what you do with the truth once you have it.
In System A, creation and production are organic in character, and are governed by human judgments that emanate from the underlying wholeness of situations, conditions, and surroundings.
In System B, the production process is thought of as mechanical. What matters are regulations, procedures, categories, money, efficiency, and profit: all the machinery designed to make society run smoothly, as if society was working as a great machine. The production process is rarely context-sensitive. Wholeness is left out.
Identifying these two categories helps us sharpen and clarify the range of differences among ways of creating the environment that exist in different societies. And the two categories serve to identify a dimension of great importance: the dimension that runs from more life-giving to less life-giving.
Pay attention, boy. The next suitable person you're in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing.
In an intentional bout of concentrated major thinking, where you sit down with the conscious intention of confronting major questions like 'Am I currently happy?' or 'What, ultimately, do I really care about and believe in?' or— particularly if some kind of authority figure has just squeezed your shoes—'Am I essentially a worthwhile, contributing type of person or a drifting, indifferent, nihilistic person?', then the questions often end up not answered but more like beaten to death, so attacked from every angle and each angle's different objections and complications that they end up even more abstract and ultimately meaningless than when you started. Nothing is achieved this way, at least that I've ever heard of. Certainly, from all evidence, St. Paul, or Martin Luther, or the authors of The Federalist Papers, or even President Reagan never changed the direction of their lives this way—it happened more by accident.
I don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.
I enjoy gardening the most when it aligns with my broader philosophy of life, so I thought readers might like to see that philosophy and see how I apply it to gardening. These principles are in random order, just as they are applied in life. Sometimes my focus is on having fun, other times I'm focused on planning, still other times I just want to kick back and chat to my friends and neighbours.
Introduction / Pareto principle / Balance / Fun / Working for happiness / Family / Purpose / Order / Planning / Flexibility / Variety / Strategic Resilience / Motivation / Sustainability / Invest to save / Kaizen / Kindness / Giving back / Experimentation / Learning
When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, and you're meant to just live your life inside the world and try not to bash into the walls too much...but life can be much broader, once you discover one simple fact – and that is, that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use.
The “Reversible Destiny Lofts Mitaka (In Memory of Helen Keller),” built by architects/artists Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, are the first residential units designed “not to die.”
I've been fortunate enough to meet some of my heroes, but I still have a long way to go.
This is a list of people I'd like to high five IRL.
I believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.
Holzer began creating these works in 1977, when she was a student in an independent study program. She hand-typed numerous "one liners," or Truisms, which she has likened, partly in jest, to a "Jenny Holzer's Reader's Digest version of Western and Eastern thought." She typeset the sentences in alphabetical order and printed them inexpensively, using commercial printing processes. She then distributed the sheets at random and pasted them up as posters around the city. Her Truisms eventually adorned a variety of formats, including T-shirts and baseball caps.
When we do not cultivate our Pillars, they grow weak and our Platform of Radiance becomes unstable, causing us to fall into one of the four Pits of Suffering below.
Each Pillar has a corresponding Pit of Suffering:
- Love > Attachment
- Compassion > Sentimentality
- Joy > Elation
- Equanimity > Apathy
I’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
The stranger your tastes seem to other people, the stronger evidence they probably are of what you should do.
So I bet it would help a lot of people to ask themselves about this explicitly. What seems like work to other people that doesn't seem like work to you?
The wind is rising!
...We must try to live.— Paul Valéry
Nothing gives man fuller satisfaction than participation in processes that supersede the span of individual life.
— Gotthard Booth
The word “meaning” has two quite different meanings in English. It can refer to the meaning of symbols, such as words and road signs. This book is not about that kind of meaning.
People also speak of “the meaning of life.” That is the sort of meaningness this book is about. So I apply “meaningness” only to the sorts of things one could describe as “deeply meaningful” or “pretty meaningless.”
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering is the full expression of what "You and Your Research" outlined. It's a book about thinking; more specifically, a style of thinking by which great ideas are conceived.
There are many commonalities we can admire in these endeavors: the dazzling leap of imagination, the broad scope of applicability, the founding of a new paradigm. But let’s focus here on their form of distribution. These are all things that are taught. To “use” them means to learn them, understand them, internalize them, perform them with one’s own hands. They are free to any open mind.
In Hamming’s world, great achievements are gifts of knowledge to humanity.
Hamming-greatness is tied, inseparably, with the conception of science and engineering as public service. This school of thought is not extinct today, but it is rare, and doing such work is not impossible, but fights a nearly overwhelming current.
How to be a great painter cannot be taught in words; one learns by trying many different approaches that seem to surround the subject. Art teachers usually let the advanced student paint, and then make suggestions on how they would have done it, or what might also be tried, more or less as the points arise in the student’s head—which is where the learning is supposed to occur!
I firmly believe in Pasteur’s remark, “Luck favors the prepared mind.” In this way I can illustrate how the individual’s preparation before encountering the problem can often lead to recognition, formulation, and solution.
Teachers should prepare the student for the student’s future, not for the teacher’s past.
In science, if you know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
In engineering, if you do not know what you are doing, you should not be doing it.
The standard process of organizing knowledge by departments, and sub-departments, and further breaking it up into separate courses, tends to conceal the homogeneity of knowledge, and at the same time to omit much which falls between the courses.
Another goal of the course is to show the essential unity of all knowledge rather than the fragments which appear as the individual topics are taught. In your future anything and everything you know might be useful, but if you believe the problem is in one area you are not apt to use information that is relevant but which occurred in another course.
Society is steadily moving from a material goods society to an information service society. At the time of the American Revolution, say 1780 or so, over 90% of the people were essentially farmers—now farmers are a very small percentage of workers.
What will the situation be in 2020? As a guess I would say less than 25% of the people in the civilian workforce will be handling things; the rest will be handling information in some form or other. In making a movie or a tv program you are making not so much a thing, though of course it does have a material form, as you are organizing information.
It has rarely proved practical to produce exactly the same product by machines as we produced by hand. Mechanization requires you produce an equivalent product, not identically the same one.
More than ever before, engineering is a matter of choice and balance rather than just doing what can be done. And more and more it is the human factors which will determine good design—a topic which needs your serious attention at all times.
Central planning has been repeatedly shown to give poor results (consider the Russian experiment, for example, or our own bureaucracy). The persons on the spot usually have better knowledge than can those at the top and hence can often (not always) make better decisions if things are not micromanaged.
At the time the Symbolic Assembly Program (SAP) first appeared I would guess about 1% of the older programmers were interested in it—using SAP was “sissy stuff,” and a real programmer would not stoop to wasting machine capacity to do the assembly.
Almost all professionals are slow to use their own expertise for their own work. The situation is nicely summarized by the old saying, “The shoemaker’s children go without shoes.”
History tends to be charitable. It gives credit for understanding what something means when we first do it. But there is a wise saying, “Almost everyone who opens up a new field does not really understand it the way the followers do.”
The reason this happens so often is the creators have to fight through so many dark difficulties, and wade through so much misunderstanding and confusion, they cannot see the light as others can, now the door is open and the path made easy.
Computers have opened the door much more generally to the mass production of a variable product, regardless of what it is: numbers, words, word processing, making furniture, weaving, or what have you. They enable us to deal with variety without excessive standardization, and hence we can evolve more rapidly to a desired future!
Perhaps “thinking” is not a yes/no thing, but maybe it is a matter of degree.
Many humans at present are not equipped to compete with machines—they are unable to do much more than routine jobs. There is a widespread belief (hope?) that humans can compete, once they are given proper training. However, I have long publicly doubted you could take many coal miners and make them into useful programmers.
There is the famous story by Eddington about some people who went fishing in the sea with a net. Upon examining the size of the fish they had caught, they decided there was a minimum size to the fish in the sea! Their conclusion arose from the tool used and not from reality.
I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such.
Moral: when you know something cannot be done, also remember the essential reason why, so later, when the circumstances have changed, you will not say, “It can’t be done.”
When you decide something is not possible, don’t say at a later date it is still impossible without first reviewing all the details of why you originally were right in saying it couldn’t be done.
Let lab equipment lie idle for some time, and suddenly it will not work properly! This is called “shelf life,” but it is sometimes the shelf life of the skills in using it rather than the shelf life of the equipment itself! I have seen it all too often in my direct experience. Intellectual shelf life is often more insidious than is physical shelf life.
Beware of jargon—learn to recognize it for what it is, a special language to facilitate communication over a restricted area of things or events. But it also blocks thinking outside the original area it was designed to cover. Jargon is both a necessity and a curse.
The only law of economics that I believe in is Hamming’s law: “You cannot consume what is not produced.” There is not another single reliable law in all of economics I know of which is not either a tautology in mathematics or else sometimes false.
Thus piece by piece I walked the crest of the dune, and each time the solution slipped on one side or the other I knew what to do to get back on the track.
“God loved sand, He made so much of it.” I heard, inside myself, that we were already having to exploit lower-grade copper mines, and could only expect to have an increasing cost for good copper as the years went by, but the material for glass is widely available and is not likely to ever be in short supply.
At the Hawthorne plant of Western Electric, long, long ago, some psychologists were trying to improve productivity by making various changes in the environment. They painted the walls an attractive color, and productivity rose. They made the lighting softer, and productivity rose. Each change caused productivity to rise. One of the men got a bit suspicious and sneaked a change back to the original state, and productivity rose! Why? It appears that when you show you care, the person on the other end responds more favorably than if you appear not to care. The workers all thought the changes were being made for their benefit and they responded accordingly. In the field of education, if you tell the students you are using a new method of teaching, then they respond by better performance, and so, incidentally, does the professor. A new method may or may not be better, indeed it may be worse, but the Hawthorne effect, which is not small in the educational area, is likely to indicate that here is a new, important, improved teaching method. It hardly matters what the new method is; its trial will produce improvements if the students perceive it as being done for their benefit.
What you learn from others you can use to follow;
What you learn for yourself you can use to lead.
We now see that all this “truth” which is supposed to reside in mathematics is a mirage. It is all arbitrary, human conventions.
But we then face the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Having claimed there was neither “truth” nor “meaning” in the mathematical symbols, I am now stuck with explaining the simple fact that mathematics is used and is an increasingly central part of our society, especially in science and engineering. We have passed from absolute certain truth in mathematics to the state where we see there is no meaning at all in the symbols—but we still use them! We put the meaning into the symbols as we convert the assumptions of the problem into mathematical symbols, and again when we interpret the results. Hence we can use the same formula in many different situations—mathematics is sort of a universal mental tool for clear thinking.
It is not evident, though many people, from the early Greeks on, implicitly act as if it were true, that all things, whatsoever they may be, can be put into words—you could talk about anything: the gods, truth, beauty, and justice. But if you consider what happens in a music concert, then it is obvious that what is transmitted to the audience cannot be put into words—if it could, then the composer and musicians would probably have used words. All the music critics to the contrary, what music communicates cannot (apparently) be put into words. Similarly, but to a lesser extent, for painting. Poetry is a curious field where words are used but the true content of the poem is not in the words!
Creativity seems, among other things, to be “usefully” putting together things which were not perceived to be related before, and it may be the initial psychological distance between the things which counts most.
Can we do anything to increase creativity? There are training courses, and books, as well as “brainstorming sessions” which are supposed to do this. Taking the brainstorming sessions first, while they were very fashionable at one time, they have generally been found to be not much good when formally done, when a brainstorming session is carefully scheduled. But we all have had the experience of “tossing an idea around” with a friend, or a few friends (but not a large group, generally), from which insight, creativity, or whatever you care to call it, arises and we make progress.
Probably the most important tool in creativity is the use of an analogy. Something seems like something else which we knew in the past. Wide acquaintance with various fields of knowledge is thus a help—provided you have the knowledge filed away so it is available when needed, rather than to be found only when led directly to it. This flexible access to pieces of knowledge seems to come from looking at knowledge while you are acquiring it from many different angles, turning over any new idea to see its many sides before filing it away. This implies effort on your part not to take the easy, immediately useful “memorizing the material” path, but to prepare your mind for the future.
If you cannot drop a wrong problem, then the first time you meet one you will be stuck with it for the rest of your career.
If an expert says something can be done he is probably correct, but if he says it is impossible then consider getting another opinion.
As the saying goes:
There is never time to do the job right, but there is always time to fix it later,
especially in computer software!
Averages are meaningful for homogeneous groups (homogeneous with respect to the actions that may later be taken), but for diverse groups averages are often meaningless. As earlier remarked, the average adult has one breast and one testicle.
A second reason the systems engineer’s design is never completed is the solution offered to the original problem usually produces both deeper insight and dissatisfactions in the engineers themselves.
Furthermore, while the design phase continually goes from proposed solution to evaluation and back again and again, there comes a time when this process of redefinement must stop and the real problem be coped with—thus giving what they realize is, in the long run, a suboptimal solution.
While the client has some knowledge of his symptoms, he may not understand the real causes of them, and it is foolish to try to cure the symptoms only. Thus while the systems engineers must listen to the client, they should also try to extract from the client a deeper understanding of the phenomena. Therefore, part of the job of a systems engineer is to define, in a deeper sense, what the problem is and to pass from the symptoms to the causes.
Just as there is no definite system within which the solution is to be found, and the boundaries of the problem are elastic and tend to expand with each round of solution, so too there is often no final solution, yet each cycle of input and solution is worth the effort. A solution which does not prepare for the next round with some increased insight is hardly a solution at all.
I suppose the heart of systems engineering is the acceptance that there is neither a definite fixed problem nor a final solution, rather evolution is the natural state of affairs. This is, of course, not what you learn in school, where you are given definite problems which have definite solutions.